Tribute to Gyula Kosice in the US
Creator of the “Manifiesto Madí” in 1946, Gyula Kosice is one of the promoters of the first attempt to stimulate the abstract art in Latin America. Among his works exhibited in museums and private collections in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America, some of his main contributions to the history of art are the hydrokinetics, the mobile water, the light works, the use of neon gas and the Hydrospace City. “When the creation is inspired by invention links, its nature expresses and projects other phonetics.” This is Gyula Kosice’s case: an inventor, a thaumaturge, a forward-looking man who celebrates the idea of a new universe in each of his works of art. His artistic background is, undoubtedly, that one of a worker who knows where the shape beats, how to make mass throb, in which way the movement causes (above energy) the liveliness which calls the eye’s attention,” states Jorge Taverna Irigoyen, President of the National Academy of Fine Arts.
The autobiography is not a simple collection of anecdotes. From the break off caused by the invention of Madí up to the Hydrospace City project, it is a glance to the modern and contemporary art, an observatory of 20th century celebrities.
The process of writing this book started more than two and a half years ago. It is the review of my whole career. I wrote about my meetings with artists, architects, writers, philosophers, such as Jean Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Ray Bradbury, Alberto Giacometti, Umberto Eco, Lucio Fontana, Max Bill, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Le Corbusier. I have included facts from my childhood up to nowadays, describing a long and deep period which explains, in general terms, all I could say and do either through the creation of artistic groups and movements or through my works with light and moving water. The most important is that people read my book and find out my geologic faults…
The Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (Texas, United States) has bought many of my works of art and now they will open a Kosice room dedicated to my work. In addition to the models of hydrospace cities there will be also an exhibition of some works of art previously acquired.
In the editorial of the Arturo magazine published in 1944 I had already started to say “the man’s existence does not finish on the earth”. Based on said statement I started to design some models with the corresponding dwellings to imagine how the man could live in space. Such hanging habitat is obtained by breaking down the water through electrolysis, a procedure which allows to use the oxygen to breathe and send the hydrogen to a nuclear fission machine which would provide with more than the necessary electrical supply. The water is always the fuel since it is the origin of the human being and three quarters of our planet are composed of water.
From the beginning I was convinced that it was a necessity. And any biological need requires certain time to come out. Anything is possible, not immediately but in a medium term. Undoubtedly the time has not arrived, because the habitats are not in space and there are no hydrospace cities yet. But also, this makes me say that there will be a time in which the only alternative would be such proposal, which evidently has a sine qua non condition.
The world’s population is 6.5 billion and it will grow an additional 30%. Can you imagine where we will go? Considering this terrible trend I tried to figure out where people would live. And the space has to be occupied. An utopia exists until it stops being one. There will be some others, but meanwhile, our immediate needs have to be covered. Actually, the hydrospace city is not an utopia but a scientific proposal. There is no water on Mars or on the Moon or the Sun so we have to manage ourselves with our resources.
The “dwellings” I am proposing with the hydrospace cities are specially invented. They are places different from the traditional ones and such difference means there are no more kitchens, bathrooms or bedrooms which we usually take for granted. I propose a place to “ feel willing to” another place “to forget the oblivion with an annex to set memory free”; a “place for the unimagined through personal and collective joy”, and a “bridge to cross from chance to the management of chance.”
I am from Hungary and on my ship voyage to Argentina, when I was only four, the only thing I could see was water and stars. It was a 31-day-voyage with my family across the Atlantic Ocean and everything was water, and more water. At ten years old I was orphaned and , as a sediment, I had the need to connect myself to art. I took classes at Academia Libre, and at Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano, but I got bored copying still life, or drawing with models, which I considered unnecessary.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing static in the universe, everything is in movement. That is why I started to work on hydrokinetics, water in movement. I also was the one who started to use neon gas, I have always tried to be in the vanguard with elements provided by people.
I consider myself an artist, in other words, with an unusual projection, whose permanent source of inspiration is the factor of happening; that is to say, time and by default, space, which have to be used in the benefit of human beings.
Tags: argentine art, gyula kosice
