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O-pus

O-pus
/12
    • O-pus
  • 1972
  • video, b&w, sound by Katalin Ladik
  • 8min, 25sec
“O-pus,” a film that Attila Csernik made in collaboration with Katalin Ladik and Imre Póth, sublimates his personal strivings—along with those of other members of the Bosch+Bosch group—to abandon visual poetry’s remaining traditional means of expression (pen/paper/book) in order to realize artistic conditions where performative aspects of the language of art function as (theoretical) visual objects, as well. Using words (or letters, to be more precise), Csernik creates (a)logical combinations and situations—a testament to the artist’s striving to identify his work with its (assumed) content. Instead of using paper or a natural environment (like Slavko Matković), he imprints letter-signs on his own body—as well as on that of Katalin Ladik and (in other works) Erzsébet Juhász. His film “O-pus” is enhanced by a soundtrack of sorts that comes in the form of an audio performance by Katalin Ladik in which language emerges as pure energy that can operate in an entirely non-material sphere (that of sound). Performing linguistic acts externalizes their spatial energies—with (the) language (of art) being articulated as the possibility of (the existence of the) language (of art). N.M.