Beyond Borders (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1991)

BEYOND BORDERS II. 0 THE MIDDLE of the 1980s demarcates the end of an era in video art in Hungary. This is an unusual boundary that merits detailed study. It can actually be specified precisely and attached to a particular year: it is marked unmistakably by Gábor Body’s tragic death in 1985. Of course, a host of other factors support the thesis that the preceding decade can be considered a prehistoric or a heroic age. Gábor Body is an outstanding figure in Hungarian art and in creative, innovative cinematographic thought. He was the first person in Hungary to work with video in an artistic context, in the early 1970s. He was abroad when he produced Infermental, the world’s first experimental video magazine, and as a professor at the Berlin Col­lege for Film and Video (dbf) he became the pre-eminent figure in European video­making. His fate, and the efforts he expended in the country of his birth, attest to the poisoned field that was Hungarian cultural policy-the only possible soil Hungarian media art could take root in, and a soil that has hardly changed in the intervening time, even if an overgrowth now lends it a semblance of life. Prior to 1983-85-, for example, video recorders were difficult to come by in Hun­gary, let alone studio facilities for editing and postproduction work. The first semi­­professional equipment became available around this time, and was used through the second half of the 1980s; the dissemination of amateur technology was an even later development. The television medium has proved as hostile and unapproachable as it has in most parts of the world, and that situation has eased somewhat only in the past few years. The first attempts to establish training in video technique in Hungary were made in the second half of the 1980s. Before that date, no student body existed, and only some alternative film clubs at schools other than arts institutions experi­mented with such work. Clearly, there were few choices for Hungarian artists who wanted to work with electronic images: they could either go abroad or expend a dis­proportionate amount of energy in the process, only to achieve what were frequently poor technical results. As a consequence, several important Hungarian video artists are working abroad even today. The pivotal workshop of this transitional era was the Béla Balázs Studio, as it had been so often during the past thirty years. It managed to operate without censorship and was open to alternative viewpoints and to related branches of art. The majority of Hungarian experimental videotapes were produced there, and it was from here that the video magazine Black Box emerged to play an influential role in political change and its documentation. A specific hallmark of this period is that the wide­spread perception of video as an artistic option coincided with the almost explosive breakthrough in computer applications in art, after earlier sporadic attempts. It is a

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