The Spirit of Montage: The "Surrealist" Mineshafts of Hungarian Visual Arts (original) (raw)

The history of art, to be more precise, the modern history of art or the history of modern art, is a history of definitions and distinctions, or put simply: the intellectual history of isms. The distinctions are often of a conceptual or textual nature, however, and not a visual one. In consequence, through visual interactions, mental associations and the crossing of borders, it is possible to construct the quasi-uniform visual culture of avant-garde art, which on the one hand sought the new, and on the other hand investigated alloys and means of hybridization, from cutting up newspapers and making montages, through learning photography and film, all the way to multimedia installations, which were as much a part of Dadaism and Surrealism as they were of the Neo-Avant-garde and Postmodernism. Moreover, the background, the raw materials, as well as the stages and audiences, were always provided by the "realist" mass culture and the capitalist and communist spectacle. Critically-minded art permeated capitalist and socialist mass culture in much the same way as trails of volcanic mineral ores create networks across layers of rock.