Paradox of Evidence, 2008
In his series “Paradox of Evidence,” Balogh reinterprets and updates the “Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière,” a late-19th-century photographic atlas that classified and depicted the bewildering variety of manifestations of hysteria. Jean-Martin Charcot, perhaps the most famous neurologist of his era, not only had the various stages of the “grande attaque hystérique” photographed by a team of professional photographers, but also presented his hypnotized “star hysterics” to his audience during the weekly “leçons du mardi.”
This is not the first time that these subliminally sexualized and theatrical visual documents have served as the starting point for an artistic exploration. Breton described hysteria as the “greatest poetic discovery of the late 19th century,” and in 1928 celebrated the 50th anniversary of Charcot’s “invention” of hysteria in his “Revue Surréaliste.”
Istvan Balogh adds another chapter to the visual world of hysteria, situated between theater and pathology, between performance and seduction. In a setting that defies temporal definition, he brings familiar phases of the hysterical attack back into view, expands upon them with those captured only in drawings but never in photographs, and imagines new ones. Icons of sensual femininity, as well as poses from striptease shows and table dancing, mingle with historical medical imagery.
With “Paradox of Evidence,” Balogh bridges the gap from the beginnings of the mediatization of pathological phenomena to our own era, encompassing reality TV and infotainment, which draw heavily on this very mediatization.
