Tamás Komoróczky

Turboreflex - Supercut

Venue: acb Gallery
Date: Jun 13 – Jul 04, 2003
Description

In the second half of the 1990s, the subject, technique, and material of Komoróczky’s works were the very subject, technique, and material of the cultural environment that had become his chief interest. The sensitive and sensual, consciously shaped and deliberately contingent installations of the Újlak Group (Komoróczky was a member till 1995), which tried to defy interpretation, were followed, on the one hand, by photographed fragments of the experience of a certain lifestyle (Triptichon, 1997), and on the other, by evocations of the classic painterly genres, executed with a non-traditional technique (digital prints on canvas), employing non-traditional image elements(6kép/ordo/c3/999). The latter group includes stylized landscapes made up of Asian letters, icon-like compositions of bizarre scenes, still-lives resembling the elements of contemporary design and the visual and sounding material of cult films, and bizarre photo-comics. The video Monument or A Bit of Masturbation (1998) is an ironic remake of a George Michael clip. Komoróczky makes montages of, mixes, and remixes, the photographed, scanned, downloaded, videoed pictures, distorts them with the available technology almost brutally. By the turn of the millennium Komoróczky’s art had become a dynamic, lush visual and acoustic world, now aggressive and obscene, now lyric and melancholic, at other times again pornographic and sentimental. In his works, the desire for expression mingles with a cautiousness of representation.

The video Sanyi, presented at acb Gallery in February 2003, reconstructs the dream of the main character. These works are part of a seven-piece series, which also includes Turboreflex. The latter features a boy, on whose facet the camera focuses. The character drinks all along - alcohol -, and keeps listening to music . on headphones -, while speaking unceasingly to the camera, which is to say to the cameraman, which is to say to the viewer. His text is improvised, but is addressed to a listener: we hear commands to, and commentaries on the action of, a second person singular entity. His meaning can hardly be understood: disconnected subjects, modalities, and rhetorical situations whirl throughout the video.

Supercut is an audio-visual art in the same manner. The girls spitting water on each other may be performing a scene from some mythology, or a strange, contemporary but mystical rite. The action is sexual, both symbolically and directly. It is not obscene but vital; not bizarre but bursts with eroticism and positive energy. The meticulously built high-tech environment is at odds with the action while making it topocal and timeless, giving it the feel of sci-fi. The camera, i.e. Komoróczky himself, is an equal participant besides the three girls; he openly assumes the role of the camera, which Susan Sonntag calls a phallic tool. He does not peep - the participants obviously pose for him, and their motions, the dynamics of the action, indicate that the man, both mythological and corporeal, is present. The raw material was given to two editors, who mixed two different versions, following Komoróczky’s instructions.

Show more