A konceptuális művészet ikonológiája = The Iconology of Conceptual Art

Hornyik, Sándor (2024) A konceptuális művészet ikonológiája = The Iconology of Conceptual Art. ARS HUNGARICA, 50 (1). pp. 13-26. ISSN 0133-1531

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Abstract

With Imagination/Idea, László Beke founded Hungarian conceptual art and also dealt with theoretical questions of iconology. He did not, however, attempt to analyse the iconology of conceptual art. The central question of my study, therefore, is why not. One thing for sure is that even as a university student Beke was drawn to problems of interpretation, and in a wide-reaching study he compared the structural analysis of Hans Sedlmayr and the iconology of Erwin Panofsky in the field of “bourgeois art history writing”. The blind spot in Sedlmayr’s method is precisely its essence, the total picture, that is, the concept of “critical form”, the large structure perceived by the interpreter, which the Viennese art historian imagined on the model of Gestalt. Beke outstandingly perceives the significance of this as well as its intellectual trap, for irrespectively of the fact that Sedlmayr breaks down interpretation of the artwork into three epistemological steps – literal, allegorical and spiritual – it is the Gestalt, the overall impression that influences how, in the first step, we describe the visual structure itself. A similar problem pervades the three steps of iconology, as synthetic intuition can even influence how we describe the phenomenon perceived in the picture. In 1984, in the afterword of the first Hungarian volume on Panofsky, Beke surprisingly ascribes the importance of iconology to the theory of fertile misunderstanding. For two reasons: firstly, because description (phenomenon) and interpretation (meaning) are inseparably intertwined, and secondly because interpretation always examines the work from the perspective of the present and is intended to reveal the “unspoken”, the unobvious, that is, it does not equate the sense and content of the work with the intent of the artist. In Beke’s view, this inevitably leads to a different understanding – or “misunderstanding” – of the work and the artist. Between 1967 and 1984, however, Beke did not deal with the iconological method, because he did not consider it a suitable approach for interpreting modern and contemporary art. In 1971, for example, he thought that because of the readymade and concrete art, the appealing complexity and stratification of the iconological method had collapsed. After all, the former is an everyday object which depicts nothing and utilises no iconographic type of any kind, while the latter likewise is not meant to depict anything or even mean anything beyond its own material reality. In connection with the application of iconology in contemporary art, however, it was by no means a negligible factor that reconstructing a critical worldview, that is, one that criticised the prevailing (Sovietised) Hungarian artworld, could have placed the artist and the art historian alike in an unpleasant existential situation. Instead of Panofsky’s Geistesgeschichte, Beke, in line with the spirit of the age, proceeded with a semiotic focus, which was in harmony with the politics of science and the sociology of knowledge in Hungary and Eastern Europe at the time. In 1975, in a text entitled Az alkotó interpretációtól az interpretáció tagadásáig [From Creative Interpretation to the Denial of Interpretation], Beke applied Leó Popper’s theory of misunderstanding to modern art through the work of Marcel Duchamp, in which – ironically –the true creator became the observer. Duchamp is also the forefather of conceptual art, who sought to break with eye-pleasing retinal art as well as naïve semiotics and the classical theory of representation. Conceptual art, in the wake of Duchamp and then John Cage, Allen Kaprow, Ad Reinhardt and the minimalists, thus became, in essence, its own iconology, when art and the picture were replaced by the interpretation of the picture and its own philosophy, so that if somebody interprets – in a conventional way – then that person is in fact acting as creator. Perhaps this is why and how László Beke became a conceptual artist/art historian.

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