START POINT PRIZE – Prize for emerging artists

Márk Radics conceived of his final thesis work as a conceptual project the theme of which is the actual idea of the thesis connected with academic education. He found inspiration for it at an exhibition about the principal of subversion in art in the Württembergischer Kunstverein where he was helping with the installation of the Hungarian collection. There he found labels with a somewhat bizarre warning “Beware, Artwork” which the local archive used to mark the art objects included among the ordinary archival materials. Radics asked the artists who were taking part in the exhibition, among them renowned artists of the contemporary scene such as Dan Perjovschi and Tamás Szentyóbi, to write their signature on the labels. Radics then mounted them and presented them as his own thesis work which intentionally balances on the edge of what could be considered being a thesis. Since the times of Marcel Duchamp we know that just the artist’s statement is enough to elevate something “non-artistic” to the level of an artwork. This idea is presented here in a particularly direct, almost obligatory form. (mf)