Galántai 80

Péter Fuchs (H)

The scent of the network

I visited the Liszt Ferenc Square flat/archive for the first time around 1997. I remember my father bought me a thin brown booklet, titled "Contemporary Galleries of Budapest" or something similar. I had passed by perhaps four or five downtown shops in which the then fashionable terracotta reliefs alternated with excessively painted pictures, when I stumbled into Artpool.

If I remember correctly, Juli opened the door and 15 minutes wasn’t enough for me to get to the end of the hall – it wasn’t because Gyuri stopped me (there would be many of these) but because I was engrossed in the books available for purchase. I definitely bought a few, and maybe even a copy of the periodical Balkon too.

Well, okay, the place stood out from the rest of the galleries, quite a bit, for example by having a website and an email address, but even apart from these I realised that I’d found something completely different here than in any other place.

When did I meet Gyuri?

Not long after, or maybe years later, in the P60 space, I think he brought a ladder, in the way only he can, to fix something, a projector or a wet patch.

Now one thing is sure: the wet patch remained, because he took the ladder and gave me a lecture for at least an hour and a half, in which other people joined in for shorter and longer periods - no one interrupted him. Because listening to Gyuri is like reading.

Anyone who enters his room - which is probably the last place on earth where you could still smoke - will get stuck there for at least an hour. Except Juli, who is apparently immune to it, who knows how.

By the way, this room is an archive within an archive. Like something from a fairytale, magical. Something left over from cyberpunk, from a future that never happened.

Artpool itself is a space torn out of space and time - a piece of foreign soil in the city center, with every inch of the shelves reaching to the ceiling sending the message that endless excitement and secrets are hidden here. It’s the network itself. Net art, network art – mysterious imprints of a network predating the network.

Gyuri's room with the small chest of drawers, whose name librarians and archivists surely know, is located somewhere between the filing cabinets and the pharmacists’ cabinet with a ceiling tainted dark by tobacco smoke and with its improbable objects (a Western intellectual with any standards uses a MAC, and I remember there always was a MAC there) and this itself was the secret I was looking for.

The scent of that room is like the smell of the network itself. In 1997 so many people didn’t understand why the Internet was important and what its essence was. But the people in this space on Liszt Ferenc Square did understand – i.e. Gyuri, Juli and their colleagues, and have done ever since that time.

This is a network, i.e. a place outside the world, as if it were not in Budapest but in New York. Maybe it's not there because the sockets and the toilets are different, and there’s less mess than there would be in America and...

I stopped here. The essence of the network is that it’s not centralised or territorial. Its elements can be anywhere, it’s intangible. What is tangible from it can be found in Artpool’s dossier, that funny website that probably still loads in with that pounding sound. It’s in the tiny drawers, which may have postal stamps, rubber stamps, or maybe someone's hair. I haven’t met them for a long time, even though I know we are similar, which feels good.

The good news is that when I first entered that space, Gyuri already looked 70 something years old, so it seems that he only ages a maximum of five in 20 years. He should keep up this good habit, and if he goes on like this, we will soon be two bearded gray sages.

Péter Fuchs
11 April, 2021