pavilion-PAVILION 2009

pavilion-PAVILION 2014

The title of pavilion-PAVILION is to indicate the basic concept of the work, the exploration of the sound of the two, differently sized rooms. The installation, which thematizes feedback, uses four tape recorders in two rooms. One in each room is connected with another in the other room, by means of a looped recording tape that runs through holes in the wall that separates the two rooms that are otherwise isolated from each other. The first machine of each connected pair records the sound of the hall on the tape, which is played back by the other device in the other room a few seconds later. The reverberation of the room is added to the recorded material, resulting in an endless cycle of sound interferences (feedback).

In his I am Sitting in the Room, first recorded in 1969, Alvin Lucier reads out a text, then plays back the recording while recording it, and repeats the process until the words become unintelligible. The recording changes in accordance with the acoustic qualities of the room. The piece, claims its description, was not simply to demonstrate a sound fabric emerging from feedback, but to change the fabric of the artists speech. Like Luciers work, the pavilion-PAVILION installation both seeks to present the phenomenon of feedback, and to represent it as a means of rearranging impressions of space.

pavilion-PAVILION occuped a hall and a corridor of Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle Budapest) durung the exhibition On the edge of perceptibility - Sound Art in 2014.

The first version of pavilion-PAVILION was originally presented in 2009 in two of those Epreskert studios of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts which were once used by sculptor Alajos Stróbl. The two, formerly communicating rooms gave home to plaster copies of antique statues, including that of the Parthenon frieze, which is still there. Stróbl kept changing the relative positions of the copies so as to allow the works in the making to enter into new constellations of forms. The old school, which spoke a rigid idiom, took a new turn, with the ideal of instantaneous motion pitched against the formal order of classicism, which sought stasis. Since everything was a copy – often the copy of a copy –, the statues were repeatedly transformed, creating a different overall view in every new constellation. These groupings are conspicuous parts of the photographs made of the studio. Stróbl himself must have come to appreciate their importance, and made them part of his subsequent artistic practice.

A contemporary newspaper article provides a list of the statues then visible in the two studios: In the hall right of the antechamber stands a figure from the Arany monument for Nagykőrös, the Old Sheppard, newly finished by the master, along with a bust of Count Gyula Széchenyi.Here is Gusztáv Keletis funerary monument, still in the making, Miklós Izsós bust, and a bear struggling with a mouflon—a faithful likeness of the bear killed by Prince Henry of Prussia this winter at the Betlér hunt.There is also a boars head; the latter two statues will be items of interest at the coming international hunting exposition of Vienna.
Another hall holds Justitias seated statue in multicolour marble; this is for an exhibition in Rome.A host of further sculptures, large and small, remind one of the significant sculptural history of Mr Strobl, as well a the bright prospects of his future.Working alongside him are his students, László Vaszary, Lajos Rápolli, and Károly Székely, busy with new works of art.(Szobrászműterem a Budapesti mesteriskolában. Huszadik Század, March 1910.)