2020. február 22., szombat

BREXIT - REMAKE


Prod. Co.: EU and USA. But why USA?

Remember Trump's three years old declaration he'll be 'Mr. Brexit'

Donald Trump has sent many questionable tweets in the past, but none have been so mind-boggling as this one: 'They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!'

2020. február 21., péntek

PLANK SCULPTURES...

Plank sculptures are being prepared for the exhibition in Ankara. Openining on 29 of February.








2020. február 8., szombat

ONE WEEK REMAINED...

Only one week remained until the closing of the István Orosz Exhibition in Moscow at the Russian State Library – alias Lenin Library. The exhibition take place in the legendary Third Reading Room (entrance #1) and also in the Blue Hall and the Marble Staircase of the main building (entrance #3). Free admission! In the last two years the exhibition were in Saint Petersburg, in Yekaterinburg, in Nizhny Novgorod, in Kazan, in Ulyanovsk and in Tyumen so the Russian State Library is the seventh stop of the travel. The next stop will be in Chelyabinsk. Please come back to the Utisz Blog for more details.  











2020. február 1., szombat

"CHESS ON THE ISLAND" IN THE PIATIGORSKY-LIST

My novel "Chess on the Island" was listed for the Alexander Piatigorsky Prize in Russia. There are 31 books on a longlist, including two Hungarian books, the other one is László Krasznahorkai's Satan Tango. Both were translated to Russian by Vyacheslav Sereda. For the full list - and a detailed description of the 31 books - click here. I copy the review by Ilona Kiss in English.
The book of Istvan Orosz “Chess on the Island” at first glance has a very simple plot. This is an attempt to reconstruct the legendary chess game between Lenin and Bogdanov, which took place on April 10, 1908 on the island of Capri, on the terrace of the villa of M. Gorky, in the presence of guest observers. Between the moves of the pieces, the storyteller (“either as an impetuous novelist, or as a bookworm digging in sources”) pauses time, as if on a chess game clock, and collects, parses, retells a huge number of stories, gossip , legends and tricks of the two main players and surrounding people who are so self-confident intend to "direct the course of history." The narrator also intends to “direct the course of history” in his semi-fictitious narration, only in the reverse order. He is interested not in what is visible on photo and text documents, but what is clearly missing. To do this, he resorts to his favorite trick: anamorphosis and other visual tricks to create illusions developed in the course of art history. Istvan Orosz is familiar with them firsthand: he is the famous Hungarian graphic artist, poster and book designer, theater artist, and last but not least, the author of many anamorphosis objects. He was engaged in fiction only at the age of 55, “Chess on the Island” is already his 9th book. More precisely, an object book, an anamorphosis book. The text in this "indefinite genre" of the work turns into different types of images, and the pictures fall into text-shaped figures. The “spread”, as the smallest visual unit of the book, is composed of text-shaped figures and verbal “drawings” (photographs, maps, illustrations in combination with inscriptions, page footnotes with color additions, etc.). The chronology is not respected in restoring the biographies of the players and the series of events around them (the narration itself ends at the time of Bogdanov’s death), but rather is determined by visual twists. In this constant movement in time, continuously changing space and turning back and forth between texts and images, the reader-spectator himself must find a suitable point of view for himself in order to see at least some whole picture. A certain imaginary object is wedged into the picture (or into the text turned into a visual object), creating the illusion that with it we will see something definite. In fact, this is just something desired, and it does not lend itself to verbal expression. We enjoy a lot of juicy and terrible details (as in a voluminous mirror labyrinth) - in the illusion that we come closer to the essence of "history". And only at the end we begin to suspect that we are under the effect of the so-called "Significant absence." From the proposed “visual narration” there is no structural center in relation to which we could realize the figurative text that was given to us precisely as “history”. We ourselves must find our own criteria, our points of view for orientation. By the way, the storyteller himself shares the same fate: he has no more chance of seeing integrity than the “observers”. This is the "philosophical" of this work. In the fact that in the book there is no ready-made philosophy for understanding history, only a visual-verbal space for reflection is given. The reader / viewer himself must find his suitable position here, so that a series of strange images develop from this point of view into an integral course of history, at least an integral reading of history. - The anamorphosis book of Istvan Orosz in an excellent translation by Vyacheslav Sereda is therefore worthy of attention also by the jury members of the Piatigorsky Prize.