Margery Amdur

The focus of my project will be on personal, familial, and cultural mythology and its relationship to creativity. During my time in Budapest I will examine, first hand, how people living within Budapest associate and understand their chosen professions in relationship to their lineage.

This research is for a book project about identity and creativity and how they inspire community based art in today’s societies. In addition to gathering information for this project I will work on a proposal to be submitted to the CEU to create and install an art object based on my research. I will also be ready to give a public presentation on my development as an artist. Thus I hope to contribute to the development of the Visual Studies Platform at the university. Other aspects of this research I plan to incorporate in my teaching at Rutgers University.

Philosophically, my approach to art is post-modern. I am a person who embraces paradox and I reject distinctions of “subject” and “object.” Most of our key concepts, values, beliefs and structures derive their historicity from cultural construction which itself is personal. I am interested in how (our) personal and cultural histories are altered, as we as human beings are constantly revising, to better understand, our positions within our communities and our visions for the future. In this respect scholarly studies on cultural memory help me to conceptualize my work.

I create work from a place of seeking to respond to the Pre-Socratic question “How shall one be-in-the-world?” However, I reject the postmodern notion that all knowledge has become externalized, materialized, and commoditized under the pressure of the information age and totalitarianism, and that our underlying “Metanarratives” of human purpose have become irrelevant. However, given its long history of falling in and out of occupation and how pervasively the Hungarian psyche is veiled with the effects of that dance, I cannot imagine a more interesting place to explore this matter than Hungary. My project will examine the roots of social knowledge through the lens of identity and lineage.