Artpool Art Reasearch Center. Continuation since 1970.
ArtStudies: a term coined by Udo Wid (see: Art and Documentation no.21 (2019): http://journal.doc.art.pl/pdf21/art_and_documentation_21_art_collectives_artstudies_wid.pdf) to describe a situation where artists, curators, art critics, art historians, archivists, galleries & museums stuff and all those interested work together within the field of art, using their research methods (epistemic) to produce a particular kind of knowledge, here on art in Middle Europe.
Artpool is an absolutely unique institution for studies on Central European art. It was founded as a grassroots initiative and has grown from outdoor summer art camp art or art symposium or plein air exhibition on Lake Balaton, founded by György Galántai in Balatonboglár, as Chapel Studio, 1970-1973. See a detailed description at https://artpool.hu/boglar/project/introduction.html.
The next stage was the establishment of Arpool as a site for mail art exchange by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay in their private apartment in Budapest in 1979. Then as the Arpool Art Research Center, from 1992 as an NGO, it existed as an archive on Liszt Ferenc ter 10 in Budapest. A huge amount of archival materials on art in the region of Central Europe, as well as worldwide, collected as a result of mail art correspondence with artists and art institutions was collected and carefully cataloged. This history is described here: https://artpool.hu/Artpool.html.
The final stage is the transfer of the Artpool archive to the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest in 2020. Since then, it has been operating within a department of this institution under the name of the Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI), headed by Emese Kürti, an art history researcher with a great scientific output in the field of regional art studies. See current Artpool activity at https://artpool.hu/en.
Artpool continues its mission. For György Galántai, creating an archive was a form of his art activity or an art project. And it should be researched and historicized as a conceptual / contextual work of art, using the methods of art history. He himself described this work as “active archive.” It is a concept that includes not only the collection of materials produced by others in different parts of the world, but also the creative use of them. This idea is close to the category of “self-historicization” coined by Zdenka Badovinac and used by her at least since the exhibition Interrupted Histories in 2011 and developed in many exhibitions and conferences on the art of the region.. See: https://glossary.mg-lj.si/related/historicization-badovinac/186. This is a descriptive category that serves her to explain the way in which artists, deprived of an institutional context and lack of a reference point for their activity, created their own history of art from scratch (placing themselves in it).
Today, looking at it from a time distance, it can be said that in this way artist created an art institution and institutionalized their own art in it. In new terms, it can be said that it was a “performative archive”, i.e. one that not only recreates history but creates it, and does not close the past in files, but dynamizes it through contextualization in contemporary conditions. And this points to a new research methodology.
by Łukasz Guzek