AndrÌÁs Beck
In each of the pictures of the series, entitled Busy Hands a hand is doing its job: simple, everyday jobs. It cleans, scrubs, washes, and propagates plants, wearing or not wearing gloves. One cannot know if the hand ends in a male or a female. There is no head that belongs to the hand. One may not even need a head to perform the almost spontaneous, mechanic movements. The impersonal effect is strengthened by the schematic, diagrammatic style of the pictures, and the absence of the traces of the artist's hand.
However, it is specifically this absence of individual identity that gives the picture and its viewers a common ground. The hand, which is separated from the rest of the body, is familiar to us. I can feel as if it belonged to me, since it really could belong to me. At least, it could as well belong to me as anybody else. With the help of these diligently working hands we could actually regain our everyday movements that are hardly even paid any attention. In these sign-like pictures we see a great but, these days almost-perished topic of art, the topic of the working man. It returns with an unexpected naturalness. Physical work in its elemental form appears for us as an automatism, characterized by the perfect economy of reflex or routine movements of the hand that functions without the control of conscious thinking. That kind of basic, mechanical movement rarely becomes of life conscious in us. The images of Busy Hands are the still images, of the rare moments of when we consciuosly create something of reclaimed evidence.
Translation: Hedvig Turai
