About "Extreme Sports" serial:
As a subtitle to "Extreme Sports” I visualise: "Streeet
Culture from Heroes Square to the Skate Board Mecca”. It was in
the subway at Budapest's Jászai Mari Square that I first encountered
the small community of break-dancers. Soon, however, I also discovered
BMX bikers in Heroes Square, and the skateboard rink built on
top of the Western Shopping Center, not to mention the Skate Board
Mecca located on the Buda side of the Danube River across from
the Palatinus baths on Margaret Island. Not only have skate boarders,
now pursuing what is regarded as a classical sport, found their
ideal arena here, but so have online roller skaters and bikers.
One could feel that invisible threads connected these young people
to each other and (as an artistic background) to rap, as well
as to cultivators of break-dance, not to mention the colorful
world of graffiti sprayed on walls and carriages. So I was not
even surprised when I stumbled into a colorful magazine called
"Offline – Extreme Sports”, a publication embracing ever
more popular forms of urban culture, at Hungarian newspaper stands.
In the old days we used to brand these kinds of things as subculture.
At a time, however, when the superiority of overstressed and overinstitutionalized
"high brow culture” has come into serious doubt, it would
be more appropriate to regard it as a highly vibrant and sincere
segment of mass culture. A product out of which emanates a kind
of truth and beauty always inherent in youth's puzzling games
and passionate preoccupations. If we followed them into the labyrinth
they have created for themselves out of wild colors, raw bundles
of light and neck-breaking jumps, then we will suddenly find ourselves
at the wellspring of century-old.avant-garde: a mix of acrobatics,
dance and light-hearted clowning long negated and haughtily forgotten
by antiquated late-avant-garde, or a postmodernism fossilized
into intellectual snobbery. If, of course, an Oldie like me succumbs
to this enticing intensity, then he will, one way or another,
nonetheless reveal that he of a different generation, drawing,
as he does, on different idioms of language and forms of expression
in his repertoire. For instance, my graffiti are the seals I have
brought with me from my Mail Art period, and, actually, instead
of the spray can, I prefer to use my brush and pallette. The series
"Cut" is related to these paintings, but I wanted to
stress out the movement and intensity by means of sharp collage
technics.
