catalog ataşat în format pdf - Muzeul de Arta Cluj-Napoca

Zoltán Sebôk
Television as Medium
Objects by Ernô C. Bartha
The artist Ernô C. Bartha, born in Cluj, lives in the vicinity
of his native town, in the village Vlaha. I paid him a
visit a few years ago. I remember us sitting in a place
called The Rose Garden, having a few drinks, eating
freshwater trout while birds in splendid attires kept quiet
above us, kittens played in the dust and I was thinking
“this must be Paradise”. I rarely think like this and even
more rarely utter such words, nevertheless that place
somehow tricked them out of me. It did so because
The Rose Garden sat in such quiet peacefulness of which
us, urban citizens of the world (born in villages, of course)
can lately gain information only based on certain cheap
and supposedly kitschy flea-market paintings.
Consequently Ernô C. Bartha lives in the middle of such
an idealistic painting, and instead of going hunting, fishing,
picking flowers or taking the dog out, he spends his
time re-designing old television sets. He does not meddle
with them in order to mend them – he approaches them
from the position of the artist, the sculptor, more precisely.
Because, in terms of a profession, Ernô C. Bartha
is a sculptor, as anybody can quickly figure it out, and not
just any sculptor. His main domains are those of organic,
archaic bronze statuettes and similarly fashioned huge
statues, made of hay. I must add that despite the almost
similar set of forms and motives employed in the two
fields, we still have to speak of two different paths and
two different attitudes. Whereas the small bronze statuettes
only reach their effect in closed and possibly neutral
spaces, while their looker-on would do best to use
the magnifying glass, the hay statues tower high over the
viewer, inviting us to pass beneath them while they
engage in a dialogue not only with us, tiny people, but
with the hills and peaks close to Paradise, with the trees
and bushes around it, with the clouds above. They only
argue when they are placed in urban surroundings:
I remember them being exhibited in the Budapest
Millenáris Park in 2008 – they simply poked fun at the
matchbox-houses in their vicinity.
I saw works of this type in Vlaha, in miniature size and
made of antiquated bronze, in a surroundings that
resembled a blacksmith’s workshop or a shop at the fleamarket.
This is already the studio of Ernô C. Bartha,
where besides these small statuettes of a dry humor I
spotted some strange objects that looked as if they had
tried to become television sets and changed their mind
at some point in time to become something else – something
different each time: a bird’s cage, a stool, a stand
for flowers or even a bookshelf. These were works of art
as well, as I had found out, things of unexpected function,
statues, or simply objects, if you will. They were
urban objects, too urban in a space torn out of the
Garden of Eden. Awesome, I thought, and I encouraged
Ernô C. Bartha to try further variations of the theme and
to create television objects for an entire exhibition. I was
curious what might the television become in such a place,
in the very middle of Paradise.
We might go back to the fact that the television is a medium,
an aggressive and omnipresent one, a medium trying
to capture the attention of the whole world. Where
the television is turned on, life comes at a still, people
stop speaking and start watching, no matter what is on.
They say us, Hungarians are especially so, as according to
statistics we are top of the list when it comes to the time
spent watching TV. We are world champions it seems,