A Comparative Study Concerning the Art and Technology Movement in the 1960ies: Gyorgy Kepes and the Social Mission of Media Art
Cover of Gyorgy Kepes’ book Language of Vision (Chicago, Paul Theobald, 1944)
Márton Orosz is Curator of the Collection of Photography and Media Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest where he is also the Acting Director of the Vasarely Museum affiliated to the same institution. There, he recently curated Time Landscape. Alan Sonfist and the Birth of Land Art; Nathan Lerner: Photo-Eye; Film Experiments Brought to Light and Hungarian Artists and the Computer. He earned his PhD in Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. During his studies, he was Terra Fellow at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. and Gyorgy Kepes Fellow for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research at MIT. His publications range across fields such as the history of photography, motion pictures and collecting. His essay on Gyorgy Kepes’ Polaroid experiments appeared in AR - Artistic Research (Koenig Books) and his study on the European abstract animated film industry of the 1930s in Regarding the Popular (European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies). Recent public appearances include a paper in the “Exile” session of the College Art Association’s 104th annual conference, in which he addressed Gyorgy Kepes’ seemingly innocuous abstract art produced at the epicenter of the Cold War United States military-industrial complex.
A Comparative Study Concerning the Art and Technology Movement in the 1960ies: Gyorgy Kepes and the Social Mission of Media Art
As an Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Fellow, Orosz will conduct a comparative study focusing on the Hungarian-American artist Gyorgy Kepes’ social commitment to the optical message. Kepes’ program, termed “education of vision,” referred to an attempt to use advancement in science to democratize the act of looking. By addressing this idea, Orosz will shed light on the practical applications of Kepes’ concept-oriented design pedagogy, experiments in which he juxtaposed “L'imagination” with “L'entendement,” the visual and the intellectual functions of perception. By linking the genealogy of image science to language-oriented conceptions on vision in mid-century Modernism, Orosz’s proposal will examine the artist’s contributions to avant-la-lettre visual study initiatives that regarded psycho-physical and neurobiological aspects of vision as a path to encyclopedic knowledge. Having analyzed Kepes’ program, this will be connected to the holistic integration of disciplines in art, science and technology in projects such as the Center for Advanced Visual Studies he founded in 1967 at MIT. A historical precursor for community based art practices, the Center came into existence in the wake of market oriented capitalist structures. Orosz’s project aims to be the first critical biography ever written on Kepes.
