Sturcz, János

Passageway

On Péter Menasági’s sculptures

Ever since the beginning of his career, Péter Menasági has been interested in the use of geometric symbols. This, however, has nothing to do with 20th-century geometric abstraction, the utopian, technocratic attitude of classic Modernism, the decorative, formalistic approach of late Modernism, or the hollow, cynically tautological and bleak materialism of minimalism, which Joseph Stella grasped with the formula of “What you see is what you see.” There isn’t even a hint of the avant-garde’s pompous “reduction to essence”: Menasági does not think the world can be redeemed with a cube or a grid, nor does he assume to have invented the philosophers’ stone. He knows it was found long ago in ancient civilizations that were closer to the primordial knowledge, and lived in harmony with the world. What Menasági reaches back to is sacred geometry, the repository of the secrets of creation, of the essential connections between the visible and the invisible world—back to Plato, the pyramid building Egyptians and Stonehenge.

Menasági probably believes in the power of ancient geometric symbols, their ability to transform the inner and the external world. This must be why he seeks to reinterpret ancient signs and archetypes in an individual manner, to make them personal and current—to effect a spiritual and visual reformulation that follows from, though may not concur with, the outlook of the present. Most often, his work unites some eternal, ancient geometric symbol with a contemporary sign, such as one taken from the world of computers, a pictogram or an asymmetrical pattern. His sculptures have a function beyond art, as they perform an individual experience of sacred topoi and thereby attain a spiritual transformation of the artist and the viewer. This does not necessarily involve faith in a particular religion or an esoteric teaching, because one need not believe in Amun, Buddha or Jesus for the conserving power of Egyptian pyramids, designed according to the golden ratio, to work, for a razorblade placed in the focal point of a model—even a paper model—of the Great Pyramid to become sharp again, for meat and fruit to remain fresh, and for water to stay liquid even at minus forty degrees. Which is not to say Menasági does not want to encourage his viewers to ponder on the spiritual forces that lie behind sacred geometry, the golden ratio or the Fibonacci sequence.

The various series of the past six years also employ, almost exclusively, the simplest geometric bodies and figures, prisms, cubes, cones, circles, spirals, and a few symbolic objects and architectural motifs, such as the plumb, the compass, the mirror, the gate, the well and the vault. In contrast to the sterile, impersonal, industrial modelling and materials of minimalism, Menasági insists on choice materials – hard stones, such as andesite and granite, and hard woods like mahogany and wenge –, on lengthy and meticulous, as well as sophisticated and bravura, creative methods, on carving and polishing the stone, and more recently, on artisan techniques, the methods of the cabinetmaker and the upholsterer, gold plating. At the same time, his plastic art inhabits a conceptually or spiritually extended realm, in which the works involve not only unconventional materials – such as water, mirrors or air – but invisible energies as well, such physical phenomena as centrifugal force or gravitation. Thanks to the sacred geometry and the visual references, the emphasis now often shifts beyond and over the material part of the sculpture. Almost all of his earlier works used solids of revolution, in connection with such symbolic contents as the road, change, eternal recurrence, measure, beginning and end, axis. The sculptures now presented explore the concept of the passageway, usually examining the possibilities, the intellectual and spiritual means, of passage or communication between two worlds, the material and the spiritual, the terrestrial and the celestial, sphere; between this world and the world beyond.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (2012), the first of the three pieces that form the series called Edenic Geometry, offers a far from conventional interpretation of the heavenly tree that came to have such a key role in the fate of mankind. Menasági is not in search of the sinner, and omits Eve and Adam; only the tree and the serpent are represented, although indirectly, with the means of geometry. The tree appears as a segment of an endless column which could be continued in both directions, and thus resembles more of an axis mundi or world tree, which in pre-Christian, antique and archaic beliefs connected three realms: the underworld, man’s “middle world” of this earth, and the celestial sphere. The Christian tree of Eden, a symbol of original sin, bars man from heaven. The resolution, the passageway to the New Jerusalem, will only be provided by Christ’s crucifix. By contrast, the pre-Christian axis mundi, like the menhir or the obelisk, suggests that man lives in a stable universe that is organized around a static axis. Almost human in size, the 210 cm tall, square-based prism of sapele (mahogany), which may represent the first couple while still in a primordial unity, before the division of the sexes, in a perfect state, and which stands for man as the measure of an orderly universe, is an expression of the desire of contemporary man whose condition is marked by chaos. A desire which is immediately negated by a spiral, formed by 1800 tacks driven into the wood, which already may in part be understood as the serpent of Christianity, and which, in accordance with the nature of man who has partaken of the knowledge of Good and Evil, simultaneously leads upwards and downwards, connecting heaven and hell. In this respect, the skin of the serpent, which is composed of the light and dark heads of the nails, offers a representation of the knowledge of good and evil that also conforms to the Christian representational tradition. On the other hand, it has a symbolism that is perfectly in tune with the present. Menasági’s Satan-serpent is also an embodiment of what is touted as the central category of global consumerist society, “information”: the four-line pattern is reminiscent of a coded message, a text. The real idol of today’s late-capitalist world is money, while mass communication, the torrent of false information only serves to avert the attention from the manipulation that surrounds it. The gold and black dots thus refer to not only the dark and luminous powers of Hell and Heaven, not only to the pattern of a snakeskin, but also to punch cards, electronic billboards and Braille writing, and their very logic follows and represents the operation principle of the computer. Also, the binary (true–false) system that finds an embodiment in the black and white dots brings to mind the obligation to make moral decisions, a part of human existence since the Fall. In the Hegelian and Marxist understanding of history, the spiral is a symbol of progress. With wars that have lasted into the present, and nationalist and internationalist socialist dictatorships, the 20th century discredited the idea of advancement, and it is not by chance that the symbol of progress, the emblem of something that has legitimized or obscured violence, takes the role of the serpent in Menasági. And this is true even if the spiral leads into two directions, and the struggle of dark and lightness is a calculated draw, because the number of brass and oxidized grey tacks is equal on all sides. It is only the pattern that is random, symbolizing a knowledge that is unfamiliar, apparently incomprehensible, and at the same time forbidden. Both Arp and Duchamp attributed a quasi-sacral significance to chance, understanding it as a set of necessities which man cannot comprehend. It may have a symbolic importance that while the wooden prism that represents the eternal order, the axis mundi, is three-dimensional, weighty and unshakable, the simulacrum of the “Devil” appears as a more or less two-dimensional “flourish.” Menasági’s take on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil adds a current, personal interpretation to the traditional Christian understanding. While he does not dismiss Christian meanings and symbols, Menasági believes in the common root of religions that Frithjof Schuon, René Guénon or Béla Hamvas was in search of, an Urreligion, and this informs his whole art, his set of symbols, and outlook. Consequently, the same work may simultaneously contain Christian, Brahmanic, Islamic or Buddhist notions and symbols. Nonetheless, it is an attractive, if perhaps exaggerated, possibility that the nails in The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil also represent release from the sin that followed in the wake of the serpent’s temptation: the nailing of the brass serpent on the pole, or the crucifixion of Christ. However, Menasági probably appreciates more the motif of the illegibility of the information encoded in the serpent’s skin, and the sculpture is more a symbol of the loss of ancient knowledge than of the Fall. One precedent in his own oeuvre is Messages (1997), another measure-like prism, 107 cm of andesite, on which the similarly illegible signs run up in a like spiral, the message having the same topicality and reference to war (as well), as in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What appears here, instead of a rising hymn, is the grid of an integrated circuit, a chip, which is reminiscent of a profane precedent, the winding military scenes on Trajan’s Column. The electronic sign that takes the place of the film-like sequence of a war report from Dacia may refer to the fact that computer technology originates in the war industry. What is more, Menasági’s column is broken at the top, which may as much stand for war damages, the endangerment of the passageway up, as for its infinity, in an allusion to Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. Both of Menasági’s columns have something of the character of a headstone or a tomb. However, if we take the wooden prism as the most abstract, most ideal sculpture of the human figure, as a representation of the first couple, then it is entwined by the serpent in the same way as Adam is in William Blake’s print, Elohim Creating Adam. Blake thought the Fall was the result of not an error on man’s part, but a mistake by the creator, Elohim, the false god of the Old Testament.

The other two works of the Edenic Geometry series in fact seem to attempt to correct a Creation that is out of kilter, by using sacred geometry and by returning to the mystic centre that is evoked by the motifs of the spiral and the circle, as well as complex interpretations thereof. In the centre of Paradise, next to that bringer of mortality, the Tree of Knowledge, stood The Tree of Life (2012), which Menasági again represents in a geometric form. The base form is again made of a choice and ancient material, which is organic and resembles the human body: African wenge wood. The hollow-bodied, drum-like cube is fitted from finely polished boards, none of which were cut across the grain, so nowhere is a growth ring, a sign of time, to be seen. Each side bears a vast golden spiral of 600 brass tacks. The six Sun-like figures form three pairs across adjoining sides, suggestive of a change in dimensions. The double spiral is an ancient symbol of the spirit and life. More generally, the spiral is the most important form in sacred geometry – itself understood as the fingerprint of God –, which follows the rules of the golden ratio, present in creation from DNA through the nautilus shell to galaxies. The spiral combines a still centre with an almost illusory movement that recalls rippling water, and is thus a perfect symbol of God and the life the springs up in his wake. The wheel, a universal image of the world spinning around a motionless centre, was a recurring motif in Menasági’s earlier work. The hub of a wheel and the axis mundi are as motionless as God, while everything moves around them. The omphalos and the whirlpool, both similar in meaning to the wheel, also often appeared in Menasági’s earlier sculptures. The colour gold, which conjures up light without a material source, is another symbol of sacrality. The tree of Knowledge represented differentiation, duality, polarity and mortality. In The Tree of Life, harmony receives the priority. The sculpture unites apparently contradictory meanings when the earth of the cube becomes one with the heavens of the circle or the spiral. Thanks to the spirals that connect and overwrite the faces of the cube, the latter turns into a circle, or in a reverse perspective, the circle is “squared.” However, the cube and the circle have further meanings. The circle or the sphere is the symbol of Paradise on earth, while the square or cube stands for the New Jerusalem. In this case, it may again have a symbolic significance that the spiral, which means motion or change, is two-dimensional, while the emblem of New Jerusalem is three-dimensional and solid. Yet this dark, oil-polished, very corporeal cube has an almost immaterial, spiritual, idea-like pair. The former stands on the latter, reverting thereby the common statics of sculptures, with what is heavy occupying the upper part. Also, the tree of Life is disconnected from the earth, as in a vision; it has no roots, as if to indicate that true, eternal life derives not from the earth, but from heaven, divine existence, and eternal life is to be sought not on a physical, material level, but in the spiritual dimension. (It can be the fate of only that part of man that is consubstantial with God, the spirit. “God is a Spirit.” John 4:24.) This meaning is reinforced by the mirror that is placed at the bottom of the glass cube, frequently a symbol of the spiritual world even in modern literature (Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass; Jean Cocteau: Orpheus). Through light, the mirror refers to the Divine, the spiritual, the immaterial, and enables Menasági to transport the heavenly, the spiral sun disk to the lowest terrestrial plane. (This is an embodiment of the Hermetic idea: “As above, so below.”) The mirror pierces the plane of the earth, and opens a gate, a passageway along a vertical axis, which leads to the heavenly world of the spirits. At the same time, it virtually blocks the underworld, while the Sun Spirals shining on the faces of the cube extend the celestial sphere in all directions. All this is an attempt to restore the harmony that existed in traditional societies between earthly and heavenly, between material and spiritual—a harmony that is already absent from today’s overly materialistic consumer civilization. The glass cube and the mirror, together with the spiral whirling inside, also evoke the medium of water, and can be read as the water of eternal life, from which the tree of Life grows. To appropriate the symbol of the tree of life, to make it individual, it was important – as is the case with almost all of Menasági’s sculptures – to spend a lot of time with the work, to draw the circles and spirals, to drive in the myriad small, round-headed tacks, by hand. During the lengthy creative period, it is not only the work that receives some of the artist’s aura or life energy, but the animating energy of the geometric sign may also influence the creator, and later the viewer. All the more so as the forms of sacred geometry – e.g. the so-called Christ grid around the planet – are understood to be manifestations of energy and consciousness.

In its turn, the third piece in the Edenic Geometry series, The Source of Life seems to represent the very water that symbolizes eternal life, out of which the tree of Life grows. Placed on the ground, the dark walnut circle with a 1.5 m diameter resembles a well. As an object, and one of the passageways, it is more reminiscent of a circular window than a gate or column, though this window turns in the vertical direction of the axis mundi, towards the sky. Wells and springs are frequently mentioned in the Bible, and Menasági’s circle, divided into four sections, may reference the four rivers of paradise, the symbols of the four gospels, indicating that the water in question is spiritual, providing the spirit with heavenly revival and symbolizing the power of baptism, which confers eternal life. (“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” Psalms 42:1.) The motif, however, like the tree of Life, belongs to not the terrestrial Paradise, but the New Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation, where a “pure river of water of life [flows from] the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev. 22:1). Menasági renders the Creator and Jesus only indirectly, by means of geometry, with the use of the cross and the circle, the latter a symbol of completeness, perfection, infinity, eternity, absoluteness. He joins the ancient symbol of the sacred origin of life, the spring, and the oldest, mandala-like world model. In this sense, the cross refers to not only Christ, but to the four points of the compass as well, the quadrants of the terrestrial world. As in The Tree of Life, Menasági achieves a perfect, smooth synthesis of geometric symbols from different beliefs, though here the solution is perhaps even more ingenious, literally fluid. He prepared four-centimetre wide channels in the rim and the spokes, which meet in a bowl sunk in the hub with a 30-centimetre diameter. He then filled this bed with paraffin oil in which gold powder paint was dissolved, creating, as it were, an alchemist’s embodiment of the non-terrestrial, sacred water of life. In traditional astronomy, a circle with its centre marked stands for the Sun, while in alchemy it denotes the corresponding metal, gold. Menasági’s golden circle, divided into four and having an emphatic central circle, is simultaneously a symbol of the Sun, a mystic centre, and a wheel of a model of the world. All this is not at odds with the Christian meaning, also declared in the title, because the Bible makes frequent comparisons between God, or Christ, and the Sun, and in early Christian times Jesus was often identified with the Sol Invictus, the invincible Sun, and was sometimes even represented as the Sun. The “divided circle” produced by the union of the circle and the cross is in fact an emblem of Christ. It is also called Sun cross or Celtic cross. The rose windows of Gothic cathedrals were understood to represent both the Sun and Christ. The Sun that shines in Menasági’s “window” is related to the Sun Spiral that appears on The Tree of Life. The spiral was the central motif of an earlier work, Sun Gate (2010-11), in which the passageway to heaven is not a window but a gate, somewhat oriental in flavour and formal idiom. In this too he used the “tack relief technique” that is employed in The Tree of Life, tracing the spiral on the circular mahogany base with 2200 tacks, the distance of the line from the centre growing by every turn with an additional millimetre. Both the circle and the spiral are simultaneously symbols of the Sun and God, as is gold an emblem of divine light, evoked here by the gently radiant inner glow of the brass tack relief. The gate is a passageway to another world, in this case to a celestial, spiritual world, the other world of spirits. In several mythic worldviews, passage between earth and heaven is provided by the gate of the Sun. The circular opening at the top of domes and tents represents the gate of the Sun – emphasizing the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm –, through which runs the axis mundi. In Christian terms, this gate is identical with Christ, who leads to eternal life. In his own  words: “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved” (John 10:9). Church doors was identified with the gates of Paradise, while the solstices are called Heaven’s Gates. Divine light, understood as the source of Life, thus has a meaning in Menasági’s work that is simultaneously related to Christianity and ancient cults of the Sun. Hung in the gateway, the sun disk also resembles a gong, an instrument, or more likely, a membrane, that resonates with cosmic vibrations, as does the hollow drum of The Tree of Life. No less is Prayer Wheel (2008-09) an instrument, with pebbles murmuring inside. The point or essence of Menasági’s “extended” sculptures is, in part, outside the solid body of the work, as in the golden river “circulating” in the Sun Well, the light emanating from the tacks of the Sun Spiral, or the sounds that suggest energy waves.

Though geometrization has always been present in Menasági’s sculpture, sacred geometry has not at all times been so dominant. Almost all of his earlier works centre around some everyday object which has a symbolic meaning. In three, related hung sculptures this object is the plumb, which, similarly to the other works that resemble measures or standards, is a symbol of divine order, and marks the right direction for the passageway to heaven, the way to God. Deviation (2006) represents the spiritual condition of contemporary mankind, the departure from the right direction, the loss of balance, with the exactitude of a geodetic pendulum. The sculpture comprises two parts, each a compass-like instrument, one on the ground, the other in the sky. Both are symmetrical, almost perfect conic forms with needle-sharp points. The one on the ground is sturdier, broader and heavier, made as it is of granite and stainless steel, the materials of choice in contemporary skyscrapers. The shape reminds one of a spinning top, as well as of modern design. The celestial component is a slender object made of alder, covered with gold leaf and filled with light. Almost weightless, it nonetheless accurately indicates the perpendicular, the direction towards God, not with the top pointing towards the ground, but with a thread of light, a steel wire that is endless in theory (and is in fact fastened to the ceiling of the exhibition space). However, the respective tips of the terrestrial and celestial weights fail to meet, because the axis of the ground cone deviates from the perpendicular, and having a metal spike on the bottom, is unstable, movable in all directions. Man has become estranged from God, His finger no longer reaches towards Adam’s. (In a possible, though perhaps extreme, reading, the form of the spinning top refers to the puerility of the manipulated individual in the global consumer society.)

The other two works in the series seem to attempt to restore the upset spiritual order with the help of sacred geometry—the logic being the same as in the Edenic Geometry series. The Hanging Stone (2006) also comprises two parts, a firm, elongated half-sphere or egg shaped dome structure made from cherry wood, and a steel-tipped andesite cone hung on it, which is not unlike the terrestrial part of Deviation. The instrument resembles Foucault’s pendulum, which represents the revolution of Earth—in itself making the concepts of “up” and perpendicular relative, even if the firmament was once conceived of as a half-spherical dome, thanks to the stars that orbit around the celestial pole. The frame, which recalls Gothic cathedrals, may refer to the fact that cathedrals were the embodiments of a world with a sacral orientation, based on the balance of the material and the spiritual. Of course, by comparison with the cultures that were built on the primordial knowledge that Plato envisioned, this medieval order was already mundane. As much is indicated by the fact that the plumb is not golden, airy and filled with light, and it is not even directly connected to the sky; it is only in connection with a man-made structure whose four ribs may also represent the four points of the compass. The plumb is in the hand of man. Nevertheless, the essence, the point of the sculpture is outside the material components of the structure; it is in that space, condensed into a single point, that can be found between the tip of the pendulum and the ground. This imaginary point refers to the omphalos, the centre of the world, the place where the cosmos was born, which was understood as a symbol of the connection between the underworld, Earth and Heaven, as well as the point where the axis mundi starts. A probably even more perfect possibility to restore the axis mundi, to return to the creative force, is modelled by Cosmogony (2007). Again, the plumb is made of light alder and light-filled gold, is large in size, and is again virtually connected to the sky. It resembles both a human figure and the golden top of a Buddhist stupa, and represents immaterial, sacred energy. The tip of the plumb, like God’s index finger, points at the cross inscribed in the sandblasted circle on the slab of granite, the oldest model of the world now representing the emerging cosmos. It is also a cosmic wheel, whose rotation represents the ceaseless change to which everything in creation is subject. The slightly arched spokes even define the direction of rotation, while the cross signals the four points of the compass and the centre of the world. The granite cone that erupts into the third dimension in the middle of the granite slab may represent the embodiment of the universe, its emergence from nothingness. As a mirror, the circle, which represents perfection and infinity, reproduces the celestial order, the pendulum that symbolizes measure. This way, by evoking the greatest outflow ever of divine energy, the creation of the cosmos, the passageway between Earth and Heaven, the axis mundi, is virtually rebuilt, the relationship of the two spheres is restored, as is the balance of matter and spirit, the profane and the sacred, which is upset in our overly material world. The essence of each, conceptually extended sculpture is in part beyond the material components, in the notion of the perpendicular as a virtual axis mundi, which again underscores the nature of sacred geometry as something that is based on energy lines and consciousness.

Though at first sight the Prayer Wheel (2006) forms a horizontal, terrestrial axis, its invisible “rope” extends in the perpendicular direction, and encourages associations to wells and the water of eternal life the same way as The Source of Life does. The invisibility of the “water” suggests that it is spiritual, while the “well” also seems to bring some underground, chthonic energy to the surface. Though the title refers to Tibetan Buddhism, the roughly hewn wooden construction, which has a handle and recalls the objects of Hungarian peasant culture, is more suggestive of pantheism, a harmonic unity with nature. This is so even though the basic form is again geometric and symbolic, resembling a window or a gate; its cracked, uneven elements are nonetheless organic, the technique emphatically manual. Like the Sun Gate, the frame is made of oak, the drum from the trunk of a pear tree, with walnut ends, the axis from larch, and when the drum is turned, pebbles start murmuring inside its grooved interior. What they murmur are probably not Tibetan hymns but shamanic songs, just as the sculpture as a whole seems to open a passageway to possibilities that are related less to world religions, such as Buddhism or Christianity, than to nature and ethnic or natural religions, such as pantheism. The technique of the work makes a hidden, personal reference: Menasági started to use manual woodworking techniques after he moved to Héreg, a village embraced by the forests of the Gerecse Hills, in response to the genius loci. Through a Glass, Darkly (2006) also employs a timberwork frame, conjoining two types of the passageway, the gate and the mirror, and carries references even more profane and personal than those of the Prayer Wheel. It couples organic wood with ice cold stone, but paradoxically it is the andesite slab, a mere 1 cm in thickness and polished brilliant on both sides, that bears the sign that refers to the human body. Because the main motif of the sculpture is again outside its body: it is the viewer, or rather, their reflection. Hung on a frame that resembles a wardrobe or a coat rack, the mirror makes us confront ourselves, and our dark silhouette in the gate suggests we have not completely entered the world of spirits. The question our obscure, imperfect reflection poses is why we have lost our contact with what is embodied by the mirror, the spiritual world. The answers suggested by the mirror are human vanity, individualism and presumption, while our reflection posits the body as an obstacle. All the more so, as the very shape of the stone mirror is suggestive of meat, or a butcher’s apron. Yet more important than anything else is the obstacle expounded in the original context of the title, St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: selfishness, the lack of love (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Threshold Stone (2011) transforms a profane object, one even more emphatically related to worldly life, into a symbol of the passageway. The motif, unavoidable when crossing the gate, embodies all the obstacles in ourselves that jeopardize entry into the spiritual world. It is not by chance that the andesite threshold is a weighty ballast, its blackness and shape suggestive of a coffin, of losing the possibility of eternal life in the other world. Yet, this threshold is covered with a grid of life symbols, which spiritualizes it, releases it from under its material weight, and infuses it with motion and life. Like a DNA, the grid runs up in a spiral, as in Messages and The Tree of the Knowledge of Good Evil. Onto the grid, Menasági grafted a pattern he fashioned from the world model representation he also used in The Source of Life, which with a cross inscribed in a circle, also evokes the life-giving Sun, and the wheel that represent the world in unceasing motion, endless change. But since the junctions of the arms of the cross and the circle are rounded, the pattern suggests myriads of dividing cells, and hence the invincibility of life. In theory, the grid can be extended in any direction, is endless, and reminds one of the so-called Christ grid that surrounds the earth. Placed at the entrance of the exhibition space, the Threshold Stone makes the visitor aware of having left behind the profane space as they enter a sacred one.

For the sake of interpretation, I have travelled in this writing from realm of the spirit – evoked by sacred geometry, the axis mundi, the motifs of the plumb, the mirror, the well, the gate and the window – to the terrestrial world. Menasági has covered the way in the reverse direction. He first confronted himself, his reflection, gauged man’s spiritual condition with the plumb, stepped over the threshold of his fears and his own subject, and then, with the help of sacred geometry and ancient symbols, using his own means of sculpture, he rebuilt those passageways to the spiritual realm that make it possible to re-establish the balance of the material and the spiritual world.