Muntadas, Antoni: Media Scenes / Media Monuments Budapest (1998)

The works of the Catalan-born, New York-based artist are complex, multi-media installations that focus on the social dimension and communication forms of representation. Muntadas explores these issues mainly through an analysis of the conflicting relationship between public and private space. The relationship between public space and private space in today’s Western-style democracy is not only defined by consensus, conflict, opposition or context, but from time to time a “media event” may also lead society (or a group of it) to redefine these categories for itself and to draw the boundaries between the two types of space. Media Scenes – Media Monuments examines sites in Budapest that have become renowned through their inclusion in the press. The documentary photo of the media event (selected from the MTI archive) is accompanied by a photo of the site in the state in which it can be seen every day without the event. The question, however, is whether it is even possible to see these places without the context of the particular historically significant event (the Revolution of 1956, the taxi strike, the Pope’s Budapest mass or the visit of Gábor Zsazsa, etc.). In the case of Muntadas’s work, the media site is never seen in itself, but always through the veil of representation that is associated with it. And this veil is never transparent, it is always only translucent, that is, it is the existing discourse about the thing that always creates the image of the thing that we, the viewers, see.

Katalin Timár