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2010.07.27 Csiki Csaba - wunschtraum

“Always Coca Cola”

It is the journey and not the arrival that is the essence, they say. The inconveniences during the journey – the unbearable heat, the traffic jams, or the monotonous, nerve-racking noise of the cicada choir – are all part of your journey. Just like when you become one with the spectacle, or you meet friendly foreigners, and this makes you happy. The essence is in fact: your essence. The way you endure your own journey, they way you experience the encounters – it depends on the web of your personality and your experiences. The space and time, in which you travel, is the time and space which become personified through you and together with you.

As I suspect, Csaba Csiki’s works function in the same way as an encounter with a foreign space, country or seaside. The participant turns with all his/her knowledge, sensitivity and experience so far towards the works which do not represent or explain, and which do not function according to particular concepts. They rather mobilize – and frame at the same time – the personality that turns towards them, they put into action some latent patterns of interpretation and orientate the attention. The German art historian Oskar Bätschmann properly describes the endeavours of contemporary artists when he defines the concept of “experience formation”. According to him “the essence is the process itself, that is, the (...) series of experiences triggered in the participant.”

The process in this respect is the artistic product itself, whose medium can be the music, the video, the installation, the photo or any other, mostly visual structure. So we had better not speak about closed works of art in the traditional sense of the word, which are based on the receiver, but rather about the invention and exploration of structures, objects and situations which trigger the processes of experience.

It appears from Csaba’s curriculum vitae that he deals with experimental (noise) music, he designs theatrical scenery and for years he has been taking part with various video works and installations in individual and group exhibitions in the country and abroad. In his works one can grasp in a condensed way the atmosphere, the feeling with which he gets into contact with the viewer in the theatre, with the participant in the exhibition space or with the audience during a concert. The videos and installations, even if they there is a text attached to them, do not force towards a possibility of interpretation, they rather urge to free associations. They test the patience along humour and irony, however, in the meantime they call upon a “private journey”. According to Bätschmann it is self-evident that the experience formation described above “implies the difficult process of the public’s becoming an active partner (even if not devoid of problems), and adjusts to the act of participation and involvement through the moments of invitation, enticement, aggression, shock and endangerment.” In this way the works, even if through trials, can become the artistic media of experience formation only together with the viewers.

If we travel to the seaside, we arrive at a new scene, where through memory our experiences so far involuntarily come into action, so we recognize that this is a seaside, still, we behave like explorers, because we would like to find out what is different, what is new in this seaside, how this new encounter can form our experiences.

For example, Csaba’s video entitled Vamos a la playa offers exactly such a journey. On a white background, accompanied by noises, there floats a spot, we may even discover an island in its shape, when suddenly, silently there appears a rocky shore evoking the photos of the Google Earth, the image of an archetypal journey. The series of images that have triggered all kinds of personal associations roughly turns back to the starting image, there appears again the noisy white background with the island figure and overwrites, modifies, wipes out the triggered associations. Its perception may vary from person to person. Of course, it is paradoxical to describe a contemporary video work in such a way, as it is not a verbal work at all. However, the experiment may be adequate, as it illustrates a personal encounter, which manifests itself in one’s own words.

As I experience my own journey, in the same way I have to make an attempt to experience the encounter with Csaba’s works. I have to let them provoke me, calm me, I have to find the personal points of contact. I can only believe him saying “Always Coca Cola” if I let myself be trapped, if I react to the challenge and add myself to it. Even if I do not like the Coke.