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Katalin Káldi THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS

Repetition; the multiple application of homogeneous elements in a single artwork

2020

Introduction 7

Unity 11 Duality 15 The Three 20 The Four 23 The Five 27 The Six 29 The Seven 31 The Many 33 The Innumerous 38

Conclusion 45

Images 49 List of Images 78 Bibliography 82

Katalin Káldi: Heat 85 List of Images 97

THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 7

INTRODUCTION

In early 2012, I cast 84 plaster elements from a silicone mold made from a 2-kilogram iron barbell. Following the composition of my earlier painted works, I placed the elements in small distinct groups on the floor, but here they were not separated from each other by the picture edge or the wall. Although the medium changed, the intent remained the same: to generate signs or patterns using a real, everyday object multiplied as many times as necessary for the individual element (the barbell) to dissolve into the generated sign or pattern, just as sugar dissolves in water (Image 1-2). Since I often paint compositions in which the same element appears multiple times, I am naturally drawn to artworks with similar structures of repetition. I am fascinated by the tension that arises between a completed pattern and its constituent elements, by the strange connection between two different languages, when different systems, each operating autonomously and smoothly, gain some slight momentum, when a statement becomes a question, when something simple becomes more nuanced, when a safe proposition becomes a random, one-off opportunity. When the regular becomes irregular. I have also begun to take an interest in examples of this multifaceted “discourse” in the works of other artists, in the ways in which order can unfold and manifest itself in randomness, and in how regularity can be found in the specific, in the momentary. After all, order is differentiated from disorder when we recognize that there is a rule.1 We therefore need to pay

1 “At the same time, however, science has turned towards researching 8 KATALIN KÁLDI attention to the way things are arranged, or put in order, since everyone attempts to create the illusion of order so as to provide satisfaction and consolation to themselves and others.2 We have to focus specifically on the mode of structure and its relationship to time, for the repetition of an element marks consecutive moments and units of time. We would like to feel at ease with time – both with time as it is measured out, and time that belongs to eternity – and to be able to navigate safely, guided by a comprehensible, reasonable, controllable structure. This is not a specifically critical attitude, but desire itself, a wish. I can discern this

complex systems. It conducts chaos research, which changes our concept of order, that is, of the world and of the universe. It teaches us to notice order where we previously saw only chaos.” Hannes Böhringer, interview published in German at zesuren.de (website no longer available). In Hungarian: Kísérletek és tévelygések (Experiments and Wanderings), trans. J. A. Tillmann, Budapest, Balassi, 1995 (BAE Tartóshullám), 80. 2 “The human ‘sense for order’ seems to be physiologically grounded, it is an important guide to being constantly ready for the unexpected. However, this leads us much further than the practical and the reasonable. Practitioners of Gestalt theory pointed out that, without any self-interest, attracted by the thing itself, we are inclined to make order, to eliminate confusion, to perfect the not-yet-created, to transform disorder into orderliness. If something is in order, then it all has to be in order. Otherwise our sense of order is not satisfied. If order is the order of constituent parts, and thus a correlation, a network of associations between many things, then the correlation needs ultimately to be completely comprehensive. We cannot see if everything is in order, we can only see if something is in order. However, this is something that, somehow, we already suppose, since the correlation is always more than what is visible; it is, so to speak, the horizon on which they appear, if at all. Everything is in order. Which means that we live in one world. We cannot see it, of course, but every part of it that we can see, all the individual things, they bear within themselves traces of this universal order.” Hans Böhringer, Begriffsfelder. Von der Philosophie zur Kunst, Berlin, Merve Verlag, 1985, 22. THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 9 desire in the works of artists from Giacomo Balla to On Kawara, Yayoi Kusama to Katharina Fritsch and Félix González-Torres. A structure that uses identical or similar elements, by its very elemental simplicity, clearly reveals the desire for order, just as an abacus reveals the denary scale. Some may say, rightly, that all this can be said about art in general, but in my point of view, in the artworks that I have observed closely, this desire is even more apparent.3 In this volume, it is not my intention to digress towards examining mathematical patterns and fractals, which provide the basis for innumerable works, nor towards the temporal arts or moving images. I also try to avoid the problem of technical reproduction, although I obviously cannot avoid touching on the topic here and there. To explore the phenomenon of repetition, we need to take a closer look at numbers, at the numerous and the innumerous, as something that can be repeated only by a number. In this adventure, we will follow in the footsteps of Pythagoras, who claimed that numbers were behind everything, and that the key to all things lay hidden within them. Many phenomena bear examining from the point

3 “The ‘meaning’ of art in this sense does not seem to be tied to special social conditions as was the meaning given to art in the later bourgeois religion of culture. On the contrary, the experience of the beautiful in art, is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be found. […] We ought rather to say that art is the containment of sense, so that it does not run away or escape from us, but it is secured and sheltered in the ordered composure of the creation. […] For we must admit that there are very many forms of artistic production in which something is represented in the concentrated form of a particular and unique creation. However different from our everyday experience it may be, this creation presents itself as a pledge of order.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful = Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1986, 32–36. 10 KATALIN KÁLDI of view of quantity, but our focus should be not on “how many” something is, but on what quantity means in each and every case. THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 11

UNITY

When speaking about the repetition of an element, we have to mention “one” itself, “unity”, as the basis whose repetition and multiplication will later be elaborated upon further. In this case it is not the numerous that grabs our attention, but existence, the momentary and the eternal. The fact of “being” (existence) emerges very powerfully in the case of all works associated with “one”. Due to its undividedness, existence fills our eyes not in a sophisticated or nuanced way, but with brute force and certitude. There is no obscurity or interference when looking at such works, for their message is communicated via broadband. This robustness, however, cannot be expected in more articulated manifestations. I think that in art, the chief means of presenting singularity is the portrait,4 capturing a person in a given moment of time, at a certain age, just as the Latin inscription says, which is often written on Renaissance portraits: “anno aetatis suae”.5 It may therefore strike us as perplexing to be

4 “Le portrait rappelle en tout un chacun fini l’infinie distension de l’un.” ([The portrait] recalls, in the finite character of each, the infinite distension of the one.) Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Regard du portrait, François Martin, Paris, Galilee, 2000, 69. English trans. by Sarah Clift and Simon Sparks. 5 “All portraits are the reiteration of the ephemeral face, although not so as to produce a duplicate, but with the intention of temporal prolongation, replacement, recording of the model – that is, with the intention to preserve the non-recurrent, the singular. […] just as Andy Warhol, who was the most brilliant expert on the problems of iteration, also worked on the Mona Lisa. His work Thirty Are Better Than One (thirty Mona Lisa reproductions next to each other) already demonstrates an irony towards art in his choice of title, and he chooses a portrait as its topic – as in other cases as well – which is one of the most unique and most individual of things.” László Beke, 12 KATALIN KÁLDI confronted by a multiple variant of this, such as Lorenzo Lotto’s Triple Portrait of a Goldsmith, the first in the history of this type of painting (Image 3). We can see the head of the goldsmith from three different angles, from the front, from the side and from the back, as though his three selves were standing together in perfect harmony.6 Naturally, this triple view does not represent a single moment in reality, for we can be certain that the painter first observed his sitter from one angle, then from another, and finally from a third perspective, placing consecutive, temporal units next to one another within the same frame. I mention this unusual, though not particularly complicated phenomenon here, because I believe that this schema helps us to understand the latent temporal factor underlying all other images containing repetition.7 Among the various reasons for creating such a triple vision are the artist’s desire to demonstrate his virtuosity, or perhaps a

Ismétlődés és ismétlés a művészetben (Repetition and Iteration in Art) = BEKE, Művészet/elmélet. Tanulmányok 1970–1991, Budapest, Balassi, 1994 (BAE-Tartóshullám), 39–48. 6 “But if someone demonstrates that I am one and many, why wonder? For when he seeks to show that I am many, he just mentions that my right is one thing and my left another, my front’s one thing and my back’s another. And likewise for upper and lower – for I do, I believe, partake of the One. So he can show that both are true.” Plato, Parmenides, trans. Albert Keith Whitaker, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1996, 27. (129 cd) 7 “The pure image of all magnitudes (quantorum) for outer sense is space; for all objects of the senses in general, it is time. The pure schema of magnitude (quantitatis), however, as a concept of the understanding, is number, which is a representation that summarizes the successive addition of one (homogeneous) unit to another. Thus number is nothing other than the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of a homogeneous intuition in general, because I generate time itself in the apprehension of the intuition.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul GUYER et al. CUP, Cambridge, 1999, 274. THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 13 commission to produce a preparatory aid for a marble bust, as was the case with Van Dyck’s triple portrait of King Charles I, which was dispatched to Rome to serve as a model for Bernini to work from (Image 4). Though their motives may differ, these depictions share common traits: they have a special relationship with time, they aspire to capture continuity, and I would even venture to suggest that they challenge eternity. Fluid becomes solid, frozen in time, like the phases of movement in paintings by Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla. Medieval representations of the lives of the saints are not dissimilar, in that the main characters appear in several important moments of their life in a single image, thus creating unity out of continuity.8 The portrait as a singularity may be replaced by the image of a centrally placed tree, as in two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, The Lonely Tree and The Oaktree in the Snow, or the Lonely Cedar by Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka. Among the multitude of geometrical solids, the sphere may be regarded as one that illustrates unity. It does

8 “The fact that modern art learned a lot about repetition from film can be demonstrated again by Warhol’s works: following his films and images, the motif of the paused picture and repeated film frames proliferated in painting and photography. This exemplifies how repetition within a single work of art always served the spatial projection of temporal segments (starting with the medieval character doubling in the frozen phases of movement by Boccioni) or the rhythmic arrangement of surface in ornamentations, which again incorporates a temporal element.” Beke, Ismétlés és ismétlődés..., 166. “Indeed, the art of the past was capable of portraying a sequence of successive scenes, using techniques similar to those of the cartoon strip, with the same characters reappearing several times and in different times and places (see for example Piero della Francesca’s True Cross, cycle in Arezzo).” Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists, trans. Alastair McEwen, Rozzoli, New York, 2009, 11–12. 14 KATALIN KÁLDI not lend itself to division into units, nor can it be divided along angles, and if cut in half, we are left with a hemisphere that still refers to its nature as a whole (there is no “hemicube”, after all, since that would be a cuboid). In principle, the sphere touches the plane that carries it only at one single point, as was the case with the stone ball designed by Goethe in 1776, which later became the first abstract sculpture in the history of occidental art (Image 5). The Altar of Agathe Tyche is how Goethe named the geometric shapes decorating his summer house in Weimar: a cube with edges 90 centimeters in length, and a sphere with a radius of 72 centimeters, evoking all the possible directions in which the ball may roll. This state of equilibrium, generated at a given moment – a moment that has stretched for quite a while now, for the composition has stood there firmly ever since it was installed –, should not deceive anyone, for everything is at the mercy of Fortuna (Tyche was a popular goddess of fortune in Hellenic times). But it “IS”, THERE and NOW, and this is something we can sense, just as we would in the case of a portrait.9 To choose just one of the infinite colors available in the world, for example, in a monochrome painting, is also a statement of “oneness”. Traditionally these works were associated with the sublime. Yves Klein attempted to achieve the same result by experimenting with sounds, or, to be precise, with one sound: for almost twenty minutes the orchestra and the choir maintained the same note, and this was followed by twenty minutes of silence (Monotone Symphony).

9 “But the now, surely, is always present in the One, throughout all of its being. For it is always ‘now’ whenever in fact it is.” Plato, Parmenides, 64 (152e) THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 15

DUALITY

The number of elements constituting a structure or a form is of great relevance.10 Repetition begins with the number two. Duality often implies doubt or hesitation, as various European languages so evocatively express: in English doubt and double, in German zwei and Zweifel (according to the Hungarian Historical-Etymological Dictionary, the words kétely and kétség, both meaning “doubt”, are literal translations from the German11 * ) and Italian dubbio and doppio. The two conjures up ideas of “thesis and antithesis”, negation or choice in an ethical situation, the doppelgänger, the “other”, the mirror, the world of shadows, the world beyond disquiet and temptation. This phenomenon is apparent in the stone effigies by Vija Celmins, who cast stones in bronze and then painted them to imitate real stones, so that the original and the copy became identical in their exterior appearance and weight (To Fix the Image in Memory) (Image 6). In itself, repetition is demonic and ironic, it negates the unique and unrepeatable. However, as psychology suggests, these deeds help us to process this demonic aspect of the world, helping us to understand, possess and overcome. We can think of Alighiero Boetti’s self-portrait as such a work: in this black-and-white photograph he stands hand-in-hand with

10 “Observations and experiments showed us unambiguously that most people have a particular order-structure that may be grouped into a few well definable, different types. These are the following: a) setting up a series b) compartmentalizing into one, two, three, four c) loose adjacency d) symmetrical arrangement e) asymmetrical arrangement f) chaos.” Polcz Alaine, A rend és a rendetlenség jelensége az emberi cselekvésben [The Phenomenon of Order and Disorder in Human Activity], Budapest, Kozmosz Könyvek, 1987, 69. 11 * Translator’s note: The stem for kétely and kétség is the word két, meaning “two”. 16 KATALIN KÁLDI himself in mother nature, under a tree (Image 7). The artist even changed his name to Alighiero e Boetti (Alighiero and Boetti), emphasizing his own duality, and following in the footsteps of Dorian Gray, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When good and bad fail to mix well, the outcome is often tragic, but it precipitates and separates. (Though I promised not to deal with motion pictures, I cannot ignore one of my favorite movies, Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. Here, the duality is not antithetical, but presented as two examples of good, kind men, but even this situation can take an awkward turn, no matter how long the equilibrium is sustained.) The totality of the two complementing each other is also seen in representations of Janus, the double-faced Roman God. Another manifestation of “duality” is the “pair”, the symmetry that arises from two parts, which ordinarily refers to a form of harmony or perfection. This is perhaps because we gain a certain satisfaction from the familiarity of our own bodies, with a pair of ears, eyes, and so on. This “twoness” of the body is there in Van Gogh’s shoes or in Meret Oppenheim’s Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers (Image 8). A symmetrical arrangement is the most obvious tool for evoking an illusion of orderliness and a balanced state. Almost all objects and living creatures around us have some form of symmetry, and ornamentation is often structured in reflective symmetry, from pairs of candlesticks to the bushes flanking both sides of a gate. These statements apply to Western civilization, of course, for to the Japanese, symmetry is frightfully rigid and motionless, conjuring up thoughts of the completeness of death, and so they prefer to avoid using symmetry. The “mirror, mirror on the wall” of Snow White’s stepmother clearly illustrates that we may learn the truth from the mirror, from an alternative viewpoint. Looking at ourselves as though in another world, on a different physical THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 17 surface, reflection facilitates cognition. Therefore cognition requires at least two, while knowledge requires questions, which arise out of “doubt”. Certitude, faith and innocence do not have the same requirement, for “one” suffices, leaving no room for questions, doubts or reflections. Returning to the genre of the portrait, we may recall certain instances in which the model is seen once facing us, and again reflected in a mirror, less stiffly, perhaps, than in a police mugshot, but nevertheless leaving an imprint of multiple perspective objectivity. One example is Self-Portrait in a Mirror by Oswald Baer, who was part of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement.12 (Image 9) Caravaggio’s Narcissus differs from Baer’s painting in that it is not the artist who is looking at himself with the help of two mirrors and painting what he sees, but a mythological youth, unable to look away from the sight of his own image in the surface of the water (Image 10). As observers, we can hardly see the mirrored image of the boy, swallowed in darkness.13 Duality can also be shown without a mirror; Caspar David Friedrich, for example, was occupied by this idea. His Two Men

12 “In a more general sense we may say that the mirror is a symbolic object which not only reflects the characteristics of the individual but also echoes in its expansion the historical expansion of individual consciousness.” Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, Verson, London and New York, 1996, 22. 13 “What then? Does each of these pieces of the One that is, the One and Being, lack something? Does the One lack the piece that’s the be-ing or Being the piece that’s the One?” “They would not.” “And so, again, each of the pieces holds fast to the One and Being, and the very least piece comes to consist, in turn, of two pieces, and, according to the same speech, it is always his way. Namely, whatever piece comes to be, it always holds fast to these two pieces; for the One always holds fast to Being and Being to the One. The result is that, since it always becomes two, it necessarily is never one.” 18 KATALIN KÁLDI by the Sea is characterized by a unique, stifling tension, a kind of “low tension”, so to speak, that emerges from the duplicated nature of the figure. Owing to the similarity between the two men’s garments and their great distance from the viewer, these figures lack individual features, to the extent that they could be the same individual (Image 11). Unlike Friedrich’s men, however, the two female figures in Titian’sSacred and Profane Love could hardly be “dressed” more differently, as one is naked and the other is clothed – they counterbalance each other, even though their faces are quite similar. Presumably one has to choose between them. (Image 12) Elaine Sturtevant presents works by selected artists as though through a mirror, for she repeats them and creates the same thing. This is a devilish evocation of the singular, and not a copy. She liberates the thought-process by making the original object “stand upside down” (her words) just as the original image would be reflected in a mirror. She often refers to the notion of the simulacrum as an overwhelming, awe-inspiring power. She eradicates representation, and instead, through repetition, she engenders a sense of distance from the “one”, giving rise to reflection in every sense of the word.14 The reproductive practice of Sherrie Levine is somewhat similar to that of Sturtevant (Image 13). In 1967, Giulio Paolini entitled a reproduction of a portrait of Lorenzo Lotto Young Man Looking at Lorenzo

“Entirely so.” “And so the One that is would be limitless in multitude?” “It certainly looks that way.” Plato, Parmenides, 47 (142e, 143a) 14 “In this way minimalism rids art of the anthropomorphic and the representational not through anti-illusionist ideology so much as through serial production. For abstraction tends only to sublimate representation, to preserve it in cancellation, whereas repetition, the (re)production of simulacra, tends to subvert representation, to undercut its referential logic. […] Since the Industrial Revolution a contradiction has existed between the craft basis of visual art and the THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 19

Lotto. In this simple way, Paolini implied that the situation entailed two actors, two people staring at each other in 1506: the young man and Lotto (who was also only 26 years old at the time). Even today, it is easy for us to identify ourselves with him, since the young man’s gaze penetrates ours, and we can feel as though only the two of us are there, face to face, in private. (Image 14) The sculpture by Jasper Johns entitled Painted Bronze is constructed of two adjacent, painted bronze beer cans. The beer cans may be full or empty, and the only difference between the two bronze cylinders is that one has a hole in the top – this is a classic example of thesis/antithesis.(Image 15) Several works by Félix González-Torres may also be analyzed from the perspective of duality, although with the number two, we are truly spoilt for choice. For González- Torres, the most essential aspect of duality is not the tension of opposites but the harmony of pairs. His two adjacent wall-clocks, Untitled/ Perfect Lovers, are the epitome of the symmetrical. The clock hands move in synchrony, always in parallel. (According to his instructions, museums must keep the two clocks synchronized at all times.) The housings of the two clocks snuggle up against each other, even though the rules of geometry dictate that circles share only one point of contact. Those who are lucky in love may be at peace; pairs do exist, and they are not alone. But the parallel motion of the clock hands is undeniably disquieting; and indeed, the year the artwork was made was the year when González- Torres’s partner died. The clock, therefore, can also be seen as death itself, one world next to another world, the other world. Extinction. (Image 16)

industrial order of social life.” Hal Foster, The Crux of Minimalism = The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, The MIT Press, 1996, 63. 20 KATALIN KÁLDI

THE THREE

When we think of the triple in art, one immediate example is probably Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, as well as similar works by him that appositely present the inherent trinity in an ordinary object. Close conceptual bonds hold together a photocopied text (a dictionary entry), an object (chair, lamp, shovel, pan, saw, table, coat, sweeper, another chair), and a photo of the object. In reverse order: photograph, object, text. Unfortunately we do not even have the option of misunderstanding it, as the tautology is so clear and so consistent. (Image 17) The Holy Trinity holds many more secrets, and eventually escapes human comprehension altogether. In 1628 Pope Urban VIII prohibited representations of the Holy Trinity consisting of three identically shaped figures standing or sitting next to each other, so as to avoid misunderstandings of monotheism. Professing the divine “trinity in unity” is a verbal expression of the form in which the one God manifests Himself to man.15 Kosuth’s works resemble this system to the extent that they are about a single, indivisible concept (God, or – for example – a chair) and its various forms of manifestation, which generates the trinity. Marcel Duchamp conducted a triple experiment with randomness in the work entitled 3 Stoppages Étalon, created in 1913. Not once or twice, but three times – with firm conviction – he dropped a meter-long piece of yarn from a height of one meter onto a stretched canvas. He then unified the resultant arcing forms into single strips (cut out of the canvas) and sawed these shapes out of three

15 A dogmatika kézikönyve II, (Manual for Dogmatics II) ed. Theodor Schneider, trans. István Gábor Cselényi, Lajos Dolhai, Endre Tőzsér, László Jug, József Válóczy, József Varga B., Budapest, Vigilia, 1997, 499. THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 21 panels of wood. There are three experiments here: how randomness, understood completely and literally, comes into existence; how yarn falls onto a surface, following certain laws – such as the laws of physics; and how reality – even the relatively limited reality of a one-meter distance – can surprise so much more than, for example, a geometry ruler or a regulation. In an interview he gave in 1961, Duchamp considered this his most important work, and I agree with him.16 (Image 18) Other numbers are simply multiplications of these numbers, either odd or even, and due to their complexity and divisibility, they do not possess the power of simple sentences. They have – literally – expanded. “He felt instinctively that the numbers from one to nine possess a greater power than those of the two digit numbers, two digit numbers are more powerful than three digit numbers and so on.”17 Jeff Koons also knew that it would be enough to soak one, two or three basketballs in those half-filled containers, not more. For modeling the most basic situations, this is sufficient. If something is all by itself, the most we can say about it is that it is there, it exists. If two balls are floating, they unavoidably interact, perhaps even jostle each other around. When it comes to three, things become truly complicated.18 (Image 19) By continuing to count further, I intend to arrive at the innumerous, the legion, and then to analyze how

16 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-3-stoppages-etalon- 3-standard-stoppages-t07507/text-summary 17 Viktor Pelevin, Számok (Numbers), trans. László Bratka, Budapest, Európa, 2007, 12. 18 “According to C. G. Jung, when arranging the chaotic multiplicity of phenomena, primarily numbers are there to help. He thinks that the number is perhaps the most primitive tool for arranging the human spirit, where numbers between one and four occur most 22 KATALIN KÁLDI the innumerous can be shaped into ordered form, or if it is not shaped, how it unfolds chaotically or amasses cumulatively.

often, and therefore these are the primitive order schemes. That numbers have an archetypal background is not his invention, but that of the mathematicians (he mentions it in his book, Science and Psyche). He therefore hazards the audacious conclusion that number may be defined psychologically as the ancestral type of order turned conscious. “As I wrote before, I had no presuppositions when starting my research on order and disorder. I approached the question simply and empirically by starting from the activities of ordinary life. I found something interesting that I highlight here, and I found the same thing: most of the time, the mode of arrangement, the order-formulas, the order-structures, the arrangement methods appear in numbers from one to four (or rather from one to three, the number four is already less frequent).” Polcz, A rend és a rendetlenség..., 102. THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 23

THE FOUR

The number four is mostly connected to the directions used for navigating in space, which may be marked by the axes of a system of coordinates. The whole world may be divided into four, just like the perpendicularly connected channels in Arabian gardens, Roman military camps, or the perpendicular axes of European monastery gardens. The four, like the number three, is also a number of unity and completeness. A few years ago, in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, I noticed a 17th-century Netherlandish painting, known as The Dance of the Rats, depicting four little rats dancing merrily in a circle, holding hands, in an image which could be interpreted as a memento mori (Image 20). Showing rats in a group is not unprecedented: the Rattenkönig – referring to rats tied to each other by their tails – is part of German folklore and is an omen of evil. Several museums in Germany have preserved real, mummifiedRattenkönig bodies. These figures and their early representations could be viewed as forerunners to Katharina Fritsch’s Rattenkönig (The Rat King), a large sculptural composition (Image 21). I regard repetition as an important element in both works, because the pattern (a circle) is formed by repeating a single element (the rat). Here, the circle suggests the claustrophobic inescapability of a crushing grinder, filled with constant dread, and not at all representative of life (generally, the circle as a symbol holds out the prospect of an eternal, continuous cycle of life). Having observed the terrifying animals, we should look into the middle of the circle. The sight of the knot strikes us with the force of a horrific shock, since the rodents, while huge, are at least comprehensible thanks to the regular circle they form; but in the middle, their common secret is incomprehensibility 24 KATALIN KÁLDI itself – neither they nor we are capable of untangling it. This chaotic knot is the crux of this comparatively orderly circle of bodies; it is its cause and its explanation. This is what makes the company of rats so frightful, because the organizing principle in the middle of this image is, paradoxically, disorder.19 Fritsch’s entire oeuvre bears interpretation from the point of view of repetition, which underlies all her works. She began with a single giant elephant and an ultramarine blue cockerel, and continued with two brilliant yellow figures of the Madonna standing side by side; overstepping the number three, she arrived at four umbrellas in different colors. From there she continued, with giant leaps, to make group sculptures consisting of multiple uniform casts, such as the 16-piece Rat King and the 32-piece Company at the Table (Image 22). In the latter two examples, it is worth noting that the quantity of the casts is a multiple of the number four; they are, it could be said, super-fours.20 After I began my search, I realized that the number four does not lend itself to artworks as readily or as plentifully

19 “In the Kaleidoscope the radical symmetry pulls the eye towards the centre from which the redundancies are most easily surveyed. Conversely, the repeated elements, as we have seen, lose something of their identity as they merge in the overall form.” Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, Oxford, Phaidon, 1979, 155. 20 “‘Remarkably enough, the psychic images of wholeness which are spontaneously produced by the unconscious, the symbols of the self in mandala form, also have a mathematical structure. They are as a rule quaternities (or their multiples) (my italics). These structures not only express order, they also create it. That is why they generally appear in times of psychic disorientation in order to compensate a chaotic state or a formulations of numinous experiences. It must be emphasised yet again that they are not inventions of the conscious mind but are spontaneous products of the unconscious, as has been sufficiently shown by experience. Naturally the conscious mind can imitate these patterns of order, but such imitations do not prove that the originals are conscious inventions. From this it THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 25 as other numbers. I attribute this to the fact that the present time in which all artworks are created is not so conducive to connecting with the harmonious, balanced, static “two times two”. The present time, whenever it is we live in it, appears more dynamic to us, whereas the number four needs at least as much distance and perspective as that which separates us from Paradise and from the four Evangelists, for example, which are not subjects often found in the art of the recent past.21 However, some artists

follows irrefutably that the unconscious uses number as an ordering factor.’ writes Jung. “Jung found the mandala not only in various cultures but in different historical and prehistorical times – this is why he called them archetypal. We find correlations with the patterns of order I have identified and analyzed, namely, the repetition of numbers, however it is not quaternity, but the repetition of the number used in its own pattern of order. We may conceive repetition as correlating to the Jungian approach, but we may also think of it as a property of the human psyche, a principle of repetition or a method of mathematical multiplication. No matter how we look at it, all of these may be the property of the conscious or the unconscious mind – but it could just as easily be both. In connection with mandalas, we must think through the following from the perspective of our analogy. The mandala is symmetrical, that is, it is a rigorously closed geometrical form of its mirror image (a number derived by multiplying its quaternity), it is the symbolization of the self. It is a collective and archaic pattern of the self, but at the same time it is also a schematic description of the world – it thus expresses the unity of the self and the world –, would it not create order by this very gesture? (and this is what are in need of, especially in the state of primitive instability….)”. Polcz, A rend és a rendetlenség..., 102. 21 “To dwell means to live in the ‘simplicity of the four’ by the celestial and the earthly, the divine and the mortal. What in his peculiar language Heidegger calls ‘the four’ is again a complexity, however in this case it is not the aesthetic complexity of the ruin but that of thinking. Life becomes again rich in relationality, man can only dwell and feel at home again if this four – of which traditionally myth, religion and philosophy speak – is no longer excluded from the experience of the ordinary.” Böhringer, Begriffsfelder..., 47. 26 KATALIN KÁLDI have struggled successfully with the four, including Jasper Johns, who experimented with other numbers as well. In his work Target with Four Faces, we see four casts of the same face repeated above a dartboard. The attentive observer will notice that even though these casts are of the same face, they were not made from the same mold, because they are not exactly the same. The work records not one single moment, but four separate ones. (Image 23) Who would dare represent the totality of the world expanding into four quarters? Perhaps in the abstract, geometrical shape of a square enclosed by four right angles. We may consider Malevich’s Black Square (on white) as such a work, as it is not only radical, but total – it encompasses everything. In my opinion, the black color of this emblematic work was essential for Malevich, for it enabled the greatest possible contrast, and therefore made the message of the work as straightforward as it could be (Image 24). The variations on this painting convey messages that are less definite, perhaps even formulaic; in the Red Square and White on White, for example, the statement is further weakened by the unparallel edges of the squares, so there is more of a sense of randomness, and less eternal truth. Consideration should also be given to those paintings by Malevich that form a cross, another manifestation of quaternity, only in a more dynamic form than the static nature of the square. In Vanessa Beecroft’s photo series, Polla Sisters, four female figures wearing curly white wigs and soft white underwear are presented in different forms, from standing in a line, holding hands with their legs apart, to more complex formations. The fact that there are four of them, however, lends them a kind of stability. (Image 25) THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 27

THE FIVE

With the five, we enter the realm of the “few”. It is still easy for us to have an overview of a group of five – simply take a look at our fingers! In the gigantic painting by Matisse entitled Dance, we meet once again a circular composition based around a number, in this case five. Here we have five human figures holding hands more or less tightly, as they dance with great vigor and happiness. (Image 26) Bruce Nauman threaded five pairs of cast hands into a single arrangement (Untitled/ Hand Circle). In this piece, the right and left hands are connected by the wrists, while each pair of hands is joined by the straightened index fingers of the right hand poking into the circle formed by the index finger and thumb of the left hand (Image 27). A neon work of his, depicting a similar hand position, is entitled Human Sexual Experience, thus leaving us in no doubt about how to interpret the gesture. The only question that may arise is whether the right hand knows what the left hand is doing, cyclically, eternally. (Image 28) In a photograph by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, entitled Equilibres / Quiet Afternoon, we can see five differently colored ladies’ high-heeled shoes, each with its heel rammed deep into the toe of the next shoe, forming a circular structure like a gearwheel. The entire construction is balanced on the sole of one shoe and the tip of another (Image 29). These are shoes which, in real life, are made for walking – running in them would be the sport of the fittest – arranged into the shape of a Saint Catherine’s Wheel or a Rota Fortunae. Alternatively, perhaps, the figuration can be viewed as pentagonal, which, as I understand it, is a symbol for an inconceivable amount of things; at the very least, 28 KATALIN KÁLDI

Marcel Duchamp liked the five-pointed figure so much that he shaved off part of his hair in the same pattern (Image 30). His shaven tonsure was not his first encounter with the five, however, for since the end of the 19th century, the five-figure portrait – created with the help of mirrors – had been a popular novelty. In fact, such portraits were so in demand that at one point, most professional photo studios and even funfairs had their own equipment installed for making them. On July 21, 1917, shortly after his arrival in America, Duchamp had his photograph taken in this way. Five handsome Duchamps sit around a table smoking a pipe, forming a complete set of views that is reminiscent of the afore-mentioned painting of the goldsmith by Lorenzo Lotto. It is interesting that modernism was not satisfied with using three perspectives and leapt at once to using five. What they wanted was not just a little more than one, but much more, which in itself is a kind of consumerism, a kind of greed, a stealthy kind of acceleration. (Image 31) THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 29

THE SIX

In mathematics, the number six is a so-called “perfect number”, that is, the sum of its positive divisors (not including the number itself) is equal to that number, in this case: 1+2+3=6. This perfection seems to be encapsulated in Dan Flavin’s work, The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham), made of six neon tubes placed next to each other and forming the pattern of the Roman numerals, I, II and III (Image 32). The title of the work is also a direct reference to Ockham’s Razor, an axiom attributed to William of Ockham, which states that in problem-solving, “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”, or in other words, the simplest solution is probably the correct one. It could be for this reason that this work has remained one of Flavin’s best- known pieces, unsurpassable by later works, even if they comprised an infinite number of neon tubes. The large lightbox by Jeff Wall entitled The Storyteller shows six First Nation Canadians sitting outdoors (Image 33). The work has mostly been analyzed from the perspective of social commentary, which is undoubtedly a significant component, but failing to move beyond this interpretation would be like concealing the work entirely. In this piece, Wall presents himself as a conscious successor to the pastoral painters of old, and his composition is structured in accordance with the Renaissance laws of perspective: the centrally located lines running towards the vanishing point divide the surface of the image into four parts: sky, pine-forest, grass and highway. The six First Nationers on the grass are arranged in three units, which are once again the divisors of the number six. Three are sitting around a small fire, two are resting on their sleeping 30 KATALIN KÁLDI bags, and one is sitting at the massive concrete foot of the highway pillar, further away from the others. In this bucolic environment, the solitary, paired and group existences of humans are presented with formulaic precision. The predecessor to this work could be Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, a painting that could also be cited here as a manifestation of the number four, specifically the ensemble of two men dressed in suits and two naked women. (I cannot regard this painting as an idyllic image, and I would be interested to see a staging of the scenario in reverse, with two naked men.) An interesting dynamic is generated by the fact that the group of four is simultaneously divided in two different ways: very emphatically, almost comically, they are divided according to gender and according to whether or not they are clothed (the overcoats of the two men are almost chameleonesque in the way they merge into their surroundings). At the same time, the composition just as clearly has a 3+1 division, with the bathing lady in the background situated away from the other three figures (similarly to the figure sitting alone beneath the highway in Wall’s image). The gaming dice that people play with most often have just six sides, so there are six degrees of fortune. Tony Cragg has often tested this type of luck with his sculptures, huge organic forms featuring protrusions and incurves that are covered with countless tiny, plastic toy dice (Secretions series). Luck, after all, is something that is never tested only once, the temptation urges us to throw the dice again and again, by which time even probability theory will not help us, we are too involved, too far lost. (Image 34) THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 31

THE SEVEN

Experimental psychology has proven that when perceiving a group consisting of a limited number of elements, seven is a sort of boundary number (although depending on the individual, this boundary may also be six or eight). A group of seven or fewer elements is perceived as a manageable set of discrete elements, while a larger group becomes undefinable, a multiplicity, a legion.22 One of Cézanne’s still lifes will help to verify this statement: in the painting there are seven apples, and nothing else. They are neither many, nor few, but “just the right amount”, the very last stage at which we still perceive the apples, on first sight, as separate elements. Their arrangement greatly contributes to our perception, for it is not a shapeless heap that we see, but two sets of three plus one, that is, two almost parallel arrangements of three apples, and another apple in between the two rows. (Image 35) The same perceptual boundary is tested by Giacomo Balla in his painting entitled Girl Running on a Balcony. It would be difficult to distinguish how many times the child’s feet or head are replicated. I am unable to say exactly how many times the girl is depicted in the painting, but what I can say is that it is sufficient for the unity of the composition to evoke a sense of motion (Image 36). Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, also from 1912, uses the

22 The most cited work of the psychologist George Armitage Miller is his writing on short-term memory, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, published in 1956 in Psychological Review. In this article he describes the seven-unit capacity of short-term human memory that holds numbers, words, images or any other meaningful, familiar element. 32 KATALIN KÁLDI same methodology (Image 37). If we understand Paul Virilio’s proposition stating that the fixed idea of the 20th century is acceleration,23 then it becomes clear why there was a proliferation of artworks presenting multiple identical elements, the myriad unity. The phenomenon kicked off in Futurism, with the use of “a few”, and gradually, over time, ever greater numbers of elements were included, finally culminating in swarms and masses. One thing is ubiquitous, wherever we look, and that one thing is death. Something was, but now it is not. Virilio describes this sensation precisely as an impulse motivated by panic. The number seven can behave in a more concrete, more defined way, however. In Bruce Nauman’sVices and Virtues, for instance, there are seven separate units. Neon lights mark out seven pairs of concepts (faith-lust, hope-envy, charity-sloth, prudence-pride, justice-avarice, temperance-gluttony, fortitude-anger), and the pairs overlap one another transparently. We can only see seven words at one time, but not with the good concepts separated clearly from the bad, but all mixed up, reflecting what happens in human nature (Image 38). The seven figures are also “mixed up” – or more precisely, copulating – in another work by Nauman (Seven Figures), whose neon silhouettes depict the outlines of their bodies, which separate them from each other even as they seemingly do their damnedest to dissolve this separation. Their experiment in dissolution can be observed in a two-phase movement. (Image 39)

23 “If, according to Hegel, ‘philosophy is an era put into ideas’, we have to concede the idée fixe of the twentieth century has been the acceleration of reality and not just of history.” Paul Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See, Oxford, New York, Berg, 2007, 3. THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 33

THE MANY

Besides the examples already cited, I have noticed certain other decorative phenomena, such as the countless scapulas, fibulas and other bones displayed in the Capuchin Crypt in Via Veneto, Rome. These objects (for as they are used here, they are merely forms and shapes) are arranged into regular patterns adorning the ceiling, reminding us that our own bodies, which contain similar elements all nicely “wrapped up”, will not last forever. To drive the message home, among the rosettes, putto heads, floral ornaments, scrolls, tendrils and architectonics, the bones are arranged in the shape of a clock bearing Roman numerals. (Image 40) It is not the subtlest of references, but it does vividly show how this type of structure is connected to time, as we have probably observed elsewhere, albeit in a more nuanced manner. I believe that repetition in itself is capable of conjuring up inside us a sequence of successive temporal units or moments. Repetition encapsulates continuity. The closed circuit of this contradiction captivates us. We may speak of direct proportionality when the moments relate to the totality of time, as discrete units relate to a total structure. We then must assume that whoever designs such a structure may think of time as having totality, that is, a beginning and an end, or as creating a circle that becomes whole by being filled, of which there are numerous examples. This purported creator has faith in an organizing principle that hides behind reality.24

24 “The regularity is the sign of intention; the fact that they are repeated shows that they are repeatable and that they belong to culture rather than to nature. […] The conclusion to which we are driven suggests that it is precisely because of these forms are rare in nature that 34 KATALIN KÁLDI

On the other hand, repetition is one of the most basic human experiences: day follows day, night follows night.25 Remembering this may give a sense of security in life. If the system were chaotic, the world would become incomprehensible, we would lose trust, but this is not what happens when things are in order… In this sense, repetition heals and protects, through its capacity to be foreseen. At the same time, we must not forget that the specific criterion of any scientific experiment is repeatability, from which the other important criteria of controllability, verifiability and regularity are derived. Repetition gives us certainty. There is a less attractive approach to repetition, which uncovers military features, the petrifying order of the phalanx, the horror of uniforms. Conversely, repetition is of significance to the field of design, in the patterns of wallpapers and textiles, the micro-order. These two aspects, when fused together, may call to mind such artists as Vanessa Beecroft. Her consistent working method is to “arrange” female models with similar makeup and clothing into peculiar groups; “arrange” is a keyword here, since I believe the desire for order is what motivates all actions of this sort.26 Her work, in which enormous numbers of

the human mind has chosen those manifestations of regularity which are recognizably a product of a controlling mind and thus stand out against the random medley of nature. […] Intuitively it is clear that there are types of simplicity which go together with ease of assembly. The principle is illustrated no less in the normal brick wall than it is in the crystal that results from the close packing of identical molecules.” Gombrich, The Sense of Order..., 7. 25 “Such a consequence, however, forces itself to the fore: just as each counted number is only real by the counting of the human spirit, so time also does not appear to be simply real, and only appears as time in the experience of man.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Concerning Empty and Ful-Filled Time = Martin Heidegger: In Europe and America, ed. Ballard E.G., Scott C.E. Springer, Dordrecht, 1973, 78. 26 “It’s the conflict between trying to achieve an ideal, the illusion of THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 35 models are exhibited together, may remind us of the Chinese terracotta army from the 3rd century BCE (Image 41). To make these lifesize soldiers, guarding the gigantic necropolis of the emperor, eight different types of head were used as models, which were then shaped uniquely in clay, each with its own facial expression, numbering around 8000 figures in all. They were arranged in trenches, five meters deep, in precise military formation, according to the arms they bore. As an objectified afterlife, the entire grave complex is a frightful model of order. Beecroft also flaunted the trappings of power for a while (to be precise, one performance), when she commanded a group of US marines to stand in particular arrangements. (Image 42) We can contrast simple seriality with this method of arrangement, in which the series refers only to itself and nothing more, with neither beginning nor end, only industrial desolation and extermination, the sense of one thing following monotonously after the other.27 In connection with the non-individual and the serial, it is important to refer to Walter Benjamin and to the change brought about by the Industrial Revolution and its

an order, at least as a point of reference, and its ineluctable fall. […] Finally, there is the conflict between order, control, minimalism and chaos, entropy and representation, that duel throughout the performances.” Interview with Vanessa Beecroft, Flash Art, 2006/ November–December, 87. 27 “From these experiments and observations I conclude that man has a kind of basic structure for order, an order-formula. We know that for small children, the structural part of order develops from an undivided mass, through the assembly piles and rows, towards ever more complex structures. We may dare to presume that the development of spatial division, its security and multifacetedness, directly correlates with similar characters of thought, emotion and will, or perhaps even with other components. In sum, the construction of order is a characteristic that defines personality.” Polcz, A rend és a rendetlenség…, 76. 36 KATALIN KÁLDI accompanying social order, which inspired the notion that the identical could be many or even innumerous. Of course in an artistic structure that resembles reality, the reality of production could be considered even more authentic, whether in terms of the reiterative mode of production or in terms of composition.28 We have to mention the silkscreen works by Andy Warhol, who made an attempt to process and mitigate the moment of death by multiplying it,29 especially in his series of prints on car accidents and the electric chair. According to a saying attributed to him, “if you look at something long enough […], the meaning goes away”. (I reckon this is something we can all relate to.) I see the different series created by Warhol as his way of trying to get rid of meaning. Surely, in our childhoods, many of us would keep repeating a word, over and over, until it turned into merely a series of sounds, which dissolved and made the sense fade away. The frightening nature of reality can be tamed to an extent with this method. When something becomes nothing, it ceases to exist.30 When facing Warhol’s Eight Elvises, we look down the barrel of eight pistols, that is, eight copies of the same

28 “For Benjamin urged the ‘advanced’ artist to intervene, like the revolutionary worker, in the means of artistic production-to change the ‘technique’ of traditional media, to transform the ‘apparatus’ of bourgeois culture.” “In Benjamin the withering of aura, the loss of distance, impacts on the body as well as on the image: the two cannot be separated. Here he makes a double analogy between the painter and the magician, and the cameraman and the surgeon: whereas the first two maintain a ‘natural distance’ from the motif to paint or the body to heal, the second two ‘penetrate deeply into its web.’” Foster, The Return of the Real..., 171, 219. 29 “We like lists because we don’t want to die.” Interview with Umberto Eco, 2009, http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/ spiegel-interview-with-umberto-eco-we-like-lists-because-we-don-t- want-to-die-a-659577.html 30 “A similar experience is known to psychologists of language and THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 37 pistol. It is true, moreover, that, even if time keeps going faster, when someone points a gun at us, time seems to last for longer. The eight figures of the pistol-packing Presley are not placed equidistantly across the composition, but become more closely compressed as we look from left to right, to the point where they are so compacted that the gun could be about to fire. (Image 43) By comparison, the movement in Balla’s Girl Running on a Balcony is steady, not accelerating, and we are affected by the rapture of motion, not the intoxication of death. The work of Peter Roehr, who died at the age of 24, deserves inclusion under the topic of multiplicity created by seriality. He cut out identical parts from newspapers, brochures and advertisements, and used them in his photo collages, films or sound montages by joining or looping them together. With the dispassionate rigor of mathematical notebooks, the images are arranged into grids – there is nothing organic in this abundance. All he did was select things and glue them together. (Image 44) When confronted by such a swirling, nauseating swarm, one may experience the same sense of repulsion as that caused by an anthill.

many of us have discovered it independently in our childhood. If a word is repeated long enough it appears to be drained of meaning and becomes a mere puzzling noise. Try to pronounce the word ’meaning’ some fifty times in a row and you will begin to wonder how you could ever operate with this strange sound. […] Order and meaning appear to exert contrary pulls and their interaction constitutes the warp and woof of the decorative arts. For the designer no less than the beholder must experience the degree to which repetition devalues the motif while isolation enhances its potential meaning. No wonder that any object that becomes an element in a repeat pattern almost asks to be ‘stylized’, that is simplified in geometrical terms.” Gombrich, The Sense of Order..., 151–152. 38 KATALIN KÁLDI

THE INNUMEROUS

With the many, the myriad and the multitudinous, we enter the field of the sublime. The limitless and the infinite can be a little daunting or forbidding, but fascinating at the same time, and we are emotionally moved by the sight of greater forces, more powerful than ourselves. This is not the case when something has a distinct form, an outline, or a boundary, for its finiteness appears tame and comprehensible. Félix González-Torres poured an enormous amount of candies into the corner of a room, or spread them out on the floor into a regular rectangular shape. The latter work (Untitled, Portrait of Dad) comprises 80 kilograms of sweets, equal to the body weight of an adult male person, wrapped individually in cellophane and placed in the center of a likewise rectangular exhibition space. This, like the previously mentioned piece by Félix González-Torres, also addresses the death of a loved one (the losses of the two loved ones occurred only three weeks apart) (Image 45). On one hand the work refers to a body in a very abstract way, while on the other hand, the candies remind us of our own, living body. Perhaps with a little exaggeration, we may also perceive a link between the small, round, white, edible treats and the wafers of Holy Communion, especially because the candies in the work are so closely attached to the concept of death. At the same time, the countless tiny elements can be understood as the sum of all those moments of life.31 I was even reminded of a

31 “So I believe that anything that is, whatever someone grasps with his understanding, necessarily is smashed into chopped-up bits. For surely, without one, he would always grasp a heap.” “Of course.” THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 39

Japanese tatami, since it also designates a human size unit, a surface, a place, a rectangular shape for a human body on the floor – the tatami was also a unit of measurement in ancient Japan, when the size of a room was defined by how many tatami it could accommodate. Other candy works by González-Torres are less specific, simple heaps in corners, with cellophane wrappers of different colors. Time only assumes its final form when it is over, for until then it is just a multitude of temporal units, another kind of heap. At the exhibition, viewers were allowed to pick up a candy, just as they were allowed to choose from González-Torres’s reproduced cloud prints. As each “offer” was accepted, the height of the pile of prints decreased. A similar idea is found in Seneca’s first letter: “For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hand.” Alighiero Boetti’s work, Me Sunbathing in Turin on 19 January 1969, also evokes the sight of a lying body. Boetti created forms out of quick-setting concrete by clenching them tightly in his hand, then arranged the 112 “pellets” into the outline of his own body lying on the floor. With the gesture of clenching and the imprints of his hand, he refers to his own created nature, while the ephemerality of existence is alluded to not only by the title of the work, but also by the dead cabbage butterfly placed on one of the pellets (Image 46). Yayoi Kusama attains a sense of peace by covering every, literally every object she finds with an endless

“And so to anyone seeing such a thing from afar and faintly, won’t it necessarily appear to be one? But to someone thinking about it up close and sharply, doesn’t each one appear limitless in multitude, if in fact it’s devoid of the One that is not?” “Yes, that’s most necessary.” Plato, Parmenides, 87 (165b-c) 40 KATALIN KÁLDI quantity of penis-shaped protrusions; one such object, for example, is a rubber boat (Violet Obsession) (Image 47). All her work to date is the reactive gesture of infinite repetition, which is not surprising from somebody who is an obsessive neurotic. What is important for her is intensity, sensing the world not just slightly, but to an extreme degree, so she does not need to list the world in order to systematize it. The paintings in the series entitled Infinity Net lack all structure and form, and her lists have neither beginning, middle nor end.32 This is a kind of loquacious verbosity. She herself has described the feeling (because that is what it is, a feeling) of the inner image breaking free from inside her, transcending the limits of time and space.33 In fact, this infinite flow, with no base or reference point, is not a comforting, reassuring view of the world but a nightmarish saga, a kind of suffering and self-forfeit. On Kawara34 marks the passing of days by pointing to the last one leading up to that day (Image 48–49). Using the font types Gill Sans or Futura, and following the local

32 “The urge which drives the decorator to go on filling any resultant void is generally described as horror vacui, which is supposedly characteristic of many non-classical styles. Maybe the term amor infiniti, the love of the infinite, would be a more fitting description.” Gombrich, The Sense of Order..., 80. 33 “My net paintings were very large canvasses without composition – without beginning, end or center. The entire canvas would be occupied by [a] monochromatic net. This endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling. […] It arises from a deep, driving compulsion to realize in visible form the repetitive image inside of me. When this image is given freedom, it overflows the limits of time and space.” Yayoi Kusama, Interview with Gordon Brown, 1964. The Struggle and Wonderings of my Soul, 1975 = Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, Udo Kultermann, Yayoi Kusama, London, Phaidon, 2000, 103–104. 34 On Kawara died on July 10, 2014, shortly after this paper was originally finalized and submitted. The translation reflects the original text. THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 41 spelling rules of where he happens to be, he writes the given date on a canvas, which is painted in acrylic, usually black, but sometimes red. His paintings are often exhibited in a frieze-like arrangement, which further emphasizes the sequence of days, freezing time before our eyes in a way that will only come to an end with Kawara’s death. Until then we see continuity, a phenomenon he likes to report to his friends, by sending them telegrams from all over the world, informing them that, “I am still alive”. (I can imagine that this act of sending messages is becoming ever less amusing for him.) He meticulously arranges his paintings into boxes that he lines with a copy of a printed newspaper from that day, and if for any reason he is unable to finish a painting on the day marked by the date of the painting, he destroys it. (This gesture is especially interesting to me, because I know of several painters – such as Luc Tuymans – who relish the zest and intensity of the day, and who would complete a painting in one day.) It is a physiological fact that when the eye focuses sharply on just a single point, the rest of the view remains in obscurity until the gaze wanders there. Kawara’s paintings remind me of this faculty of the eye, by sharply delineating the exact object of our attention, the temporal unit, the day, which presupposes all the rest in the same way as a single point on a numerical scale presupposes the entire rest of the scale. The other days, which are in obscurity here, either remain forever in obscurity or appear in other paintings. In Giorgione’s Old Woman (Col Tempo – With Time), her face bears the traces of time, of every minute she has lived until then. This is also true with an image of a small child, of course, but what we see in Giorgione’s painting is not someone in a given moment or state, but time itself, as confirmed by the label on her arm, which is inscribed not 42 KATALIN KÁLDI with her age or identity, but only “time”, the passing of all the days.35 (Image 52) I would also like to mention Vija Celmins once more, whose drawings, almost entirely, were born out of her attraction to the infinite, as she drew the starry sky and the surface of the sea, using a graphite pencil in a way that makes it possible even to count, or in Eco’s term, to list, each wave and star with the utmost objectivity, devoid of all emotions. Celmins summarizes infinity. This is no half- hearted project, when we think about it, and humanity might have experienced a similar act by God, as we can read in Psalm CXLVII/4: “He counts the numbers of the stars and names them in their kind”. (Image 51) Self-portrait photographs have a characteristic style, when the subject – who is also the object – of the photograph simultaneously triggers the camera using a cable, standing between two mirrors, so the image is multiplied and reproduced infinitely. How many times we actually see it depends on the angle formed between the camera and one of the mirrors. Since the image of the face diminishes and fades into the distance, the result suggests an infinite number, even though in the enlarged print we can only count the image seven or eight times. An example is the self-portrait of Ise Gropius from 1927 (Image 52). If we were to give a camera to somebody with no knowledge of photography, sooner or later that person would a produce a photograph like this, since there is an irresistible attraction

35 “Then we were not speaking the truth, just now, when we said that beinghood had been apportioned into the most numerous parts. For it had not been apportioned into more than the One, but rather into an equal number, so it looks, as the One. For Being neither lacks the One nor the One Being; rather, since they are two, they are always, in every case, equal.” Plato, Parmenides, 50. (144e) THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 43 in not having to use any type of external assistance when looking at ourselves in this manner. On the other hand, it is an uncannily schizoid experience to multiply ourselves in this way, as the image, after all, was made in a single moment of time, marked precisely by the exposure of the camera. (Perhaps this is why we insist that digital cameras at least imitate this clicking sound, as a way of confirming the moment that is recorded.) As progressive artists made their way along the path of photography and seriality, as predicted by Walter Benjamin, a proliferation of works and collages ensued, such as the self-portrait collage by Josef Albers in 1928 (Image 53). The work performs the act of repetition in two different ways within the same image. Firstly, in the bottom left quarter of the picture, Albers neatly arranges four copies of his self-portrait in a line, and then he covers the rest of the surface inordinately with six negatives of the same photo, colored blue. What results is an ordered, earthly (brown) line and a formless celestial (blue) mass, an enigmatic division of the number ten (4+6). Primary reality (Albers’s head) as a reference point disappears, repetition covers it up, and the head even sinks slightly downwards and to the right, vanishing carefully (this perception is confirmed by the certain knowledge that man does not separate himself from his head). Albers’s later abstract works are also, in a way, collections of variations, and as such they aim for infinity. A distinction may be attempted between types of multiplicity by at least considering the “many” as either calculable or incalculable. Can there be an end to something that is long and yet finite? Or does it sooner or later become boundless? The incommutability of the difference that emerges here can be expressed in English using the words “many” and “much,” or reflected in the 44 KATALIN KÁLDI distinction between a progressive and a perfect tense. In the case of planar paintings, it is easy to see that, if the edge completely frames the depicted objects (even if there are many of them), then what it represents is totality, whereas if the objects “spill over” the edge of the picture, this gesture signifies that they continue into infinity. Is the edge some kind of “end”, a limit imposed on the whole? Or does the edge only isolate a portion of infinite totality and set it aside from the rest of the whole? THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 45

CONCLUSION

If we grow accustomed to looking at art from the perspectives put forward so far, it is difficult to find any piece of work that would not fit into this elemental process. The selection of works was therefore entirely arbitrary and personal, and there are certainly many representative works that have been left out. We have to be careful, otherwise, like Umberto Eco’s hero, we may be inclined to attribute underlying content to all the phenomena before us in the world. A construction site, a brick wall, a nest woven from grass, mosaic eyes and pixels all follow this pattern, the pages of a book, the pointillist style of a painting… before becoming totally confused by thinking the problem over, I will finish here. 36 This structural principle also has a popular variant, namely the gigantic majorette shows performed at the Olympic Games, where large groups of people move around in synchrony to form patterns and logos.37 Even the most conventional still life with flowers

36 “So deeply ingrained is our tendency to regard order as the mark of an ordering mind that we instinctively react with wonder whenever we perceive regularity in the natural world. Sometimes, in walking through a wood, our eyes may be arrested by mushrooms arranged in a perfect circle. Folklore calls them fairy rings because it seems impossible to imagine that such regularity has come about by accident. Nor has it – though the explanation of the phenomenon is far from simple. But why are we startled in any case? Does not the natural world exhibit many examples of regularity and simplicity – from the stars in their courses to the waves of the sea, the marvel of crystals and up the ladder of creation to the rich orders of flowers, shells and plumage?” Gombrich, The Sense of Order..., 5. 37 “When paying attention to symmetry, regularities and patterns, one can find them everywhere in everyday life, on clothing and textiles, rugs and wallpapers, on walls and on road surfaces. The transition from practical arrangement to the decorative-ornamental 46 KATALIN KÁLDI is the same: a specific multiple of identical or very similar elements. Battle paintings are no different. In conclusion I would like to mention one film, a favorite of mine, Fernand Léger’s Mechanical Ballet. As I watched the film, I felt that it offered a summary of this small volume, raising example upon example of repeating the few or the many, one after the other (Image 54). The works I have cited may also be structured in accordance with another system, following shapes and patterns.38 Many works form a circle or a human figure. Examples of such objects include Nicolas de Larmessin’s engravings, which form human characters. Larmessin constructed his figures based on the attributes of their profession, just as Arcimboldo structured his portraits from all types of items (Image 55). In a certain sense, the same example is followed by Antony Gormley’s sculptures, and even by the afore-mentioned work by Alighiero Boetti, Me

is gradual. Decorative order is only rarely without purpose. Originally, it certainly had a practical and symbolic role. Its main job, it seems, is to show ‘infinite rapport’ – this is what Alois Reigl calls the arabesque. As an infinite rapport, as a piece of order that constitutes complexity, the inexhaustible richness of references being transparent, ornament reminds us of the world’s infinite rapport that can never be represented or made present exhaustibly, so it is only settled here and there as decoration, ornaments made up of isolated things and their connective parts, again and again.” Böhringer, Begriffsfelder…, 25. 38 “Inasmuch as a list characterizes a (even dissimilar) series of objects belonging to the same context or seen from the same point of view […], it confers order (and hence a hint of form) to an otherwise disordered set. There are subtler ways of transforming a list into form, the most typical example being Arcimboldo. He took the elements from a possible list, e.g. all the fruits or legumes in existence, or all those represented in the form of a list from many still lives, and composed into an unexpected form. In his certain Baroque way of his, he tells us that you can artfully pass from list to form.” Eco, The Infinity of the Lists, 130. THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 47

Sunbathing in Turin on 19 January 1969. We could point to many examples among Tony Cragg’s sculptures, although they are not human figures, but axeheads made out of various objects (Axehead) (Image 56). What we are talking about here is the concept of pareidolia, which refers to the kind of perception that turns indistinct stimuli into concrete, meaningful phenomena. (One well-known example is our propensity for identifying faces or animal shapes in cloud formations.)

I have analyzed the situation in my work, where the ensemble of homogeneous objects carries meaning over and above the objects themselves. Through perceptible reality, a kind of abstract concept may come about, creating tension between the everyday and the conceptual, as the conveyor of some kind of secret. By making order, we may succeed in overcoming chaos and evil, in thwarting the incomprehensible; by building a small scale-model, we may at least gain some consolation from the illusion of doing so.39 However, a regular structure, and regularity itself, will only be a source of excitement if there is a secret attached to it, for if it is only circumstantial or perfectly regular, then it will remain plain, boring and dumb. The structure has to be slightly disquieting, moderately uncomfortable.40

39 “If I want to tackle the question on the level of the ordinary, then such things come to my mind as, for instance, the wife of a very good friend of mine, at whose place I stayed abroad. She warned me that her husband started to clean up in his study, on his desk, among his books and documents, when he felt mortal fear.” Polcz, A rend és a rendetlenség..., 163. 40 “Any continuous body feeling, sight or sound, will sink below the threshold of attention. The rush of wind and water, the rustling of leaves, the ticking of the clock and even the roar of the traffic outside 48 KATALIN KÁLDI

There is a strong temptation to achieve order, or at least to create the illusion of order. Still, it seems natural for this experiment of ours to fail again and again, although I do not even consider it a failure, since we can never be precise.41

the window become mere background and will be ignored unless they interfere with other sounds. The best proof we have, however, that we still hear what we no longer notice comes from the well- known observation that we realize it when the sound changes or stops.” Gombrich, The Sense of Order..., 108. 41 “However, all endeavors aimed at creating order in the world, in our thoughts or in the home, come up against boundaries. The remnants of disorderliness will always be left behind.” Böhringer, Begriffsfelder…, 23. IMAGES 50 IMAGES

1–2. Katalin Káldi, Barbells, 2012 IMAGES 51

3. Lorenzo Lotto, Triple Portrait of a Goldsmith, 1530

4. Van Dyck, Charles I, 1635–1636 52 IMAGES

5. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Altar der Agathe Tyche, 1776

6. Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory, 1977–1982 IMAGES 53

7. Alighiero Boetti, Alighiero e Boetti Self Portrait, 1968

8. Meret Oppenheim, Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers, 1936 54 IMAGES

9. Oswald Baer, Self-Portrait in a Mirror, 1932

10. Caravaggio, Narcissus, 1597–1599 IMAGES 55

11. Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men by the Sea, 1817

12. Tiziano Vecellio, Profane and Sacred Love, 1515 56 IMAGES

13. Sherrie Levine, Black and White Bottles, 1992

14. Giulio Paolini, Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto, 1967 IMAGES 57

15. Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze, 1960

16. Félix González-Torres, Untitled / Perfect Lovers, 1991 58 IMAGES

17. Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965

18. Marcel Duchamp, 3 Stoppages Étalon, 1913 © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris, / HUNGART 2020 IMAGES 59

19. Jeff Koons, Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off), 1985

20. Master from the Low-Lands, The Rat King, 17th century 60 IMAGES

21. Katharina Fritsch, The Rat King, 1993–1994

22. Katharina Fritsch, Company at the Table, 1988 IMAGES 61

23. Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955

24. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, Black Square, 1915 62 IMAGES

25. Vanessa Beecroft, Polla Sisters, 2001

26. Henri Matisse, Dance I, 1909 © Succession H. Matisse / HUNGART 2020 IMAGES 63

27. Bruce Nauman, Untitled / Hand Circle, 1996

28. Bruce Nauman, Human Sexual Experience, 1985 64 IMAGES

29. Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Three Sisters (from the series Equilibres / Quiet Afternoon), 1984–1987

30. Marcel Duchamp, Tonsure, 1919 © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris, / HUNGART 2020 IMAGES 65

31. The Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1917

32. Dan Flavin, The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham), 1963 66 IMAGES

33. Jeff Wall, The Storyteller, 1986

34. Tony Cragg, from the series Secretions (detail) IMAGES 67

35. Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Apples, 1878

36. Giacomo Balla, Girl Running on a Balcony, 1912 68 IMAGES

37. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912 © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris, / HUNGART 2020

38. Bruce Nauman, Vices and Virtues, 1988 IMAGES 69

39. Bruce Nauman, Seven Figures, 1985

40. Capuchin’s Crypt, Via Veneto, Rome 70 IMAGES

41. Terracotta Army, 209–210 BC.

42. Vanessa Beecroft, US Navy Seals, 1999 IMAGES 71

43. Andy Warhol, Eight Elvises, 1963 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / HUNGART 2020

44. Peter Roehr, Ohne Titel (FO-15), 1964 72 IMAGES

45. Félix González-Torres, Untitled / Portrait of Dad, 1991

46. Alighiero Boetti, Me Sunbathing in Turin on 19 January 1969, 1969 IMAGES 73

47. Yayoi Kusama, Violet Obsession, 1994

48. On Kawara, Date Paintings in New York and 136 Other Cities, David Zwirner 74 IMAGES

49. On Kawara, 5 Feb. 2006, 2006

50. Giorgione, The Old Woman, 1506 IMAGES 75

51. Vija Celmins, Night Sky No. 15, 2001–2002

52. Ise Gropius, Self-Portrait, 1927 76 IMAGES

53. Josef Albers, Self-Portrait, 1928 © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / HUNGART 2020

54. Fernand Léger, Mechanical Ballet, film, 1924 IMAGES 77

55. Nicolas de Larmessin, Habit de Boisselier, 1695

56. Tony Cragg, Axehead, 1982 78 IMAGES

LIST OF IMAGES

1–2. Katalin Káldi (Budapest, 1971), Barbells, 84 plaster barbells, 20x5.5cm each, 2012. 3. Lorenzo Lotto (Venice, 1480 – Loreto, 1556), Portrait of a Goldsmith from Three Positions, oil on canvas, 52.1x79.1 cm, 1530. 4. Anthony Van Dyck (Antwerp, 1599 – London, 1641), Charles I, oil on canvas, 85x100 cm, 1635–1636. 5. Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Frankfurt, 1749 – Weimar, 1832), Altar of Agathe Tyche, granite cube of 90 cm edge and 72 cm diagonal granite mass, 1776. 6. Vija Celmins (Riga, 1938), To Fix the Image in Memory, 11 pebbles and 11 bronze casts painted with acrylic paint, 1977–1982. 7. Alighiero Boetti (Turin, 1940 – Rome, 1994), Alighiero and Boetti Self Portrait, photography, 15.2 x11.2 cm, 1968. 8. Meret Oppenheim (Berlin, 1913 – Basel, 1985), Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers, fur, wood, nail polish, 5x21x10 cm, 1936. 9. Oswald Baer (Bielsko-Biala, 1906 – Jena, 1941), Self- Portrait in a Mirror, oil on canvas, 115.5x91.5 cm, 1932. 10. Caravaggio (Milan, 1571 – Porto Ercole, 1610), Narcissus, oil on canvas, 110x92 cm, 1597–1599. 11. Caspar David Friedrich (Greifswald, 1774 – Dresden, 1840), Two Men by the Sea, oil on canvas, 51x66 cm, 1817. 12. Tiziano Vecellio (Pieve di Cadore, 1490 – Venice, 1576), Sacred and Profane Love, oil on canvas, 118x279 cm, 1515. 13. Sherrie Levine (Hazleton, 1947), Black and White Bottles, glass, 33x7.6 cm each, 1992. 14. Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940), Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto, photography, emulsifying canvas, 30x24 cm, 1967. IMAGES 79

15. Jasper Johns (Augusta, 1930), Painted Bronze, painted bronze, 14x20.3x12.1 cm, 1960. 16. Félix González-Torres (Guáimaro, 1957 – Miami, 1996), Untitled / Perfect Lovers, clocks, 35.6x71.2x7 cm, 1991. 17. Joseph Kosuth (Toledo, 1945), One and Three Chairs, photography, chair, 110x60 cm / 81x40x51 cm / 52x80 cm, 1965. 18. Marcel Duchamp (Blainville-Crevon, 1887 – Neuilly- sur-Seine, 1968), 3 Stoppages Étalon, wooden box: 28.2x129.2x22.7 cm, three pieces of yarn of 1 meter each glued to a 13.3x120 cm painted canvas stripe, each canvas stripe fixed to a 18.4x125.4x0.6 cm glass plate, three 6.2x109.2x0.2 cm wooden staves sawed into a shape meeting the curve of the yarn, 1913. 19. Jeff Koons (York PA, 1955), Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off), glass, metal, pneumatic legs, three basketballs, water, 1536x1238x336 cm, 1985. 20. Dutch master, The Dance of Rats, oil on canvas, 41.5x46.5 cm, 17th century. 21. Katharina Fritsch (Essen, 1956), The Rat King, polyester, paint, 280x1300 cm, 1993–1994. 22. Katharina Fritsch (Essen, 1956), Company at the Table, polyester, wood, cotton, paint, 1.4x16x1.75 m, 1988. 23. Jasper Johns (Augusta, 1930), Target with Four Faces, encaustics, newspaper, canvas, painted plaster, wooden frame, 85.3x66x7.6 cm, 1955. 24. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (Kiev, 1879 – Leningrad, 1935), Black Square, oil on canvas, 79.5x79.5 cm, 1915. 25. Vanessa Beecroft (Genoa, 1969), Polla Sisters, performance, 2001. 26. Henri Matisse (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, 1869 – Nice, 1954), Dance I, oil on canvas, 260x390 cm, 1909. 80 IMAGES

27. Bruce Nauman (Fort Wayne, 1941), Untitled / Hand Circle, bronze, copper, 1155x710x700 cm, 1996. 28. Bruce Nauman (Fort Wayne, 1941), Human Sexual Experience, neon tubes on aluminum surface, 43.2x58.4x24.1 cm, 1985. 29. Peter Fischli (Zürich, 1952) and David Weiss (Zürich, 1946 – Zürich, 2012), The three sisters (Equilibres / Quiet Afternoon series), C-print, 30x40 cm, 1984–1987. 30. Marcel Duchamp (Blainville-Crevon, 1887 – Neuilly-sur- Seine, 1968), Tonsure, photography, 15x10 cm, 1919. 31. The Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, unknown photographer, gelatin silver print, 1917. 32. Dan Flavin (Jamaica NY, 1933 – Riverhead (town) NY, 1996), The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham), neon tubes, height 183 cm, with flexible width, 1963. 33. Jeff Wall (Vancouver, 1946), The Storyteller, slide, lightbox, 229x437 cm, 1986. 34. Tony Cragg (Liverpool, 1949), Secretions series, polystyrene sculpture covered with dice (detail). 35. Paul Cezanne (Aix-en-Provence, 1839 – Aix-en-Provence, 1906), Still Life, oil on canvas, 19x27 cm, 1878. 36. Giacomo Balla (Turin, 1871 – Rome, 1958), Girl Running on a Balcony, oil on canvas, 125x125 cm, 1912. 37. Marcel Duchamp (Blainville-Crevon, 1887 – Neuilly-sur- Seine, 1968), Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, oil on canvas, 147x89.2 cm, 1912. 38. Bruce Nauman (Fort Wayne, 1941), Vices and Virtues, neon tubes, 1988. 39. Bruce Nauman (Fort Wayne, 1941), Seven Figures, neon tubes, 127x457x7 cm, 1985. 40. Capuchin’s Crypt, Via Veneto, Rome 41. Terracotta Army, ca. 8000 terracotta soldiers, 130 chariots, 520 cavalry horses, 150 riders, 184–197 cm, 209–210 BC. IMAGES 81

42. Vanessa Beecroft (Genoa, 1969), US Navy Seals, digital C-print, 101.7x135.3 cm, 1999. 43. Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, 1928 – New York, 1987), Eight Elvises, canvas, silkscreen, 1963. 44. Peter Roehr (Lauenburg/Elbe, 1944 – Frankfurt, 1968), Ohne Titel (FO-15), 1964. 45. Félix González-Torres (Guáimaro,1957 – Miami, 1996), Untitled / Portrait of Dad, 79.4 kg white candy in transparent cellophane, 1991. 46. Alighiero Boetti (Turin, 1940 – Rome, 1994), Me Sunbathing in Turin on 19 January 1969, 112 hand shaped concrete pieces, cabbage butterfly, 117x90 cm, 1969. 47. Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, 1929), Violet Obsession, textile, rubber boat, 109,8x381,9x180 cm, 1994. 48. On Kawara (Kariya, 1932 – New York, 2014), Date Paintings in New York and 136 Other Cities, David Zwirner. 49. On Kawara (Kariya, 1932 – New York, 2014) 5 Feb. 2006, acrylic paint on canvas, 26.7x34.3 cm, 2006. 50. Giorgione (Castelfranco, 1478 – Venice, 1510), The Old Woman, oil on canvas, 68x59 cm, 1506. 51. Vija Celmins (Riga, 1938), Night Sky No. 15, oil on canvas, on wood plate, 79.1x96.7x3.2 cm, 2001–2002. 52. Ise Gropius (Wiesbaden, 1897 – Lexington, 1983), Self- Portrait, 1927. 53. Josef Albers (Bottrop, 1888 – New Haven, 1976), Self- Portrait, 1928. 54. Fernand Léger (Argentan, 1881 – Gif-sur-Yvette, 1955), Mechanical Ballet, film, 1924. (film still) 55. Nicolas de Larmessin (Paris, 1632 – Paris, 1694), Habit de Boisselier, etching and engraving, 1695. 56. Tony Cragg (Liverpool, 1949), Axehead, wood, metal, plastic, 1092x3931x4902 mm, 1982. 82 KATALIN KÁLDI

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, Verson, London and New York, 1996. Beke, László, Ismétlődés és ismétlés a művészetben (Repetition and Iteration in Art) = Beke, Művészet/ elmélet. Tanulmányok 1970–1991, Budapest, Balassi, 1994 (BAE-Tartóshullám). Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction = Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 217−252. Böhringer, Hannes, Gondolatok az ornamentikáról (Thoughts on Ornamentations) = Kísérletek és tévelygések (Experiments and Wanderings), ford. J. A. Tillmann, Budapest, Balassi, 1995 (BAE Tartóshullám). Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, ford. Paul Patton, London, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. Eco, Umberto, The Infinity of Lists, trans. Alastair McEwen, Rozzoli, New York, 2009. Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, The MIT Press, 1996. Erdély, Miklós, Ismétléselméleti tézisek (Repetition Theory Theses) = Erdély, Művészeti írások. Válogatott művészeti tanulmányok I, Budapest, Képzőművészeti, 1991. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Concerning Empty and Ful-Filled Time = Martin Heidegger: In Europe and America, ed. Ballard E.G., Scott C.E. Springer, Dordrecht, 1973, 77−89. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, The Relevance of the Beautiful = Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1986. THE NUMEROUS AND THE INNUMEROUS 83

Gombrich, Ernst, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, Oxford, Phaidon, 1979. Hoptman, Laura, Tatehata, Akira, Kultermann, Udo, Yayoi Kusama, London, Phaidon, 2000. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul GUYER et al. CUP, Cambridge, 1999. Kramer, Mario, Paare / Couples, Frankfurt am Main, Museum für Moderne Kunst, 2001. Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye, Repetition = Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, Princeton University Press, 1983. Morley, Simon (ed.), The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art, London, Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press, 2010. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Le regard de portrait, Francois Martin, Paris, Galilee, 2000. Pelevin, Viktor, Számok (Numbers), trans. Bratka László, Budapest, Európa, 2007. Plato, Parmenides, trans. Albert Keith WHITAKER, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1996. Polcz, Alaine, A rend és a rendetlenség jelensége az emberi cselekvésben (The Phenomenon of Order and Disorder in Human Activity), Budapest, Kozmosz Könyvek, 1987. Virilio, Paul, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Phil Beitchman, MIT Press, 1991. Virilio, Paul, Art as Far the Eye Can See, Oxford, New York, Berg, 2007.

Katalin Káldi

HEAT

Kisterem, Budapest January 17, 2018 – February 16, 2018. 86 KATALIN KÁLDI

The Gun and Machine Factory Incorporation (FÉG) was founded February 24, 1891. In many Hungarian kitchens we can still see the type of wall heater known as Calor II, one of their most popular products. The meaning of calor in Latin is “heat”. Originally, I planned to use calor as the title of this group of objects. (I gave up the idea because the word is not so well known, and sounds too similar to the word “color”.)

1. Katalin Káldi, Heat, 2018, Kisterem, exhibition view. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

Rubor means “red” in Latin. Between 2013 and 2015 I almost exclusively painted red pictures. The reason for this was that I had a large stock of unopened red paint, and when I looked at the boxes, I realized that the most obvious use for them was to create “active” paintings. The model-like paintings, recording single constellations, had to be replaced by images depicting “oncoming” motion. HEAT 87

The names of colors came about in languages in a determinable order; the order in which the first three color names appeared was the same: first black and white, and then red; variations appeared later on. We recognize red as the color we respond to most intensely. After a while, another active color appeared, namely yellow. Contemplating on the pigments covering the canvases of these years, I thought it was about time I listed and named them. What is on these pictures? Paint. What kind of paint? These kinds of paint. I think of these paintings, titled Color Study, as a kind of encyclopedia, as they show the pigments from previous years radiating from one single point, listing them ever more intensely, ever more rapidly.

2. Katalin Káldi, One, 2016. Photo by Miklós Sulyok 88 KATALIN KÁLDI

3. Katalin Káldi, Turbulences, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

4. Katalin Káldi, Color Study, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok HEAT 89

5. Katalin Káldi, Point II, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

In each of the works the elements converge on a single point, regardless of whether these basic elements areobjective depictions of spatial forms (a plummet, a cylinder, the infinite number of edges on a cone) or geometrical shapes (triangles) with arbitrary colors. This is the single point that everything heads towards. What is one is absolute, and everything is directed towards it. Direction is truly essential in these works. The vector is a quantity that has magnitude and also direction. The novelty of these images stems from the fact that they do not depict “being”, nor particular constellations or relationships; they just progress, and this progress is manifest. 90 KATALIN KÁLDI

6. Katalin Káldi, Great Turbulence, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

7. Katalin Káldi, Four Turbulences, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok HEAT 91

8. Katalin Káldi, Heat, 2018. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

The meaning of rotor is “turning”, and in the language of mechanics it refers to the part of rotating electronic equipment that generates voltage. These paintings, which evoke this type of movement, I called “turbulences”. The art of Fernand Léger was called “tubism”, with a touch of irony, due to the plasticity of the cylindrical shapes he loved. His film from 1924,Mechanical Ballet, is a rich storehouse of the innumerous and of metallic shine. I therefore regard it with affection. The metallic shine and dazzle of star destroyers gleam through here and there, as though from an early work of science fiction. The cylinders visible in the paintings titled Velocity of Bodies I-III proceed with the same slowness (or fastness) as the spaceships or missiles in Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. 92 KATALIN KÁLDI

9. Katalin Káldi, Velocity of Bodies I, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

10. Katalin Káldi, Velocity of Bodies II, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok HEAT 93

11. Katalin Káldi, Heat, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

12. Katalin Káldi, Effectivity, 2016. Photo by Miklós Sulyok 94 KATALIN KÁLDI

I would like to touch upon the innumerous that has always been present in my work. The first plaster cast seen here is a rectangle divided into four parts by its diagonals and fitted into the size of a painting. Here too, it is the center that is interesting, the One, so much so that it was important for me to make sure that this point stood away from the plane of the wall, a few centimeters or so, advancing forwards and gaining a body, a plaster body. This was followed by a few other plaster casts, recognizing that any number of edges may converge towards a single point, three, four, or even five. The triangular plaster form resembles a tetrahedron viewed frontally. The tetrahedron is the first of the five regular Platonic solids – Plato matched it with the element of fire, and here we arrive immediately at “heat”. The pentagonal plaster object was intentionally placed beside the painting of a cone, and through their juxtaposition, they clearly show that the only thing that matters is their center; this is their common denominator. In military strategic games, such as chess, advancing and changing place constitute the structural force, the certitude. This certitude is manifest in my latest works.

Katalin Káldi HEAT 95

13. Katalin Káldi, Heat, 2018, Kisterem, exhibition view. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

14. Katalin Káldi, Pentagon, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok 96 KATALIN KÁLDI

15. Katalin Káldi, Cone, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

16. Katalin Káldi, Heat, 2018, Kisterem, installation view. Photo by Miklós Sulyok HEAT 97

LIST OF IMAGES

1. Katalin Káldi, Heat, 2018, Kisterem, exhibition view. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 2. Katalin Káldi, One, oil on canvas, 40×50 cm, 2016. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 3. Katalin Káldi, Turbulences, oil on canvas, 65×65 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 4. Katalin Káldi, Color Study, oil on canvas, 30×50 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 5. Katalin Káldi, Point II, oil on canvas, 60×120 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 6. Katalin Káldi, Great Turbulence, oil on canvas, 65×65 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 7. Katalin Káldi, Four Turbulences, oil on canvas, 30×50 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 8. Katalin Káldi, Heat, 2018, Kisterem, exhibition view. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 9. Katalin Káldi, Velocity of Bodies I, oil on canvas, 80×80 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 10. Katalin Káldi, Velocity of Bodies II, oil on canvas, 80×80 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 11. Katalin Káldi, Heat, plaster, 48×56.5 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 12. Katalin Káldi, Effectivity, oil on canvas, 60×120 cm, 2016. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 13. Katalin Káldi, Heat, 2018, Kisterem, exhibition view. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 14. Katalin Káldi, Pentagon, plaster, 48×48 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 15. Katalin Káldi, Cone, oil on canvas, 60×120 cm, 2017. Photo by Miklós Sulyok. 98 KATALIN KÁLDI

16. Katalin Káldi, Heat, 2018, Kisterem, installation view. Photo by Miklós Sulyok.

Art as research

Publisher The Hungarian University of Fine Arts (1062 Budapest, Andrássy út 69–71.), Balatonfüred Városért Közalapítvány (8230 Balatonfüred, Szent István tér 1.)

Managing Publishers Eszter Radák, Judit Molnár

Series Editor Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák, Balázs Kicsiny

Editor Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák

Design Imre Lepsényi

Manuscript preparation and text management Patrícia Kármen Burza (Seleris Project Bt.)

Translator Gabriella Ágnes Nagy

Lector Steve Kane, Christalena Hughmanick

Pre-press Krisztián Tóbiás (Seleris Project Bt.)

Printing EPC Press, Budapest

ISBN 978-963-9990-80-7

© HUNGART 2020 © Hungarian University of Fine Arts © Káldi Katalin H U N G A R I A N U N I V E R S I T Y O F F I N E A R T S D O C T O R A L S C H O O L A H R C T R

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BORITO_hu.indd 1 2020. 02. 18. 7:46