George Legrady:
AN ANECDOTED ARCHIVE FROM THE COLD WAR
Hyperreal Media Production, 1994
Legrady, an artist of Hungarian origin, living in Canada, the USA, and Germany, erects a "monument" to the memory of those vicissitudinous five decades subsequent to WW2 in Hungary, as well as, in Eastern Europe through portraying personal lots and the propaganda mechanism. It is striking to see home made movies, faded letters, and IDs put together in the same space with impersonal historical documents: coins, bills, placards, books, and street signs by a classification system based on the objective categories of museology. The imaginary setting of the archive is the former Workers' Movement Museum situated in the Buda Castle, which enables the artist to present this wide variety of materials by different multimedia tools - as though each medium would symbolize a space/hall within the museum. A unique aura is created by the polarity of the collective and the personal throughout this CD-archive: in the work of the artist in search of his identity the old objects gain a new meaning - they become a collective monument.
