Category: ARTMargins Online: Articles

The objective of this essay is to introduce the leading Hungarian media artist, Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák, through his latest two web projects dealing with cryptography (Cryptogram) and virtual reality (Demedusator). Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák is an associate professor at the Intermedia Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest where he teaches interactive computer art. He is also a researcher for the Center for Culture and Communication.

In Hungary, there are more and more visual artists dealing with the new media, even though there are not many institutions where they could either educate themselves or present their media … Read more

Jacques Lacan defines art itself with regard to the Thing: in his Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, he claims that art as such is always organized around the central Void of the impossible-real Thing – a statement which, perhaps, should be read as a variation on Rilke’s old thesis that “Beauty is the last veil that covers the Horrible”. (See Chapter XVIII of Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992.) Lacan gives some hints about how this surrounding of the Void functions in the visual arts and in architecture; what we shall do … Read more

ODE ON THE ECONOMIC CATACLYSM (RUSSIA 1998)
(Vladimir Yaremenko-Tolstoy)

The economic cataclysm swallowed Andrey Borisovich Gubin in Moscow,
The economic cataclysm swallowed Semyon Antonovich Paramonov in Kursk,
The economic cataclysm swallowed Nikolay Petrovich Aleksandrov in Vladivostoc,
The economic cataclysm swallowed Yuriy Grigoyevich Gavryushin in NizhyNovgorod,
The economic cataclysm swallowed Pavel Vladimirovich Sorokin in Petrosavodsk,
The economic cataclysm swallowed Alexey Ivanovich Kirogasov in Krasnoyarsk,
The economic cataclysm swallowed Sergey Sergeevich Borodulin in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk,
The economic cataclysm swallowed Oleg Arkadyevich Chvostopadov in Novosibirsk,
The economic cataclysm swallowed Michail Michaylovich Savushkin in Krasnodar,
The economic cataclysm swallowed Mark Leonidovich Zakharov in Irkutsk,
The … Read more

No matter how much it wanted to escape into the sanctuary of beauty, art had to serve in the war between communism and capitalism. Both in the former Soviet Union and in the West, the rhetoric of art criticism was laced with ideological animosity.

Soviet art criticism formulated the conflict in terms of the difference between life and death, no more and no less. Since the early 1930s, these tropes were used to defend the virtues of realism against the threat of modernism and abstraction: if “their” art was about expression, individualism, and therefore morbid and decaying, “our” art would … Read more

Should we be surprised that as the new computer-based media expand throughout the world, intellectual horizons and aesthetic possibilities seem to be narrowing? If one scans Internet-based discussion groups and journals from London to Budapest, New York to Berlin, and Los Angeles to Tokyo, certain themes are obsessively intoned, like mantras: copyright; on-line identity; cyborgs; interactivity; the future of the Internet. This follows from the Microsofting of the planet, which has cast a uniform digital aesthetics over national visual cultures, accelerating the globalization already begun by Hollywood, MTV, and consumer packaging: hyperlinks and cute icons, animated fly-throughs, rainbow color palettes, … Read more