Street Action, Budapest
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- Street Action, Budapest
- 1972
- 25 b&w photographs mounted on cardboard
- 70 x 100 cm
“Street Action” was a performative gesture of sorts that Dóra Maurer let passersby carry out in the public space in Budapest. In socialist times, the public space was less a space of communication than a space for locomotion, and hence also more anonymous. So Maurer took three large white paper strips and placed them on the ground in a parallel arrangement that was somewhat reminiscent of a crosswalk, as she had sketched out in a drawing. Over the course of an hour, she documented how passersby trampled the strips and caused them to slide, with the result that they eventually moved far apart. The camera focused mainly on the strips, capturing the moving legs of the passersby in fleeting glimpses that preserved their anonymity. With 25 such black and white photos, Maurer documented how the action played out and how a happenstance event could enable a symbolic change of signification within a state-controlled socialist system. W.S.