Art Installation by T.Villő PENDULUM TUNING, 2012-13.

Villő Turcsány: Pendulum Tuning

installation

BTM Municipal Gallery — Kiscell Museum, Budapest 29 November 2012 — 20 January 2013

That some hundred people who were so lucky as to see Villő Turcsány's Pendulum Tuning project enjoyed a special experience. The first heralds talked about an audio-centered installation, but the later ones, emphasizing movement and writing about hanging sculptures, grasped it in a different fashion. Behind the modification of definition indicating the seemingly simple shift in medium, however, there is much more than we would first think: it is a synthetic turn moving beyond the artist's earlier experiments with sculpture, performance, sound art and music, and as a result, the project can be regarded as being of outstanding quality even in the international context.

(...)

Four sculptures — representing their own dynamics in their forms— were hung on
the highest points of the Church Interior, which moved like pendulums along axes intersecting one another angling with the lines bordering the space. The movement was generated by small engines, which moved the sculptures suspended at two points by winding the climbing ropes up and down with the help of pulley leverages. The movement of the cyclically changing mobile structure was controlled by a computer software, which determined the rhythm of the swing of the four sculptures, the intensity of the movement, individually, in every moment. The artist had done the modeling with the musical sculptures of auDIO VOL. 01., the first phase of programming had been done by a robot mechanic after a long period of experimenting.(8) The sculptures can be understood as individual “musical parts”, their movement being composed by the music, which could only be set during the installation process — one by one, as a continuous improvisation, by experiment. The cycles built together resulted in a 32-minute-long “loop”. The artwork possesses a special power, which, with its sensuousness, creates the effect of an experience of space, sculpture and musical structure. The character of movement that the pendulum swing lends to the sculptures perfectly match their material and shape showing the axes along which they move; more precisely, the handling and coloring of the surfaces together with the size, the dynamics of movement, creates definite illusions of weight and mass. The two aluminum sculptures swinging higher above with their shiny surface — besides their perceivable massiveness suggested by their shape (in reality they were hollow) — creates the illusion of lightness in comparison with the sculptures made of acrylic resin moving in the lower spheres, the color and shape of which suggest leaden heaviness, a more difficult movement. These all, in the space keeping its sacrality with its architectural effects let the spectators associate with lightness-darkness, lightness-heaviness, ascending-descending dichotomies.

(Balkon, issue 2013.7-8., introduction and a chapter by Laszlo Kertész)