KATALIN KOTVICS• wall sculptures
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installations click image for enlargement and details |
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| American Dream/ Dream America, 2001 | ||
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American Dream/ Dream America
The " American dream " is that local American dream which is materialized in the mass flocking to the suburbs, and which is focused on the family home, the garden, the car and the swimming pool. Dream America is the outsider's, the foreigner's image of America which is nourished by Holly wood and which is full of glitz and glamour; it is the Promised Land of the modern age. The later is the subject of Katalin Kotvics's installation titled America Dream; America as seen by the artist first from the outside, and now, since a long time, from the inside. For the average American this image is least represented by New York, but for Europeans New York is its main icon. The balloons filled with air, these symbols of taking off, of aiming for the skies, these Icarus-surrogates represent the part of our self that is woven of dreams and desires and which is just as fragile as the balloons themselves; it can burst or pine away at any moment, but it can also defy the world. The solid ground usually represents our physical reality as juxtaposed with our mental self, and the real world as opposed to the virtual one, there here, instead of balancing the quality of delusion, its surface, evoking a sheet of water, only enhances it. The sheet of water could be an evocation of the island on which Manhattan lies, but it could also refer to its narcissism, while its form, enclosed into a sphere represents the essential, concentrated quality of the city center. Suspended between the two on thin threads are the "bits of reality", the " real New York", the symbols, the photos of the famous tourist attractions and the idealized dream world of Manhattan. According to the multi cultural quality of the city, there are nine of them, which number carries a special meaning in every religion and every mythology. The images are familiar and recognizable, but the joy of recognition is immediately diminished by the fact that in every one of them there is an unsettling, "disturbing" element, which quickly jolts us out of the enchanting idyll. The Statue of Liberty looks as if it had been grabbed by the waist and twisted, it appears before us disheveled, with lengthened waist and oblique torso, signaling the illusory nature of our belief in total liberty. The Brooklyn Bridge looks like a winged, prehistoric animal, the painted road-mark looms ahead like a giant cross, while the golden statue in front of Rockefeller Center turns into a writhing Laokoon - group during the course of its mutation. The evening Times Square is not the least bit amusing, instead it presents a rather menacing image with its rocket pointed skyward, its giant neon advertisement face and the phallic skyscraper symbolizing power. The famous spiral of the acropolis of art, the Guggenheim Museum is also crumbling and smeared, just like the once solid structure and canon of art and its boundaries. The well-known Flat Iron building, which since its birth has symbolized the city's primary character, upward mobility, it here transformed, with its fluid forms, into a melting, painted gingerbread house. The Wall Street Stock Exchange building, the domain of money and power, looms from behind the cemetery, thus reviving the idea a of Vanitatum Vanitas, and placing the enduring values beyond the world of material possessions into the spheres of mental and spiritual On the characteristic Manhattan city scape photo taken, similarly to the other pictures, with a distorting lens, the graceful downtown skyscrapers sway and stagger, their proud, serrated silhouettes quivering ion the air, while the World Trade Center bends like wind-blown sapling. We could be witnessing the robust moment of birth, when the gigantic buildings erupt from the earth with an elemental force; or perhaps it is just the opposite, perhaps it is a vision of the crumbling, modern Tower of Babel, as the divine punishment for vain illusions. Or it could be the hurriedly taken press photo of a fin de millennium terrorist action, but perhaps the picture merely undermines the supposedly objective laws of nature. The viewpoint might be that of a tightrope-cancer who is able to thus view the world and the gaping abyss under her feet, whilst constantly balancing. The tightrope- dancer could be either the artist or the viewer who confronts her own image in the reflecting surface of the photos' backside. She confronts her own dreams, desires and illusions in that artistic transformational process in which the tourist attractions are metamorphosed into the elements of a personal life story. While Kotvics confronts the viewer with the process of her own intellectual transformation and with its two-way feedback mechanism, she also makes us realize the relative nature of perceiving reality. The process which manipulates the documentary photo's ability of capturing reality undermines our faith in the objectivity of the genre, and evokes painterly effects with its panning technique, blurred contours and shimmering surfaces that is, it slips into another, supposedly contrasting representational from. With its staged presentations, multiple reflections and inversions the installation deconstructs our manipulated and medialized world view. Edit Andras Art Historian Translated by Ban Zsofia ...back to top | ||