Csákány, István: Erecting (2008)

István Csákány found himself in the role of “worker” several times both during his years attending art school and afterwards. In order to make a living, he did manual labor at construction sites and renovations. This proved useful later, because knowing hands-on techniques was integral to creating some of his later work (e.g. oversized installation pieces), but it also proved meaningful in the sense that the experience gave him a sort of theoretical foundation to think about the current state of the working class and the worker, and to reflect on monuments erected in the past to commemorate the worker and their reading in a contemporary context. Csákány erected a public sculpture titled Monument to a Monument in 2008 in Žilina, Slovakia. The “base” of the statue is a gigantic, out-of-service lamp post that had been originally installed in the 1980s to illuminate an oversized intersection. The artist modeled the statue after himself, and commissioned a crane to hoist his slightly larger-than-life-sized likeness made of colored synthetic resin to the top of the lamp post. Dressed in workwear and wearing utility gloves, the figure holds a functioning solar panel above his head, and the renewable energy collected during the day is then used to illuminate the statue situated 20 meters above ground during dark hours. The woodcut was created based on a photograph documenting the installation process, and it captures the moment when the “real” workers grab the statue to make it stand on its feet. The background is a typical panorama of the outskirts of a Eastern European city: apartment blocks, overpasses, traffic signs – symbols of modernization and urbanization that have by now lost their sheen, which are themselves in some way monuments to the past regime. K.Sz.