Notes From Nowhere

When Martin Parr has his latest book printed in an ultra-cheap print shop in Mexico and, while they’re at it, lets them do the sequencing and design as well, I think that’s a good thing. Good as in necessary – as an irreverent counterweight to the technically perfect (and perfectly boring).

However, when I took a walk through Chelsea last week, technically horrendous did not make much sense at all. When galleries try to sell large format fine art prints for a couple of thousand dollars each and, for example, every single print on display has the same (admittedly faint, but clearly visible) marks that suspiciously look like the result of clogged print heads, I think it’s a disgrace. Call me old fashioned, but I go with the adage that you should know the rules of your craft before you break them – with skill and imagination, and not by accident.

That said, I think I’d like to do a show with prints from a large format inkjet printer too, only with the print heads removed altogether. Makes perfect sense, does it not?

At the train station, on a first foray into town, there are elderly women around corners with flowers for people to buy. The flowers are terse and papery yet they wilt in the sun; the women stand alone, or occasionally, in twos. Have the women come from the same fields? The flowers suggest as much. Why station themselves apart then? Are they strangers with but fields in common? Is community unfavourable to commerce?

I see like-women later on the banks of the river dividing Buda from Pest. Now they bear textiles spun to a foregone pattern, and lace. They hold them up to show us as we pass, their fingers through the holes of the spin.

The faces in Budapest are hard to please, smiles are not forthcoming. Hospitality, in what becomes a favourite brasserie, where tea is served with a pot of honey and a silver tray, is as starched as the aprons. Who are you, stranger to me, English speaker, to ingratiate?

The plane taking off, spoke French, on arrival, it speaks Hungarian. A first impression on landing in Budapest, then, is the strangeness of the sounds from no mouth in particular. I can’t tell where the words stop, or where they begin. There is nothing Latinate with which to gauge English approximates. Indeed, the only word I manage to master in two weeks is szia, and then only because it sounds like an Australian see ya (though it is offered as a greeting on arrival and departure).

Home is: a dormitory in the Soviet style; two bunk beds at cross purposes, two desks in parallel. We are a bus ride and four train stops away from town centre, we are up the highway and nearly in the woods. The highway, one of Pest’s main arteries, is a single-lane in both directions. The sky above it is wide. At the window there is a gathering of insect life, rare visitations.

The foyer is: awash with name-tags affixed below faces, and folders, red or blue, clutched at the breast. The faces are in various stages of passage from trepidation to the putting of best feet forward. I am an anxious child again, the first day of school. We are shown to the dining room, the computer room, the laundry room, the lounge— amenities for two weeks: a conference in Budapest.