Kitti Gosztola

RUMINATIO (2018)

 

Oh, the Humanity! - the reporter cried, witnessing the burning Hindenburg, only for the phrase to become a caption of ironic memes, reminding us: time trumps all catastrophes and sympathy. Conversely, however, what once seemed the mastery of the elements, the transfiguration of nature into environment, now appears a series of catastrophes as we are looking back from our perpetually expected apocalypse. But this exhibition is neither eco-escatology, nor pulling the hand of the Doomsday Clock striking midnight, but rumination. Contemplation, speculation about recurring patterns in the relationship of mankind and nature. The evocation of the conditio humana, of the subterranean rivers and twin shafts between culture and catastrophe from Delphi to Dante, from Hellas to Latin America, from the depths of the Earth to the stomach of ruminants. For the history of culture and science is also the history of the exploitation of resources, just as the history of airships burning on hydrogen is also the history of the monopoly over safe helium. "Why all this rubbish? So, like sheep on grass / we may graze on it?", the Romantic poet, Vörösmarty, asked thinking about the full circle of recycling lowlife's rags into paper of books for a humanity that ridicules science and art printed on it. And while we graze on and digest books "Sated with fodder / and idle hours synthesized by science amoral", the ruminants let the grass back in the atmosphere transformed into methane, boiling our planet. So the scientist, instead of letting the methane into the intestines - from which once the gas bags of airships were made - cannulates the cow's stomach and drives precious methane into a balloon floating on its back. But art is not science, neither is it annunciation. It is the rumination of the spheres into artworks. With the clarity of an ozone hole or the obscurity of an oracle on a teleprompter.

 

(Olivér Horváth)