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, Galilée, 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.