Art on Lake
Budapest City Park, Budapest, Hungary
An outdoor sculpture exhibition on and in a 20,000-square-metre boating lake, ‘Art on Lake’ features work by 25 artists from a cross-section of EU member states. In a city whose architecture remains a grand celebration of imperial, fin de siècle Austro-Hungary, the exhibition poses itself the challenge of developing appreciation for contemporary public art as a counterpoint to the ubiquity of more conventional statues and monuments.
Echoing the ethos of recent so-called populist group shows at London’s Hayward Gallery – such as 2008’s ‘Psycho Buildings’ and ‘Walking In My Mind’ in 2009 – a key feature of ‘Art on Lake’ is visitor interaction. Rather than staging a complex curatorial concept, the exhibition provides a novel opportunity to engage with contemporary art by allowing visitors to paddle open-topped canoes around the works – even to bump into the installations when their boatmanship lets them down. Beyond this gimmicky attraction, the canoes do allow intimate perspectives on art works that would otherwise suffer from being viewed only from afar.
Romanian Daniel Knorr’s snowman built of stones, Bonhomme (2011), becomes a suitably strange character to meet on a lake when seen up-close. Similarly, Small Theatrical Production on Water (2011), a collection of four sculptures influenced by classical mythology by French duo Anne and Patrick Poirier, offers shifting interpretations as you glide between the evocative figures of a man, woman, horse and lightning bolt.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the context of promoting contemporary art in public spaces, the exhibition’s most successful work is the one that pushes the limits of sculpture the furthest. Consisting of only four white ropes that lead from the lake to the tower of a mock-Transylvanian castle, Mimmo Roselli’s Anchored (2011) neatly links the exhibition site with its wider environment, while adding its own dramatic geometric lines in the air. The effect of Roselli’s intervention is to make the castle – a giant folly built in 1896 – appear as though it is floating on the lake’s surface. In effect, the Italian artist has hijacked the castle, harnessing the visual impact of a structure whose creation would have been beyond the exhibition’s remit and resources. Anchored therefore questions the limits of what outdoor art alone can achieve, while at the same time offering a solution to how it can co-exist with the more dominant forms of the built environment.
A more brazen counterpoint to traditional outdoor sculpture is found in Polish artist Krzysztof M. Bednarski’s K. M. Column-fountain (2011), a totem-pole-like structure of seven large pink-resin busts of Karl Marx mounted one on top of the other, with an ineffectual fountain sprouting from the top. The work challenges conventional statues and the ideologies they venerate, while its glowing pink heads offer a bold addition to the lake. Also subverting convention, the Czech Republic’s Krištof Kintera has added stag-like antlers to conventional metal barriers in Paradise Now (2011). Situated near the lakeshore, the animalistic structures bridge the urban and natural elements of the city park setting, asking us to look again at a mobile piece of street furniture that is regularly employed to mark boundaries and divide space.
Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts, which commissioned the exhibition, now has plans to make ‘Art on Lake’ a triennial event. The hope is that the unusual format could give the city a memorable brand, with regular installments helping to raise its contemporary profile. Should the plans materialize, the present edition is good enough to suggest it could prove a long-term success – a platform, perhaps, for artists to build on in the future.
Richard Unwin
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