1981, ink on paper, 77 \u00d7 57 cm<\/p>
\u201cFor G\u00e9za Ottlik\u2019s seventieth birthday, from the tenth of December Esterh\u00e1zy\u2019s Ottlik rewriting is the best-known work of Hungarian literary retelling and can be interpreted as a tribute to the author. It is both a tribute to Ottlik and a tribute to the author\u2019s masterpiece, which frames the events of the mid-twentieth century and depicts a cross-section of the (de)formations of human behaviour. The protagonists pass from their parents\u2019 home to the college, from civilian life to the military, from childhood to the adult world, from immunity to vulnerability, to the unimaginable world into which they are forced to cross, and this (border) crossing makes them different.<\/p> Another important assertion of the novel is the impossibility of authentic access to the past, the diversity of the memory of the stories recalled by one of the protagonists, G\u00e1bor Medve, on the basis of his diary, the mnemotechnical operations of selection and correction, which manifest themselves in the difficulty and polyphony of the narrative.<\/p> Esterh\u00e1zy condensed G\u00e9za Ottlik\u2019s novel School at the Frontier into a single image. He created a surface that at first glance might seem to promise legibility and comprehension\u2014the text of the book, every single letter (it contains 717,440 letters, with spaces), can be found on the surface\u2014but its superimposition in approximately 47 layers makes it ineffective. Esterh\u00e1zy\u2019s performative gesture, through the process of passing from the medium of writing to the medium of the image, appropriates the text, resolving the conflicts of the reconstitutive code-switching in the impossibility of narration, presenting an imposing gestural image.<\/p> As an art form, re-enactment is a kind of (re)interpretive manifestation that never creates a true repetition: Esterh\u00e1zy does rewrite, even manually rewrite, each line of the novel, but he does so in superimposing layers, eliminating any legibility of the writing, creating a gap. The textual illegibility creates the visual legibility, which means that we begin to contemplate this work in its sensual materiality, as an image, precisely because we are deprived of the possibility of interpretation through reading. Thus the image remains transitory or immaterial, which on the one hand leaves room for freer translation\/interpretation, and on the other hand leaves something forever unexplored in this incomplete or incompletable object, always challenging the acquisition of meaning.<\/p> With his poetic and heroic action, Esterh\u00e1zy attempted not only to read the novel, the story of the characters, the history it describes, to recall it, but also to bring it to life again, that is, to drag it into the present, thus extending its claims to the present day.<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-27663","blogposts","type-blogposts","status-publish","hentry","col-md-4 col-sm-6"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
nineteen eighty-one to the fifteenth of March eighty-two, in about
250 hours, I copied School at the Frontier on a 57 \u00d7 77 piece of
drawing paper. That\u2019s how this picture was made.\u201d PE<\/u><\/strong><\/p>