Aniko Horvath
Courtesy of the artist.
Aniko Horvath, Untitled (Kent Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn), 1998, black & white film image
Here is a history of abandonment in the collection of shadows, all tainted, that remain after the vanishing of the machines. There is a peculiar and unexpected sorrow that attaches to these industrial tombs, as if their disdain for the world around them had a kind of deluded nobility that no contemporary manufactory can replicate. In Horvath’s image, one imagines the gleam of an alien battle cruiser, its light refracted along the steel frame of the building in a catastrophe’s benediction. Or this is the site of some Pentecost that got out of hand, the tongues of fire scurrying away, dismayed.
Courtesy of the artist.
Aniko Horvath, Untitled (Pleasure Beach, Stratford), 2009, black & white film image
But there is also more domestic wreckage, where what is left behind has a deliberately casual quality, as if the former inhabitants had suddenly decided upon a frugal lifestyle, and had raced off to some desert cave leaving this decorated ruin as a vaguely comic antithesis to Robert Polidoris’ toxic color images of a hurricane marked New Orleans.
Horvath’s work is also a reminder of that quality of photographs made on film, free of the distorted precision that purely digital images lead us to confuse with realism.
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