Dezső Szabó: Phenomenon

With Phenomenon, Dezső Szabó presents a set of works from a career of almost two decades of staged photography that form a distinct subdivision in his oeuvre.

Among other things, the artistic concept is centred around the visual representation of phenomena observed in nature. What we see clearly alludes to images familiar from different media, television shows and popular science magazines, as well as the imagery of scientific photography, while ironizing them all and questioning the truth of their presentation and content. This, in turn, enables the viewer to adopt a critical position towards the sight.

When we look at a photograph, we concentrate, as a rule, on its content, trying to identify and understand it by drawing on our available knowledge and experiences. We disregard the fact that the photograph itself is a phenomenon that makes it possible—albeit in a specific way—to experience things. The photo literally mediates their view, while revealing nothing of the specifics of their mode of being. In the context of the exhibition, the main question then is what you really are directing your attention at: the information (the spectacle of the phenomenon) that the photograph communicates, or the photograph as a mode of communication and a creative tool that allows the artist both to focus on the image as a philosophical problem and to reveal the creative process behind the image as a phenomenon.

In the context of the exhibition, the groups of works enter into a distinctive dialogue with each other, while the visitor is simultaneously exposed to illusion and the laying bare of the process of creation. The title, Phenomenon, is a guideline in this situation, and can serve as a starting point for the interpretation. The Greek original (phainomenon) referred to that which appears to the senses, a thing that can be perceived or observed. The question that philosophers, who had been interested in the problem since the beginnings, sought to answer concerned the relationship between that which exists in reality and that part of it that appears as a phenomenon and becomes perceptible to man. The phenomenon exists only in the sensory experience and is without any theoretical constructs. It is not identical with the object it points to, because it is only an appearance of the latter that can be perceived by the senses. A phenomenon is therefore immune to all doubt, unlike the object that is mediated by the sensory experiences. For cognizing man, only the phenomenon is given, which is not identical with the thing to be explained, nor is it the explanation. Under everyday circumstances, one’s natural disposition is not to examine the being or non-being of a thing, its quality, and one concentrates instead on the way it becomes manifest. However, the perceptions in which things appear are always mediated, while it is not known how the notions that are thus generated represent the things.

This was why natural scientists took an interest in phenomena observed in nature, and they studied the laws the stand behind them and could explain them. They wanted to find out what lies behind them and how.

Several of the works on view have never been exhibited before, while others were made or finished for this show. High Voltage, St Elmo’s Fire and Eruption are large-scale works that are based on photographs of natural phenomena induced or modelled in the studio. They are accompanied by Process, Making-of, Studio, Eruption—Inverted, Eruption—Infrared, Eruption—Trompe-l’œil, and a video, Electric Field. In its own way, each of the series and the video has a ‘behind-the-scenes’ character, referring to the process wherein it was created. As a consequence, the works examine not only the often eye-catching visual world of scientific photography, but the means and methods as well of painting and ‘photography as a medium,’ together with the creative strategies that go hand in hand with them.

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Text: Gábor Pfisztner