Dance of the shoe-trees – 2007

 

The many clean, mature ‘photo-poems’ do not amount to sentimental, poetic lyricism, but are more fine, objective, pared down studies.

Some time ago Aliona Frankl sent me a CD with the material for this book and a list which should have guided me through the pictures, but the computer interfered and played the pictures in a somewhat idiosyncratic order: not according to shops or crafts, but all jumbled up.
At first this bothered me, but then the secret order created by digital logic became the real sequence and pure chance the proper order. In any case – just as one might re-cut a film and lace it up again – relationships were immediately created between the pictures mixed up in this way, associations and tensions arose and the new order caused the various trades and professions to merge with each other, concealing and revealing, reassessing and reinterpreting them.
These excellent, affectionate photographs, in whatever constellation, all say, suggest, communicate the same thing. What that might be, since we are talking about works of art can, at most, only be described in outline. They speak of working people, I say unexpectedly even to myself, and then I stare at this poor phrase, worn to threads, which I have perhaps never written quite like this in my life before. I keep looking at it, turning it over in my mind, but finally do not cross it out. In order for the words to get rid of their creases, they have to be used once in a while, don’t they? The more worn out they are, the more rewarding. And it really is at work that people become people. Always assuming that the work is not drudgery, not done in haste, but is rational human activity. Production, craftsmanship, creation. From this point of view, whether it is a cog-wheel, an eiderdown or a sleeping-doll is neither here nor there.
All the same, as a consequence of the subject, there is a nostalgia, a sadness behind the whole collection, a resigned musing. (When will Adorján Szabó’s ‘ Matching Stripes Fashion Tailor’ shop sign finally be engulfed by waves of Chinese ready to wear?) But despite this, what is much more apparent in these pictures is good humour, a kind of doomed zest for life, a joy in the work process. What makes Aliona Frankl a good artist is that she observes this, leaves it alone, shows the admittedly rather ‘autumnal’ good humour and slightly chilly optimism, suggesting that these things may be past their prime, but they still exist; even if they are crumbling and dilapidated, they are still tangible and possible to photograph. This is not decay or a plunging into ruin – it is just a slow winding down which is not quite the same thing.
I feel in these pictures the delight in trade skills and craftsmanship as rare curiosities, the calm that goes with them, their finiteness; the fact that someone is sitting there in the workshop of their forebears, as if in their own tradition, their own past. Perhaps when this person was a little girl the mirrors, cupboards, the jars of varnish, the glass lampshades shone brighter, but they are still the same ones. This is her life. What is more an entire life, a whole, complete world – let us not refer to making a living or ‘connections’, for this is not about making a living, it is about something else. About the fact that it is as necessary to produce cog-wheels, watches, dolls, shirts, chandeliers, family trees, codices, Jewish layered cakes, enamel pins, eiderdowns, hats, soda water, riding boots and thousands of other things, as it is to sail in a boat.
I can’t decide whether Aliona Frankl photographs objects with people in the foreground or people among their objects, machines and materials. Perhaps it is not a decision that can be made, perhaps this characteristic symbiosis is the point, as the craftsmen merge with their crafts. I look at the watchmaker and think, yes, a watchmaker looks exactly like this and no other way. I look at the hairdresser, the eiderdown maker, the locksmith, the badge maker, the young master of china figurines, namely the porcelain restorer, the lady photographer, indeed they all become one with their craft, with the space where they work.
Basements, arches, tiny shops, then bigger spaces, sheds, well inhabited, new workshops. The smell of materials, oils, paper, iron, the list goes on. Heaps of objects, paraphernalia, that fine, organic disorder without which a workshop is not a workshop. I can even hear the chirruping of the neon lights, whether it is a May evening outside or a late October day of rustling leaves, these workshops are flooded with industrial neon light, in the semi-past, who can say they will not disappear with time, but the lessons they provide without constant repetition or bragging, will stay behind them.
And the machines too will remain, these busy living beings of light industry, clever, logical, human machines. I have no idea what some of them are used for, but they have souls, their eyes sparkle. The intelligent eyes of a Singer sewing machine or a boot-stitching machine stare back at me if I look at them. Perhaps this is how I should have started, by itemising the machines, such as the soda-water machines noisily making their way into Ferenc Town like enormous, otherworldly animals or ‘sodasauruses’ for example
And I have not yet mentioned the beauty of the hand tools, secret kinds of wooden handled things, similar to dumpling cutters, hanging on hooks on the wall, old iron tools, old handles; perhaps even their owners no longer know what some of them are used for. Among them a little crucifix, as if it were a tool itself, carrying on the anthropomorphic process for something which is already deeply, human, deep down to the palm of its hands.
I look at the photographs cut out of a newspapers on the wall of the hairdressers, so many ‘Virgin Mary’ perms, I stare at the disintegrating shop sign of the cog-wheel maker or at the doll maker as she starts to resemble the dolls, assuming their smiles and the expressions on their faces. I particularly like the world’s end, surreal locksmith’s workshop of Lajos Nagy in the autumn, among the rustling leaves on the ground. I can even hear the rustling, yes, I can hear it in black and white, it would only bother me if it were in colour: the colour would distract me from the colourfulness – however ‘life-like’, to this day I am less interested in photographs as paintings. Black and white disciplines one, demands proportion and humility and gets one’s imagination going. It creates a lack and makes me believe that I, as the viewer, as a temporary collaborator in the work of art, must make up for this absence.
The many clean, mature ‘photo-poems’ do not amount to sentimental, poetic lyricism, but are more fine, objective, pared down studies. The golden shoe with the cigarette, like some kind of private emblem; a whole tragic chanson could be written about it. Then the dance of the shoe-trees and the riding boots, which have souls and personalities, even if before anyone wears them, they put them on and break them in to fit their own feet. Yes, the soul of objects. On my CD, Aliona’s motifs whirl around like fragments of an Iván Mándy short story, evoking the past, the lost crafts. Behold, they are at this precise moment being preserved and turning into art!

 

Szerző: Lajos Parti Nagy
Fordító: Translated by Eszter Rónay
Nyelv: english
Megjelenés helye: Aliona Frankl: Masters of their crafts
Megjelenés dátuma: 2007