András Böröcz: Props

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a prop can be “anything that serves to support something or keep it in place.” In András Böröcz’s work things are rarely in place—he continuously and strategically misplaces the function of objects and subverts their relations to create a disturbance in the order of things.

Böröcz’s objects move among different tasks and ways of being—they are artworks, toys, fetishes, musical instruments. Pencils are carved to become comic and vulnerable human figures, or made into boxes that function as both rooms and theatre stages. Eggs and drums are becoming canvases, walnuts are carved and painted, and palettes are mushrooming on dead tree branches or on an old easel. Böröcz carves, draws, paints, assembles, and constructs his work from unusual raw materials as well as from found and readymade objects, and often uses the finished works as performance props.

A sculptor, performer, draughtsman, gardener, and builder, Böröcz studied painting at the Academy of Fine Art in Budapest and participated in the experimental workshops led by Miklós Erdély (1928–86), the leading figure of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde. He began his multimedia performance work in 1977, with painter László László Révész. Since 1986, Böröcz has been living in New York where he continues making and performing.

Böröcz’s practice is rooted in Dada performance and assemblage work, Duchampian conceptualism, and in Eastern European literary and theatrical traditions of the absurd, yet he creates objects and images with the precise facility and gift of a master craftsman. In both his object-based works and performances, he turns art making into a mock ritual—he plays the artist and performs, as some of his carved figures do, the artist’s labor in the studio as a deadpan satire.

The three-dimensional works form a theater of objects created through playful deconstruction and dis-assemblage. He makes, uses and misuses objects in his Williamsburg studio, in his garden or in front of an audience to imitate and upstage practices of art and everyday life. His clever, often melancholy and always profoundly amusing work also has political dimensions—Böröcz’s props propose freedom from the prescribed functions and protocols we live by and offer liberation from the impositions of mass-produced things that regulate how we do things with whatever is at hand.

Agnes Berecz