A titkos nyelv : Képek és jegyzetek a hetvenes évek "kreatív" fotóhasználatainak mélylélektani aspektusaihoz = The Secret Language

Perenyei, Monika (2017) A titkos nyelv : Képek és jegyzetek a hetvenes évek "kreatív" fotóhasználatainak mélylélektani aspektusaihoz = The Secret Language. Ars Hungarica, 43 (4). pp. 479-498. ISSN 0133-1531

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Abstract

Monika Perenyei: The Secret Language In my paper I investigate the psychoanalytical sources and traces of the use of creative photography in Hungary in the 1970s. The theoretical framework and concepts of psychoanalysis, in particular semiotic psychoanalysis, have the potential to enrich our understanding of the “photoconceptualism” pursued in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as possible links between the forms avantgarde praxis spanning the period from the 1920s to the 1970s. The train of thought followed in the study revisits the exhibition held in the Hungarian town of Hatvan in 1976 (titled Exposition – Photo/Art), presents works produced by Gusztáv Hámos in the 1970s, and reorders well-known commentaries dealing with the “creative” use of photography. The emancipation of photographic aesthetics was a hot topic in the 1970s both in Western Europe and overseas. In the major European centres of art (such as Dusseldorf and Kassel) the debate on the sovereignty of aesthetics in the photographic process revolved around the questions of “science and art” and “documentary or fictional”. Across the Atlantic at the same time, passionate and sincere institutional criticism was nurturing increased attention on photography. In the columns of the periodical October, art critics sought to escape from painting-based terminology by emphasising the particularities of photography. In formulating this new language of criticism, they relied on structuralist semiotics and on the topological model of psychoanalysis. As one of the logical consequences of their method, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical terms were deployed as conceptual frame (the imaginary, identification and the mirror stage). According to Tibor Hajas, photography is unavoidable in art. Due to its democratic and international accessibility, photography is not merely a part of art, but is itself “Art” (1977). In other words, art is unavoidably photographic. Unlike in the visual cultures of New York or Western Europe, in the sociocultural milieu that existed behind the Iron Curtain, new applications of photography served as a means of bringing back reality, and of making alternative realities visible. Hajas’s declaration was not only a radical departure from the conventional image of art, but also a reference to the sovereignty of photography. In shaping the autonomy of photography, beside the German and American models, Hungary’s home-grown creative use of photography can also be regarded as a distinctive model. This model, characterised by its amateur independence, can be described in terms of three interconnecting theoretical and pictorial aesthetic topics. Notions of picture analysis are characterised by analysis of the relationship between picture and reality, disclosure of the “language” of the photographic image, and the invention of what is known as “performative realism”. Research into the Hungarian tradition of photomontage shows that montage not only seems to be an historical device of image criticism (the genre of its users’ progressive forebears in the seventies), but also a creative process tinged with psychoanalytical awareness. The third topic is the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity, which not only existed as a consciously founded programme, but also came about as a necessity arising out of the absence of a thriving art scene and out of the restrictions imposed by state censorship. As practised by Gusztáv Hámos, creative photography was a way of producing images in accordance with a precise programme, and it served as the subject of both psychological and social research. State control, which effectively prevented people from following their own path, played a major contribution to the development of the new, interdisciplinary approach. The amateur professional exploring hitherto uncharted territory could reach loftier heights than an institutional artist. The bricoleur – as the child psychologist Ferenc Mérei called himself – would become the inventor of tiny circles of freedom. The montage simulations created by Hámos from the middle of seventies on were fully in tune with the issues being dealt with by communication researchers at the time. The so-called “montage debate” (the sociography of the concept) that arose in 1974 was formally published in 1977. In it Mérei examines the phenomenon of montage within a psychoanalytical context, describing it as a representational function of how the conscious operates and as a representational device used consciously by artists. Furthermore, the psychologist’s research also serves as a basis for the analytical understanding of “new photography”. During the years he spent in prison, Ferenc Mérei researched the structure of language of dreams (through his own dreams), although after his release this research was known only within narrow circles. Nevertheless, the desire to analyse the “language” of photography was also present among creative photographers. In Mérei’s research into the language of dreams, as in the practice pursued by creative photographers, there was a determined shift away from the content behind the image towards analysis of the “cloak” of pictorial language. The psychoanalytical awareness that existed underground emerged with the wave supported by semiotics, and became visible in alternative photographic practices that used identity-diffusion techniques against the prevailing authorities (as was the case with their surrealist forebears). The dialectic of suppression and desire, together with the imaginary representation of desires, may prove interesting both with regard to makers of montages in the interwar period and in the photographic œuvres generated in the 1970s (in the performative use of the camera).

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