Erika Fehér’s new work is a temporary public sculpture, which is going to be exhibited throughout the summer and into the autumn in a busy Budapest park. It consists of two objects in the form of large armchairs that are covered with a drapery of grass. The green fabric appears to stretch over them and merge into the surrounding lawn. The grass chairs are positioned such as to suggest the possibility of dialogue, both between them and with the viewer.

In his essay Dialogical Aesthetics, Grant Kester identifies the dialogical relationship as one which ‘breaks down the conventional distinction between artist, artwork and audience.’ A genuine dialogue is therefore one in which the viewer gets to ‘speak back’ to the artist and where this reply becomes in effect ‘a part of the work itself’. Such activity is an open-ended process of dialogical engagement that can produce new and unanticipated forms of ‘collaborative knowledge’ which, significantly, do not depend on the principle of formal differentiation. The meaning of a given work is therefore neither ‘concentrated in the physical locus of the object’, nor in the ‘imaginative capacity of the single viewer’.

Erika Fehér’s work does indeed have great potential to actually generate a real dialogue, to engender a conversation between park-goers, park-keepers and/or the art world. Topics that readily suggest themselves include the environment, landscape architecture, art in public space, and sculptural materials. Instead though, the viewer is kept behind a rope and any interaction with the work is purely on the level of visual sensation. The art object itself is the only carrier of aesthetic significance and the viewer is left to either contemplate the formal appearance of the work or try to figure out its immanent meanings.

In this sense, one of the possible readings of Dialogue is as a comment on the commodification of nature in urban consumerist society. The uninterrupted flow of grass from the ground into the forms of comfortable and cosy armchairs raises the question of human subjugation of nature. This point is strengthened by the specific location of the work in a highly-designed and closely-managed park. The sculpture succeeds in distinguishing itself from the other objects and interventions in its environment, and could also be read as a comment on the history of manipulation and modelling of nature in, for example, eighteenth century landscape gardening.

A feminist line could also be discerned in the work, in the notion of caring. The artist herself has a background in textiles, and in researching the qualities of fabric, she came upon grass as an organic material, the roots of which resemble weaving. Grass is living matter that needs nurturing, regular watering, and cutting. In difference to many of her previous works involving grass over the last decade, which were investigations into the transformation of the material under the influence of light and time, Dialogue is about maintaining the same quality of grass.

By caring for this living sculpture over the length of the exhibition, the artist creates a space for personal meditation. It is a ‘parallel process’ in the Beuysian sense, an artist Erika Fehér mentions as important in her work. This dimension of the work is only available to the artist herself, as the viewer’s position is confined to that of an observer. The artist often states that this is a ‘reflexive’ sculpture, and not an ‘interactive’ one, linking her to a great number of artists and critics who stand by the theory of the ‘autonomy of art’. In a similar way, she keeps the trade secrets to herself, and does not choose to discuss the method for the realisation of such a sculpture, preserving the mystery of artistic creation.

Art does not need to be instrumental to be justified in the contemporary world, but it is difficult not to wonder about the great possibilities that this work could have generated, if it was conceived as engaged and immersed in dialogue. By choosing not to approach this appealing and sensual sculpture from the ‘I like’ pleasure-based school of criticism, we open the work to a contemporary aesthetics centred on the discursive inter-relationship between the individual and the social.