REVIEWS 

Anna Bálint
 

Garden of communication <http://www.artpool.hu>

Review of Artpool Art Research Center’s web site <http://www.artpool.hu>
 

Artpool Art Research Center - one of the best known alternative art and documentation centres in East Europe, located in Budapest, Hungary - after 20 years of more or less tolerated organising, archiving and publishing activity - eventually was officially recognised subsequent to the political changes of 1989. Established as an institution open to the public in 1992, Artpool continued to organise exhibitions, art events presenting new trends, artistic tools and resources (intermedia, network, performance, installation) and their possible antecedents and links (fluxus, happenings, mail art, video). At the same time the collection of the sources relating to the avant-garde movements and marginal artworks of the 1970s and 1980s of both Hungarian and international origin has been continuously broadened. 

Since Artpool always favored mixed genres and new technology, it was natural for it to join the net, and once it could lease an Internet line in January 1996, it started to build a home page of information, documents and projects for public access via the Internet, on-line publications and on-line shows. Used as a tool for self-expression and self-construction, the web site mirrors the institution itself, thus its past and present activities define the content, basic structure and visual appearance of the pages. In addition to the self-standing meaning and content, an emphasis is laid on the position and connective value of the pages. There is hardly any independent, floating information, every component is connected with others at one or more levels and leads to at least two or more contexts, connotations, aspects, the pages are nested with internal and external links. Each element of the content is reinforced by others thus transforming the mass of information into a consistent value system and offering at the same time multiple interpretative possibilities to the reader. 

The home page as a visual trademark incorporates the main characteristics of the institution: Artpool's first two self-memorial artistamp images guide to links related to Artpool's activities,  signifying the connections and relationships of the institution, and at the same time referring to one of the special collections of the Artpool Archives, the Artistamp Museum (consisting of about 20.000 items) based on the material of both the World Art Post exhibition from 1982 and Mike Bidner's collection devised to Artpool which arrived to Budapest in 1990. 

Suggesting the commonplace of the net transcendentality in a subtler way, two main entrances with a night and respectively a day image on the main page as guiding paths call for a visit in the spiritual world of the institution. 

The pages describing the history of the institution from 1979, the publication list with summaries of titles containing documents and theory of the contemporary art scene and the description of different collections of the Artpool Archives give an idea about Artpool's role in organising and documenting artistic concerns in the past and present. 

The current events pages present the exhibitions and projects arranged by Artpool since 1992. Some of the presentations have already an on-line version, such as the Networker Bridge <http://www.artpool.hu/bookwork/bridge/bridge.html>, the web adaptation of a bookwork published by Artpool in 1994, consisting of 64 Tarot cards with motifs by 64 artists; the web version of the UNI/vers, the Peacedream project 1988 by Guillermo Deisler <http://www.artpool.hu/univers/uni.html> and the Bookworks of Barbara Rosenthal <http://www.artpool.hubookwork//T3/1.html>. Lectures given at Artpool offer opportunity for the Web adaptation of an artwork as well, like in the case of Tomas Konart's T3, published on-line on the occasion of an exhibition and a lecture on Polish avant-garde books by Piotr Rypson. The pages of Correspondence Art of Ray Johnson based on a show held at the Ernst Museum in Budapest and the Dadaist Picture poems by Lajos Kassák (1920-1922)  succeeding the dadaist visual poetry open air exhibition at the Liszt Ferenc Square in Budapest (both on show in autumn 1997) especially provide many ways of accessing and understanding data. Each viewer can select from the diverse material of the site according to his choice and depth of his exploration. 

The Ray Johnson site <http://www.artpool.hu/RayJohnson.html> offers various sources related to the artist: the Ray Johnson Chro No Logy, biography and a bibliography, a chronology of the New York Correspondence School, the Budapest story of Ray Johnson (1982-1994) which describes the Buda Ray University project, Artpool's Ray Johnson Space, all illustrated with copies of Johnson's correspondence art, add and return works and memorial pieces made after his death. Materials of the Artpool archives and links ease access to the whole context of the mail art culture, on-line theoretical texts and critiques about Johnson's correspondence art are collected to help research. 

Opposed to the completed character of the widely used urban net- metaphors (digital city, café, saloon, electronic agora), Artpool chose an organic interface symbol, as it is announced in The Garden of Correspondence Art, a manifesto published as part of the Ray Johnson site by György Galántai, conceiver and designer of the web-pages. 

The synergy of the media and the instantaneous connectivity of each manifold reference and link - expressed in the interface metaphor of the garden - redefines the linguistic, symbolic and aesthetic perception of the Johnson narrative. The contextually charged visual and textual data multiply the amount of information and at the same time - instead of authoritarian display - it remains in an informative status. 

In 1994 some of the work of outstanding Hungarian artists from the 70's and 80's were exhibited in Artpool, with a special emphasis on Miklós Erdély, one of the most inspiring figures in Hungarian avant-garde art scene, whose manuscripts, video and sound documents finally became available. Lectures entitled Self-Assembling Afternoons recalled his memory, some of the sources and related texts, formerly published in the Alternative/Actual Letter of Artpool, were issued on the net as well - for now only in Hungarian. His text about conceptual and formal auto-poetic systems could stand as another metaphor for Artpool's way of construction of the web site. <http://www.artpol.hu/Erdely/EMcontenthu.html>

To promote research on experimental art and on groundbreaking artistic movements of this century and to spread information on this culture, Artpool built a research site as well - first a Hungarian version will be completed - based on both sources available in the Artpool Archives and a web village of regularly updated links related to the topics of Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationist International, Concept, Pop Art, Fluxus, Mail Art, Neoism and Computer Art. 

The layout of the pages often metaphorically refers to the content and its analogy of the material world counterbalances the immateriality of the digital media. Exemplary of boundary shifts of images, texts and references would be the page presenting Artpool's location in Budapest: the image of the building with a spring background, the icon of nature as a subjective allusion to avant-garde, or the description of the recent events with the image of notice board pins.

Besides the above mentioned items of the events list from 1992-97, the others could be unfold as well in on-line presentations and could self-assemble themselves in the garden's correspondence metaphor: as recurring icon of the digging man indicates it, the site is continuously under construction.