The clash
The piece depicts the struggle between the two symbolic animal figures of the stock market world, the bear and the bull. The clashing forms of the two animals, which the artist has constructed from metal sections resembling stock market diagrams, represent the struggle of the material world. The two animal figures are not static, but poised to leap off the ground and spring at each other. It is but a moment, yet also an infinite movement. Humanity has struggled to survive as long as they have existed on Earth, and this is what the earliest works of art, the cave paintings and totemic sculptures – to which Szőke’s works allude – seek to capture. In the cave paintings, our prehistoric ancestors depict animal or human figures of the material world, usually leaping or swimming through the air, to evoke an otherworldly existence, in a departure from the real world. These figures may have been part of ancient rituals, mysteries, the first eternal evocations of human survival, of struggle. This clash has been going on since our forebears were gatherers and hunters, yet it is no thing of the past, but an everpresent throughout each era of humanity. In our world today, we are still part of this ongoing clash for survival, between our needs and the fulfilment of our needs. We are still facing enormous challenges and it is no easier for us now than it was 40,000 years ago. In our civilisation, the stock market has a similar driving force to that of the hunt, the struggle for material existence and material gain. Need and fulfilment.
The figures appearing at the moment of movement are made up of a system of thousands of monotonous, vertical, rigid metal columns. Individually, the columns may be thin, thick, short or long, but together the many columns form a super-powerful unit. Their cross-section and their location in an imaginary coordinate system outline the workings of the stock market in the two opposing state spaces that personify the market processes. The sculpture represents a frozen moment of continuous struggle in which there is no eternal victory. First one prevails, then the other. With its icy, neutral, cold surfaces of raw stainless steel evoking a cave bear, the beast strikes down on the bull, a reference to the declining market. The bull with his reddish glowing body – custom-made oxidized steel sections – is about to charge his opponent. He is the process of rising trends. Together fire and water, destructive and constructive energies, natural elements of life.
The two metallic beasts are born of the material world, clashing over mother earth. The addition of soil, the terrestrial world as the site of the struggle, was conceived by Szőke especially for this exhibition. The sculpture thus represents the main elements of the universe: fire in the form of the bull, water in the form of the bear, the air establishes a link between the earth (material) and the sky (spiritual) worlds and the earth element, a passive receptor, is both stable and secure, holding the clashing figures together and nourishing them. The existence of the four main elements is the condition of life. The artist was influenced by the work of Empledocles, who, in the 5th century BC, in his Tetrasomia, or The Doctrine of the Four Elements [Roots], was the first to derive the universe from the blending of the four elements, and is considered a forerunner of materialism. For Empledocles, the 4 elements originate from 4 gods. Reflecting on this, Szőke sees the totems of the modern age in the images of the bear and the bull, whose clash between the spiritual and the material world embodies the clashes of existence itself.
