a. the athens contemporary art review 10

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ISSUE 10 • FEBRUARY 2007α. athens contemporary art review

Contents

03 Editor’s note

04 Correspondence

05 Drafts

08 Art in the age of meta-politics Yannis Stavrakakis’and Kostis Stafylakis’ paper

in the 1st Athens Biennial Conference

20 Interview Nikos Tranos discusses with Christopher Marinos

32 Some remarks on the impressionistic paintings of Thanassis Totsikas

Sotirios Bahtstzis comments on Thanasis Totsikas’ exhibition

38 The Faint Unity of History Maria Thalia Carras writes about Michael Schmidt’s exhibition

42 The Visual of Music Esther Lemy writes about Athanasios Argianas’ exhibition

46 Contemporary Testimony Giota Konstandatou writes about the exhibition Purifying Love

50 Intervention at the Kypseli Municipal Market Reconstruction Community desribes the event

at the Kypseli Municipal Market

54 Visits Katerina Nikou meets Angelo Plessas

58 Book Review Effi Yannopoulou writes about W.G. Sebald

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The 1st Athens Biennial staged its conference, entitled Prayer to (passive?) resistance, on February 17-18. The event was step two towards the Destroy Athens exhibition; step one was the publication in September of Suggestions for the Destruction of Athens, a slim handbook and a collection of extracts presenting the curators’ conceptual thrust and intertextual points of departure. In its turn, the conference sought to explore the central axes of the progression set to culminate in the

Biennial exhibition in September 2007. The acts of the conference, which are to be published in April 2007, will complement the exhibition catalogue. This issue of A contains an abridged version of the paper by Yannis Stavrakakis and Kostis Stafylakis with which the conference opened.

Nikos Tranos’ show approached the seemingly unrelated issues of the confinement and assimilation of forms on multiplelevels. In my opinion, the Crimen Majestatis show actually revolved around the cardboard box simulating the identical torture cells used by the Democratic forces during the Spanish Civil War. Continuing his series of interviews with Greek artists, Christoforos Marinos discusses the exhibition and its prerequisites with Nikos Tranos.

Although Thanasis Totsikas is an artist whose work critics are often swift to appreciate, his work remains largely inaccessible. Sotirios Bachtsetzis looks back at his recent show (see Issue 9), and attempts to draw closer to its impressionistic premise.

Esther Lemi, a musician, provides a tool for reading the musical structure of Athanasios Argianas’ show. Giota Konstantatou reviews Anisa Ashkar and Joseph Dadoune’s joint-show, Purifying Love. The “Reconstruction Community” reports on its action in Kypseli’s municipal market, where local citizens have been staging a sit-in protest. Finally, Maria-Thalia Carras, who is keeping the locus Athens programme up and running along with Sofia Tournikioti (the last event was the excellent panel discussion“Architecture and Art” held at the Athens Odeon), writes about Michael Schmidt’s show.

It’s strange how often passing references in a magazine can convey a strange sense of unity. This issue, for instance, contains two separate references to the Moebius strip, once in the Stavrakakis-Stafylakis essay and again in Esther Lemi’s review. However, the second double reference—to Italo Calvino’s The Castle of crossed destinies in the Tranos interview as well as in EffiGiannopoulou’s book review—is perhaps more significant. W.G. Sebald’s novel, The Emigrants, is one of those rare cases in which contemporary literature turns to subject-matter in which contemporary art usually enjoys a distinct advantage.

Next issue: late March.

04

Bibliographical References

Sirs,Elpida Karaba and Kostis Stafylakis’ piece entitled “Isn’t this feminist enough?” whet my appetite to findout more about the projects to which they refer.

I was therefore hoping you could tell me where I can find the acts ofthe Gaps in the history of art confer-ence, as well as the Greek editions of:

1. Women and art (which deals with the 4+ group), Athens, Cultural Cen-tre of the University of Athens, 1990. 2. The power of visual logos, by Zoi Kosmidou.

Thank you, Yours sincerely,Pieretta Sakellariou

Dear Miss,The book references are as follows,

Κενά στην ιστορία της τέχνης, εκδόσεις Γκοβόστης, 1990, Αθήνα.Art Group 4+, Women and Art, Athens, Cultural Centre of the University of Ath-ens, 1990.Zoe Kosmidou, The Power of Visual Logos: Greek Women Artists, ICAN, Αθήνα, 2003.

You may surely find them in the libraryof the Athens School of Fine Arts, 256, Peiraios str.

Bibliographical observations

Sirs,In the last issue of your review, Th-anos Stathopoulos expressed the opinion that: “As a genre, the liter-ary interview has unfortunately not fared well in Greece; indeed, any at-tempt to discern (so much as a trace of ) a tradition will, I fear, draw an absolute blank, or, at best, drag up

the late Alekos Lidorikis”. In the same issue, Mr. Stathopoulos corrects your collaborator, T. Tramboulis, with regard to the publishers of Giorgos Makris’ collected works (Estia, not Stigmi). How nice it would be if Mr. Stathopoulos displayed the same attention to historical accuracy in his own texts. Specifically, we shouldlike to point out that Exantas pub-lished volumes of interviews by Soti-ris Kakisis during the Eighties (Appia odos, for instance) which essayed (successfully, for the time) a hybrid of poetic and journalistic writing.

Thank you,Vasilis Diakoumakis

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The Archaeology of the Future: Searching for the Barbarians

The first day of the conference“Prayer for (Passive?) Resistance” came to a close with a long discus-sion inspired by the talks given by Maria Theodorou, Panaghis Panaghi-otopoulos and Jeremy Valentine, fol-lowed by a lengthy debate on urban spaces. The focus was on the identity of the Athens middle class as well as the political geography of the scandalous new malls. Numerous unorthodox connotations inspired by this debate were not expressed, one of which juxtaposed the “urban hermeneutics” of the future with the distant past of Athens.

The creation of Athens as a stere-otype city was spectacular right from the start and actually possessed two major points of view, an inner one and an outer one. As explained by

Eleni Bastea in a discussion of her book The Creation of Modern Ath-ens: Planning the Myth” in an inter-view for Ta Nea newspaper in 2001 (http://ta-nea.dolnet.gr/print_article.php?e=A&f=16948&m=R22&aa=1), “…the creation of Athens was not only a European matter, as argued by architect Klenze, but also a predomi-nantly Greek matter. The design and reconstruction of Athens symbolised the innovation and restoration of the Greek kingdom itself”.

In a working generalisation, we might argue that if this spectacular-ideological design of Athens as the urban gesamkunstwerke of romantic neoclassicism was initially signalled by (among others) Raffaello Ceccoli’searly landscapes, in which the theme “Acropolis - priest - shepherd” was consolidated, and by Schinkel’s re-jected proposal to erect Otto’s palace on the “sacred rock” of the Acropolis.

The second similar-definitive waveof spectacular reconstruction was recently launched, culminating in the Olympic Games 2004. Yet, if the neoclassical mansion, which “turned its back to the dark Ottoman remains of the past”, was assimilated and be-came the trademark of the “authen-tic Greek neighbourhood”, which new type of construction is going to take its place – perhaps against our predictions?

In the aftermath of the post-junta “socialist” phase, Athens seems to have boldly and swiftly jumped on the post-modern wagon, and con-stantly evades us. The current criti-cal discourse in the visual arts and architecture scene is often disrupted by electrical noise. No matter how vibrant reference to the grim reality of the American models sounds, the terms in which the new hyper-con-structions are described and demon-

http://tanea.dolnet.gr/print_article.php?e=A&f=16948&m=R22&aa=1

http://tanea.dolnet.gr/print_article.php?e=A&f=16948&m=R22&aa=1


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ised, on the basis either of a 1990’s leftist discourse or the international bibliography on the subject, are di-rectly related to the distinctive local transformations of these trends. The old stereotypes – souvlaki, the social ritual of the evening stroll, the long hours of sipping coffee,all come back with a vengeance and consolidate themselves on the carpets of multiplex cinemas, in a village square cum imported subur-bia saga. The inhabitants, however, continue to find themselves in anextremely interesting phase of ex-ploring the new reality. The users of the metro (in which everyone seems to fit in) still wear their bestclothes, take note of the glossy fin-ishes, discover the glorious past in the make-belief displays with the “finds” or the “ancient remains” andkeep an eye on their behaviour, as-suming the air of taking a stroll in a

small-town high street.Athens as a capital city is charac-

terised by two charming paradoxes: in spite of its ancient pedigree, it is scandalously new, and in spite of its chaotic appearance it is spec-tacular from birth. If the newly-imported malls fell into a puzzled disuse or were abandoned in the 1990s, today The Mall par excel-lence glows as the most appealing mushroom on the arid sides of the Attiki Odos. Couldn’t we perhaps find our way into the rifts betweenthe stereotypes of mass culture and conservative humanism in order to boldly explore the “unconditional principles” and, ultimately, our own embarrassment? Can it be that an inflexible discourse, the Adornoinside us, our ritual self-flagellationmake us less efficient, less insightfuland prophets of disaster? The Mall may be the future version of Ziller’s

Drafts

trilogy, the object of nostalgia for future journalists.

Despina Sevasti

RADIATIONS, 20/02/07, CCA, Glasgow

In Glasgow for a postgraduate course at the city’s School of Art, I seized the chance to organize a screening of videos by Greek artists at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA: cinema 4). The works screened were by the following artists: SifisLykakis, Dionysis Kavallieratos, Ange-los Plessas, Myrto Stamboulou, SofiaSimaki, Vasilis Karouk, Despoina Sev-asti, Mandy Albani, Despoina Stokou, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Voltnoi, Dimitris Karantinopoulos.

The curation sought to present Glaswegian art-lovers with relatively singular Greek work in the video

sphere. The videos chosen essen-tially form a group of works in which the artist’s idiolect, though linked with some precision to international production, nonetheless succeeds in revealing the metaleptic essence of the act of reference. The selected artists successfully avoid simplis-tic appropriations or borrowing of stereotypical form and content, and transform the referential act into a rational reduction whose content simultaneously defines both theform and meaning of their work. Working in their own way, the art-ists have in these videos succeeded in referencing a complex prismatic event through which everything is refracted, magnified and ultimatelyrendered as personal narratives or obsessions.

The works shown could each be seen as an identity somewhere between the personal and the refer-


07

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ential; as a unique mirroring of the associations all references bring into being. I would say these videos mir-ror an “enlightened egotism”, maybe the most interesting thing contem-porary Greek reality has to offer.

Rallou Panagiotou

What Conference?

Although I was only there for a little while, I have to confess that what most impressed me at the recent Conference of the 1st Athens Biennial 2007 was the attendance. In spite of my often declared interest for the arts – evident also in my collabora-tion with this magazine – I think my tolerance of learned discussions is becoming slight. That is why I won-dered what in the name of God had all these people come for, piled one on top of the other or standing up, in

the middle of a rainy weekend, and why were they not leaving, why were they not going to do whatever it is they do when they are not listening to lectures about the philosophy of Walter Lipman.

My question was answered, though, when a few days ago I had a talk with an acquaintance of mine, who is a member of the Athens Bien-nial team. He had the kindness to tell me of a brief conversation he had, when an Athenian curator called him on the phone to complain: “You did not tell me about Intercontinental!” she shouted at him. My acquaint-ance wavered for a bit, and then proceeded to make excuses for forgetting to invite her to the recep-tion that took place in the luxurious hotel, in honour of the Conference speakers. And while excusing him-self, he remembered that he had not seen her, in order to invite her. “Be-

sides,” he mumbled “I did not see you at the conference…” Her answer was merciless: “What conference?”

Rodyahttp://www.kill-alyona-ivanovna.

blogspot.com

http://www.kill-alyona-ivanovna.blogspot.com

http://www.kill-alyona-ivanovna.blogspot.com

Giannis Stavrakakis

and Kostis Stafylakis

discuss some of the

fundamental paradoxes

of contemporary art in

the age of blockbuster

exhibitions and the

metapolitical.

Art

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Moebius strip.


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The paradox of contemporary artThe comments that follow relate to a fundamental paradox of art in our con-temporary environment. The paradox can be summarized thus: the grow-ing power of artistic institutions and the greater scale and frequency of the important/international art events that have been staged in Greece over the last two decades have been accompanied by an intense quest for a new and politically radical art within the framework provided by these very institu-tions. As with all paradoxes, while this may seem contradictory to the core, it ultimately regulates the coexistence of certain elements which cannot be rec-onciled dialectically save through their dynamic/political co-articulation. How, in truth, could we explain how the globalization process, which is linked to an increase in the budgets available for major international blockbuster exhibi-tions, for promotional mechanisms, and for the production of a new global art élite (artists and curators), has also led to new artistic and theoretical dictates which now lay claim, with what may well be unprecedented vigour, to radical-ity and to having made a break with the aesthetic past of the historic avant-garde?

Some explain this paradoxical relationship between the increased financialpower of the institutions and the resurgant radicality of art (and the discourse on radical art) in terms of immanence. Every theory of immanence is based on the idea that systems of domination and legitimization conceal within themselved the potential for transgression, a potential produced without the need for highlighting and politically mediating the fundamental exclusions, negativity and deficiency hidden in its foundations. Which means the con-

ditions governing systemic transformation are perceived as intrinsic to the system in a positive sense of plenitude/surfeit rather than a negative sense of antagonism. This is clear, for instance, in analyses by theoreticians such as Jean Fisher:

While we might deplore certain procedures and ideologies of the globalized art market, we clearly cannot dismiss the fact that, like the internet, in opening up networks of communication to what it legitimizes, it also opens cracks for the in-filtration and circulation of what it doesn’t legitimize. While international biennialsand conferences privilege the institutionally “acceptable,” they also provide sites that the “unacceptable” can take advantage of – they enable an exchange of ideas and experiences not always under institutional control.1

Yet, however much this reassuring view may correspond to aspects of con-temporary reality, it certainly cannot be described as ideologically innocent, since it seems to pay inadequate attention to the Political at the very moment that the social bond which sets its external limits is coming apart, and this always clears the way for political decision-making, mediation and leadership--elements which cannot stand in for technological progress of any kind or for immanence in the form of an automatic pilot. As is often the case, the logic of immanence misuses the Internet and technological advances as universal metaphors, and ends up limiting its search for ‘cracks’ to within the institu-tions. It thus chooses not to focus on their provenance (whether the institu-tions are political, artistic or something else) or on the exclusions within them,

Art in the age of metapolitics


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thereby limiting all possible criticism, resistance and alternative approaches to the peripheries set by the prevailing system.

However, we can no longer counter this new metapolitical perception of the function and prospects of radical art with the traditional terminology of aligned art; a return to the language of the late or new avant-garde, to the refuge of “aesthetic negativity”, is no longer sufficient. The historic and lateravant-garde’s traditional form of militancy suffered a radical and intense dis-articulation during the Eighties, the result of the collapse of at least two core axes of radical art.

Firstly, as Hal Foster has accurately pointed out, the reconstruction of the class subject by avant-garde and late-avant-garde art gradually gave way to a critique of social reconstructions (of gendered identity, national stereotypes etc.). Secondly, the Promethean myth of ‘liberation’ via the means of produc-tion--the myth of productivism from Marx to Brecht and Benjamin--ceased to convince. An art centred exclusively on the means of production fails to take the workings of ideology, the cultural significance of consumption, and theburden of social and sexual difference into account.2 Which means that we are dealing with a process which follows on from that which left its mark on politics and political theory, too: the shift from class politics to identity politics and the reorientation of interest towards the ideological re-production of identifications.

There can be no doubt that the ensuing landscape is more complex in so far as it is no longer easy to distinguish that which reproduces the status quo from that which calls it into question, since there no longer seem to be

firm foundations viewed from which the distinction would acquire some de-finitive meaning. This absence of a transcendental, definitive foundation isconsidered—probably somewhat hastily—to have annulled the possibility of ideological criticism and anti-conformist political imaginings. It appears that a vicious circle of two-way Otherness/identity assimilation has been re-producing itself since then, serving to bring about the de facto negation of the hierarchies that rank high above popular art, the mainstream above the underground, the dominant above the opposition. We know, for instance, that in the collective imaginary, no medium has shed as much light on the biopolitical and metapolitical impasses of the age as the commercial cinema, including even Hollywood, which is a component part of the self-same meta-political, capitalist globalization. One need only recall films like Enemy of the State, Babel, Children of Men and V for Vendetta to see the truth of this.

The above comments are not meant as a denouncement. These are am-bivalent processes. Which is how critical artistic practices often assimilate in turn the identification with state, national and economic structures in order toscramble their attachment to them. The Neue Slovenische Kunst movement, for example, attempts to table the issue of national identity by hyper-identifying with the institution of state through the founding of a new one, the NSK state, with its own passports and coats of arms.3 That said, this ab initio bi-direc-tional movement does not mean that exclusions and limitations are not in op-eration, nor that the discourses of the predominant articulation and critique share the same opportunities for accusation and reverberation.



Authority and resistance: contemporary transformationsThese changes have been accompanied by a series of transformations of the techniques of power themselves; transformations that have been closely monitored by contemporary political theory. This means there is a clear con-nection with the resurgant popularity of schools of political thought that have taken on board the work of Foucault, whose founding contribution it was to perceive power as a productive force that does not merely forbid by repress-ing the subject, but actually produces things, pleasures, forms of knowledge, discourse.4 In such a context, both political theory and certain contemporary artistic practices are more concerned with highlighting the subject as an ‘ac-complice’ in their own domination, and thereby underscoring the fact that a critique entirely from without is no longer feasible. Authority and resistance are interwoven in a tight bond of ‘extimité’, a term Lacan coined in an attempt to convey conceptually situations in which it is impossible to distinguish that which is within from that without, as in a Moebius strip which is structured in such a way that its two surfaces are ultimately one, with the inside constantly turning outwards and vice versa.

This topology really does allow us to better perceive a series of phenom-ena including the dialectic between contemporary art and censorship. In its traditional or archetypical form, censorship can be defined via the arrange-ment of a state mechanism (ministry, committee, board of directors etc.) which, even in a constitutional democracy, takes a ‘repressive’ decision to exclude a given form of discourse (a news item, an artwork, a cultural good of any sort) from the public sphere (an exhibition, the pages of a publication


NSK State: Passport Department.


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etc.). Meaning we are dealing with censorship as “a restrictive intervention in an individual’s intellectual/artistic activities”. But the reproduction of “a régime of truth” is not necessarily enacted through violent repression; it can just as easily be achieved through the structuring of our subjectivity as it can in the public sphere. What we are actually dealing with here are mechanisms of con-scious and unconscious self-censorship situationally involved in the produc-tion of every identity and discourse. And these self-censorship mechanisms can no longer be fully distinguished from “market censorship”, which relies on the defining of consumer models. It should therefore come as no surprise thatmost instances of censorship in contemporary art are now actually examples of artists self-censoring, and are actually ‘arranged’ through a form of internal bilateral regulation between the artists and the institution, which ensures that they never enter the public sphere where they could fuel a political clash or even open protest which would record negativity in the public sphere. It is thus a form of metapolitical consent which is crying out for more in-depth research.

This is perhaps a good point at which to examine the example of the par-ticipation of Superflex, a Danish art group, at the 27th São Paolo biennale. Open the catalogue at the Superflex page, and one will find the name of oneof the biennale’s curators beside a blacked-out text. What could have been there before? One might be forgiven for suspecting that the organizers were jealous of the glory enjoyed by the Stalinist censors who blacked out the faces of Stalin’s fellow diners one by one in published photographs as they fell into disfavour and were purged. But nothing of the kind has occurred here.


Superflex’s scheduled participation concerned their Guarana Power project, and was to have presented the product of a Brazilian farmers’ cooperative which cultivates the guarana plant in collaboration with the Power Founda-tion, founded by Superflex, and produces the well-known guarana tonic, apopular Brazilian drink halfway between Coca Cola and beer. The farmers had joined forces in response to the activities of certain Brazilian and multina-tional corporations which had formed a cartel with the express aim of forcing down the price of the raw material while simultaneously drastically increasing the price at which guarana was sold to consumers. Superflex worked with thefarmers to organize the distribution and sale of guarana and undertook an entire advertising campaign for cheap guarana. The São Paolo curators’ invi-tation to the group to present this particular project was withdrawn by the chairman of the Biennale Foundation, who argued that the project was not a work of art, but “a product whose ulterior motive is commercialization”. He added that, far from being artistic, the group’s activities actually contravened the aims of the Foundation and were probably “harmful to third-party inter-ests”.

This logic is an example of a puzzling amalgamation of anti-capitalist rhet-oric and the “market censorship” which is brought into being by the workings of the market itself. Which presents us with the paradox: the work is banned on the—probably hypocritical—charge that a work of art has reduced itself to the status of mere product, an acolyte of the market, but is also censored as something of harm to the market in general, and to the interests of those sell-ing the same product, but reaching a little deeper into consumers’ pockets, in



particular. For better or worse, Superflex’s response to this ‘fuzzy’ censorshipcomplicated things still further: the group did not resolve to withdraw more or less ‘heroically’ from the Biennale, which would have politicized the issue; they chose to participate with another three works. In one, the Copy Right in-stallation, the group remained true to form by creating a space with copies of the famous chair designed by the famous Danish designer and architect, Arne Jaacobsen, and giving them a more authentic shape which was closer to the original. The work was part of an overall strategy based on ‘hypercopying’ and creating ‘new models’ which, according to Superflex, subvert the role of intel-lectual property and trademarks in contemporary society.

We can thus see that censorship phenomena (in the form of conscious or unconscious self-censorship or of market censorship) are not restricted to the archetypal model of repression/resistance. Via a bizarre back flip, thecensor’s intervention incorporates the anti-capitalist rhetoric ‘denouncing’ commercialization just as resistance to intervention on the part of authority is emerging as a shift of the critique from one field to another; as an attemptat multiple low-key subversions. But why did Superflex stay in the exhibitioneven after their original proposal was banned? Because the issue was never couched in terms of a rift or a clash that might have revealed the limits and exclusions on which every institution is based? Negativity, the trace of the political, the black stain on the exhibition catalogue, is ultimately drowned out by its inability to articulate itself politically. But might a stance of this sort actually remove any possibility of spotlighting and bringing about a shift in these ever-present exclusions? Might it not even legitimize and perpetuate

Superflex, Guarana Power.



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them? In what terms can we couch this short-circuit today? The problematic of metapolitics can indicate the general direction from which these issues can be fruitfully explored.

The meta-political node and its legitimizationWhat does ‘metapolitics’ mean in general and in the sphere of art in particu-lar? According to intellectuals like Crouch, Ranciere, Mouffle and Zizek, themetapolitical denominates the predominance of discourses and conventions which seek to legitimize themselves beyond all meaningful political discord, beyond all political antagonism, beyond Right and Left. In this context, the wielding of power is depoliticized and; as an apolitical process, it can then be relinquished to enlightened technocrats (economists, spin doctors etc.). In short, the metapolitical corresponds to every form of discourse, ideology, institutional articulation and social practice which represses/rejects the onto-logical importance of the ‘political’.

Both biopolitics—which reduces political decisions to the brutal techno-cratic regulation of naked life—and the consumption imperative in “societies of compulsory pleasure”—in which personal pleasure is made a social duty and every lack is reduced to the lack of a product, thereby preventing the po-liticization of desire—are forms of metapolitics since they reject the element of the political. What political theory calls ‘meta-democracy’ provides us with another example of metapolitics.5 Once again, the term attempts to describe a paradoxical, mutually contradictory field. Never before have the formal insti-tutions of democracy been operational in so many countries the length and

breadth of the globe. Never before has democratic rhetoric been so widely accepted. But this impressive achievement has a flip side: never before havethe limits of possibility, the socio-political, material and emotional conditions presupposed by a genuine democratic life, been in such a profound crisis. And this crisis assumes a series of forms familiar to us all: falling participation in politics, the declining status of the political game and political figures, po-litical alienation, cynicism etc. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly obvious that far from being coincidental, these phenomena are actually indi-cators of a broader shift in liberal parliamentary democracies.

That said, however, the rejection of the political is not leading to its disap-pearance. As Mouffe notes in his recent book On the Political: “despite what the theoreticians of the metapolitical would have us believe, what we are currently experiencing is not the disappearance of the political in the guise of rivalry”.6 So what is it we are experiencing? Mouffe argues that we aredealing with a dangerous shift. Incapable of understanding and hesitant about legitimizing the nodal significance of antagonism in democratic poli-tics, the meta-political zeitgeist forces discord and confrontation to express themselves through channels that feed into a vicious circle of increasingly uncontrollable violence: while the recognition of the antithetical nature of the political permits antagonism to be transformed into contest--which is to say it tames brute force--the metapolitical approach leads to violent outbursts which, as they impinge on the public sphere (nationally and internationally) are denominated and treated in purely ethical, cultural and ultimately polemi-cal terms (hence the fixation on axes of evil, clashes of civilization etc.).



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Which brings us to the main problem posed by the metapolitical era: in-stead of doing away with antagonism, the metapolitical rejection of the politi-cal creates new antagonisms while simultaneously depriving us of both the analytical tools required to understand these antagonisms in political terms, and the political tools required to channel the potential of antagonistic pas-sions in legitimate democratic directions. In this sense, Mouffe is essentiallywarning us that we can only dare hope for the ‘transubstantiation’ or ‘taming’ of political antagonism when we have rebutted this rejection; its potentially catastrophic nature has to be discharged.

On the level of ideological legitimization, the metapolitical rests in the he-gemony of neutral scientific/technological knowledge. One can detect here aveil of illuminating optimism which treats political, cultural and religious iden-tifications as remnants of the passions that impede the rational and neutralregulation of human affairs. The Guardian recently reported on the optimism of the most influential scientists of our era:7 Daniel Denett was certain that the dissemination of information would have undermined the potential for fanaticism, religious faith and intolerance in a quarter of a century from now; Richard Dawkins looked forward to the discovery of a theory of everything that would deliver the coup de grace to religion and other “juvenile supersti-tions”; and for his part, Steven Pinker was convinced that violence will soon be a thing of the past. In conclusion, a new world is dawning, a world without destructive passions and free of stark contrasts: a world beyond the political.

As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, a specific form of discourse lies at the coreof this metapolitical fantasy: the discourse that has gradually come to domi-

nate the social bond since ’68: the discourse Jacques Lacan has labelled “uni-versity discourse” or the “discourse of university knowledge”. This discourse is also the discourse of bureaucracy, medicine and biopolitics. The differencebetween University Discourse and the traditionally prevalent discourse, the ‘monarchical’ Discourse of the Lord, is that it’s support is no longer the abso-lutist overlord who peremptorily demands the labour and submission of the Other: it is now knowledge itself. By means of a unique ploy, knowledge as-similates multiculturalism, interdisciplinarianism and other noble values in a bid to conceal its authoritarian dimension: the hegemonic act that constitutes its moment of genesis. It is thus presented as a neutral function which seeks to pedagogically mould the unprocessed subject and his/her desires.

Metapolitics and artIs this not, to a great extent, the discourse promoted by certain international curators of art events? So what lies behind the dominance of consensual con-cepts such as “Non-negotiable Democracy”, the “Plateau of Humanity”8, “Uto-pia Station”, “Poetic Justice”, “Generosity” etc?

A major series of international art events staged since the turn of the cen-tury have recognized the need to move on from the ‘monumental’ exhibition space of the 20th century to a model based on plurality and contradiction. There is a need to focus at this point on the content of concepts such as ‘plu-rality and ‘contradiction’ when they are proposed by international curators. What is extremely interesting to note here is the tendency to incorporate antagonisms in the form of ‘multiplicity’. But where are the limits of such an

Orbist, Tiravanija, Nesbit, Utopia Station, 2003.



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undertaking? In the words of the curator/director of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, Francesco Bonami:

A curator accepting his or her own limitations should present an understanding of a world articulated through contradictions inherent in a multiplicity and diversity of ideas. The “Grand Show” of the 21st century must allow multiplicity, diversity and contradiction to exist inside the structure of an exhibition. It must reflect thisnew complexity of contemporary reality, vision, and emotions. While the grand curatorships of the 20th century reflected an almost Christian attitude toward theexhibition, as if attempting the moral and cultural conquest of the world, today the curator’s attitude must be more pagan. Today’s exhibitions, like Greek tragedy, must address the clash of irreconcilable elements.9

Bonami’s references to tragedy clearly require further comment, but let us limit ourselves for the time being to the following general observation: his words make it clear that if conflict and antagonism have to have a place inour major exhibitions, their place comes under a broader ranging ‘knowl-edge-based’ attempt at documenting ‘plurality’: the international art events of the new century seek to comprehend the multiplicity and contradictions of contemporary reality; contradictions that may be insuperable, but which can ultimately, as such, be included in the structure of the exhibition itself and in this way provide an adequate, spherical ‘knowledge’ of the snapshot of the world. The curator of Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor, spoke of the show in simple terms of gathering, describing it as “knowledge arranged in space”.

Various metaphors and rhetorical devices are employed to describe and de-fine this new knowledge: “a map of the state of contemporary art’”, “A new network of cultural expressions, which are less dogmatic and more spiritual?”, “a new Romantic dimension of internal emotion”, “Globalanticism” (globality + romanticism: Bonami’s coinage), a “fragmented panorama”, the “polyphony of voices and ideas”, an “accumulation of messages”.10 The most important thing for Bonami is how to give autonomy to each one of the participating curators to highlight their own plurality in an “a complex exhibition, but an exhibi-tion of many complexities”.11 It would seem that anything with a tendency to go beyond the limits of the enterprise, anything that threatens to develop into impossibility or negativity, can, by dint of rhetorical sleight of hand, be re-incorporated into the ‘grand’ encyclopaedic plan. Perhaps this endless me-tonymic use of rhetorical devices is actually the result of the rejection of the dimension of hegemony which such an argument contains de facto within itself, rather than of the death of the curator/Lord? Might this enumeration of declarations of polyphony, multiplicity, the gathering of images, this chaotic game of difference, have not come to fill the void where the Lord/Master oncewas with the expectation of an abiding plural plenitude? And, on the other hand, might this—simplistically utopian—desire to include everything not conceal the existence of political exclusions and demarcations that—albeit camouflaged— continue to typify the metapolitical reality?

The key event of the 50th Biennale was Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Molly Nesbit’s promisingly entitled Utopia Station, a ‘flexible’ projectwhich relied on the participation of over 60 artists, architects, authors, per-


18


formers and on a “flexibly designed” (by Tiravanija and Liam Gillick) transform-able platform/dance stage/discussion space with benches. According to the artists’ own rhetoric, someone could take a shower in this utopia station or powder their nose, combining recreation with taking in events of various kinds: performances, concerts, lectures, readings, screenings and parties. The Station’s meetings had already started on foreign soil--in Paris, Frankfurt, Poughkeepsie and Berlin--their aim being to call into question the institution-al hierarchy of different ways of putting ideas into circulation--meetings, ral-lies, seminars, exhibitions and books—and to convey their wide-ranging ideas on utopia to as broad a network as possible.12 Of course, it should come as no surprise that when the protagonists went to Paris to meet Jacques Ranciere, enthused by the publication of his book on the segmentation of the aesthetic, he informed that, as far as the question of utopia was concerned, he would be far more interested in the highlighting of dissensus and rift than in various calculations on utopia.

Ranciere himself has noted contemporary art’s tendency to identify itself with the metapolitical. The art of today is more and more concerned with attempting to activate its political potential by reframing the sense of com-munity, repairing the social bond etc.13 But in this way, both the political and the aesthetic vanish into a metapolitical, utopian ethicism. Here, Ranciere locates the supreme paradox of contemporary radical art, which is essentially no difference from the contradiction described at the very start of this textto which we shall now return: Contemporary radical art not only attempts to replace all political rifts and rivalries with a new knowledge-based plurality;

along the way, however, it betrays its potential to contemplate the metapoliti-cal condition of its existence and the limitations which it—like every hegem-onic discourse—imposes.

* Abridged version of a paper presented at the conference “Prayer for (passive?) resistance” held

in Athens, February 17-18, 2007. The paper’s paraphrases the title of the text by Boris Groys,

“Art in the Era of Biopolitics”. In terms of the argument elucidated herein, biopolitics is now just

one dimension of a broader phenomenon—metapolitics--which warrants pride of place in our

attentions. See Boris Groys, “Art in the age of biopolitics: from artwork to art documentation”,

Documenta 11, Platform 5: exhib. cat., Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002, pp.108-14.

1 Jean Fisher, “Toward a Metaphysics of Shit”, Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition Cata-

logue, Germany, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002, p.642 Hal Foster, “For a concept of the political in contemporary art”, in Recordings: art, spectacle,

cultural politics, Seattle: Bay Press, 1985, pp.141-2.



19

3 See Alexei Monroe, Interrogation machine: Laibach and NSK, Cambridge, MA: the MIT Press,

2005.4 Michel Foucault, “Intervista a Miche Foucault” in Microfiseca del Poetere, 1977 (in Greek).5 See Colin Crouch, Μεταδηµοκρατία, Athens: Ekkremes, 2006. 6 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 5.7 See “No religion and an end to war: how thinkers see the future”, The Guardian, January 1,

2007.8 Which calls to mind Roland Barthes’ penetrating analysis of the “Family of Man” exhibition

staged in Paris during the Fifties. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1957. 9 Francesco Bonami, “I Have a Dream»”, in 50th International Art Exhibition: Dreams and Con-

flicts – The Dictatorship of the Viewer, (eds) Francesco Bonami & Maria Luisa Frisa, Venuce, Venice

Biennale, 2003, p. XXI10 Ibid., p. XXII11 Ibid., p.XXII12 In the curators’ works: “It is simple. We use utopia as a catalyst, a concept most useful as

fuel. We leave the complete definition of utopia to others. We meet to pool our efforts, motivat-

ed by a need to change the landscape outside and inside, a need to think, a need to integrate

the work of the artist, the intellectual and manual laborers that we are into a larger kind of

community, another kind of economy, a bigger conversation, another state of being. You could

call this need a hunger”. See Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rikrit Tiravanija at www.e-flux.

com/projects/utopia/about.html. 13 Jacques Ranciere, “The politics of aesthetics”, to be published in the collective volume Το

Πολιτικό στην Σύγχρονη Τέχνη, eds. Giannis Stavrakakis & Kostis Stafylakis, Athens: Ekkremes,

2007.

Christoforos Marinos

discusses Italo Calvino,

confinement and

transgression with

Nikos Tranos.

Inte

rvie

w

Nik

os

Tran

os

Nikos Tranos, Head, 2007. Courtesy by A.D. gallery.


21

CHRISTOPHER MARINOS: Your new exhibition A Little Regicidal (Crimen Majestatis) in AD gallery is I think your most multidimensional creation up to now- at least in terms of sculpture. Although photography is actually absent, we are able to detect certain pluralism as far as the medium is concerned: portraits in ink, silicon and china sculpture, video, models made of packing paper, even readymade articles, namely recuperated chairs. And although a (traumatic?) event lies under every single form and a transformation is being realized, there is also an imaginary dimension of the fairy tale lurking, as in Italo Calvino’s allegoric fables. Those elements of allegory and fable are indeed present in your work and in the way you handle reality, are they not?NIKOS TRANOS: They are indeed. I have even been called a story-teller by some people –especially when I narrate or show them around my works. I wouldn’t consider my recent work as the most multiplex. I think that one of my earlier works, Spell your Name (2002) is the most composite- and the following one Hospital Infections (2004) - have been but intercrossed stories: there was a construction in the centre, namely the homeopathic tests, a palace built of sugar cubes and all around a number of photographs that were really an encephalogram, as if we had opened up a brain. To put it differently: as if we had found a certain person and told him “Spell yourName, tell us your name, who you are”- hence the work’s title. He had been unconscious and we managed to witness the images he had seen during the past year through the retina- that is with the aid of a future technique. In short, it had been something like science fiction. And suddenly, we opened

up the images and tried to interpret through them who he had actually been- as he had been unable to tell us himself. Some parts were closed, others open. We might say that it was exactly what Italo Calvino’s Castello dei Destini Incrociati( The Castle of Crossed Destinies) was about : some travelers go into the woods, they neither speak, nor eat and drink, but tell their stories with tarot cards. You have adopted the fictional mechanism employed by Calvino, inorder to discover the proper keys that might unlock the gates of meaning and narrate your own tales and passions but also those of the world around us.It is precisely so. But you should consider it as technique, for even Calvino said in an interview that he fervently wished to present it with modern material. I was halfway in the construction of my work and then I read his book- which I bought quite accidentally of course as I noticed the Tarot cards on the cover and thought that it might be of interest to me- later I realized that it provided answers to all my questions and that it helped me move forward, as I myself maintained certain doubts about what I was doing. And before that there was my other work Travel Warnings (2000), which included 101 Tarot cards as well. We could say that Travel Warnings is the point of departure for my allegoric works and the works of considerable fiction. Before Warnings my works were mainly constructions. Building Stones, for example was a work which set issues of unit and ensemble- something that always plays in my work: it is the unit and the total, namely the intermediation of the mechanism we see, and one piece is the microscope while telescope is the other. On one

Interview Nikos Tranos


22

side, there is the minutest piece we are made of and on the other where we are in the world- it is a mapping of the minor and the major. I believe that we can no longer see except in this way. Every time man sees or creates it is with the intermediation of some form of equipment. Therefore at this point, in Crimen Majestatis we could say that I approached closer, as if observing a piece through a microscope. One could say that if I were to be a writer, I would write a detective play. And I came to create also the landscape setting where the play takes place via the play itself. In other words, I have disclosed the material: I am not telling the story but am I revealing its protagonists, who are to play roles, and what they had imagined that they might wish to do. At the break -out model, at one end we can see the plastic coffee cups with theerotic imprints that the runaways were drinking from as they dug their way out, and which stand for the expression of their desires, while at the other end the tunnel leads to a cell, which stands for their fears. When one is creating a construction the result is not just a construction: it is at that point that you shape an idea and say exactly what it is. Those works are documents- it is all about “catastrophic” works: where man arrives at a procedure that tests one’s limits.I am sharing that impression myself, I have the feeling that death is lurking behind those works, death on the surface of things, on the surface of the image. With your models you are exploring the notion of prison space and confinement in terms of sculpture. Furthermore,the title of the exhibition comes from the renowned study by Michel Foucault, Surveillance and Punishment. The failure of prisons, he

maintained, lies in their very function.Yes, exactly.And which do you think is the failure of art?Every age has its own function…Is it perhaps its failure to attract wider audiences?Now you are discussing art’s problems. Those are the problems of art, not its genuine function. If we are referring to the visual arts domain, those who wish to approach it, they actually do so. Anyway, if someone refuses to approach you that might mean that something is wrong, one might not be interested in doing so. But we can see that man has not stopped singing. Why does music have wider audiences? Ok, in Greece at least because that is not the case worldwide, the attraction of visual arts appears to have weakened. But if one reads the press, how much space they devote to fashion and how much to the visual arts, one finds that it is quite limited as the product is alsoscarce. That is not the case with fashion because a share of the merchandise is immediately related to the audience. What they cannot realize is that art is something of a gift. It is an aesthetic piece which renders man rich through the gaze, astounds via the gaze. It is not a vehicle that one might carry home with him, but an eye procedure. That had always existed in the world. In older days, where was art to be encountered? In temples and churches. You rarely came across it in individual homes. There were some public spaces where art was to be encountered and so one developed criteria. Visual arts in countries like America, England or Germany do not appear to face problems. In Berlin, for instance, there are no difficulties, there are exhibitions organized



23

continuously. I think that it is Greek society that fails to be interested much in that domain, I cannot however detect the reason why.So then, the function of art is not a failure.The function of art cannot be a failure, ever. Art is necessary to every one of us, as it is the only part where one is free. It is only there that one is free, it is only within that realm that one can ignore as many red lights as he chooses. Whoever managed to understand that, they very well did. Why do audiences frequent the cinemas or watch movies? The way to approach art has possibly changed. We might not wish to watch something in common. I do go to the cinema because I want to be with and among other people. I never see filmsat home. I do not buy a DVD because I know that I have the option of pressing forward. At the point when pleasure comes through slowness, namely via the other person, I will be tempted to pause the dialogues. In the cinema I am determined to see the entire film. That is perhaps because the procedure of slowness has not been advertised enough, the procedure of going out, of visiting a gallery, of meeting other people and taking in the feeling that it might offer. Other over- advertised sectors manage to attract people, whorush and get them.If the function of Art had failed, then Art would be binding, prison-like. While, as you say it is something liberating. Perhaps the dream of freedom lies in it.A hundred percent! There appear before our eyes things we have never even imagined. All that only appears by means of art. Never forget that it was the

artist who painted gods, even. But those were the times when artists were enslaved, subjected to masters, priests, Doges and so on. At present artists, all artists are free. The problem now is how one administrates one’s freedom. It is not that simple. All unexpectedly you are offered freedom and they tell you,“You can do whatever you like”If you were working in a grand master’s studio however, you would findyourself under the surveillance of some boss. But what happens when we are all free to do whatever we choose?The cell you have created integrates multiple elements of Art History: inside we observe homocentric color circles that remind us of Marcel Duchamp’s Rotorelief. But also the way of viewing the interior refers to Etant donnés.Yes, yes. I essentially wished to create a cell. Since I was to negotiate a detective story, the result of crime reportage- for without prison there is no crime reportage- I had to deal with the psychographic part called fear.In such a procedure I read a lot about prisons, size etc- therefore I constructed 1/3 of the actual detention space. In every cell we can see that something exists, we write on cell’s walls, so I wanted to paint something in that cell. Deep inside me I did not know what to paint. When I completed the construction of the cell- made from my favorite Yamaha piano cartons which I found outside Nakas’s store- and made up my mind what to do inside, I came across an article which wrote that during the Spanish Civil war they used to place Kadinski’s paintings in the cells so that they might cause the prisoners a feeling of time and space instability.


Nikos Tranos, Crimen Majestatis, installation view, 2007. Courtesy by A.D. gallery.


25

Furthermore, in order to stress that feeling of instability and as they did not have access to a Kadinski’s work they had illustrated the article with Op Art! And then I read an article about a prisoner who used the stones of sour oranges and fruit kernels-as he was probably not allowed to have any colors- and painted homocentric circles, small, like post-cards which he was selling on the Internet. And somehow I decided to get myself into that prisoner’s place. I naturally knew that they had been used by Marcel Duchamp and also for the one-eyed, employed by oculists in order to create focus depth. In this case, you take a part of Art History, but without sticking to Art history.You namely select that part which suits you and you perform that in a modern way. You do not do it in the old way: I did not make them move, or anything. I just set that time/space instability in the cell and that is why I put it in motion, as if when you are inside the prison. I actually speak about time in the entire work. It is a work on time and perception. What is confinement? What is allthat?Yet, apart from the issue of time instability, I believe that as far as the particular work is concerned, we can speak of another type of allegory. The detention cell is made out of thrown away packing carton. It is as if you are saying that we are all trapped into our consumption mania- you are creating a cell out of the waste of society and of its public space.And there’s more. It is not only that; apart from the consumption there are also the clochards, who turn those boxes into homes. When I was in Paris in the ’90s the clochards use to live in such boxes. Now they live in carton boxes

in Athens, too. That is one thing. Another is the “packaging”, packing people into prison houses. And on the other, a piano-cradle leads us to the procedure of listening through an image also to one of that piano’s tunes. I thought about it all while I was constructing it. But, to be a little matter-of fact, I did not wish to make the cell out of any strong, hard material. I could have made it with ply-wood. But no, I wanted to construct it with a type of material that would bear all those qualities of re-use, the traits of its ‘earlier history”. I place it within historicity and space-specificity: it is a Yamaha piano, it came fromJapan and I found it in the streets of Athens. The piano is universal at the same time. One can find this type of box anywhere. It is not just localized. Youcan go everywhere by means of a box. The whole thing has traveled. You are not there. You are there but not only there.In one of Yiorgos Ioannou’s early “prose works”, under the title The cells included in the “For one’s pride” (1964) collection, the prison simulates the cell of a saint who ‘gathers his spirit and soul and tightens them with God’. To Ioannou, a prison maintains a form of spirituality and mental serenity that one could not possibly find in the outside world.Such mental peace could possibly be the cell of a monk- which I know not of as I have never been one. But I do not think that there is mental peace in prison. Let us not confuse things: a prison term is not a holiday.Imprisonment is a very hard form of punishment no matter if you get soaked in water or bastinadoed or whatever. Monks depart on their own free will, they are not forced by anyone to leave and go wherever they have chosen. And one can have a cell with a view. We have never seen any monk lining in



26

a gorge. They live in high places- higher than Lycabettus! They all have view; there are passages and watching-towers. It is not like that in prison. A prison house is the absolute confinement: you can not see the sun, you can only seeinwards, like a closed shape. These are two completely different situations. Letus not get confused over things.I attempted that parallelism to a saint’s cell because I wanted to ask you if you feel that with your portraits you are somehow sanctifying those law violators. The fact that you put the drawings in golden frames, for instance. Why do you draw them? If we are referring to this portrait series, you will notice that Adam and Eve are among them, as pithecoids that lead us back to the jungle and to Paradise lost. We enter the condition when man used to be a food collector and the thief stood there, beside him. Therefore, it is a memory of the food collector. That is what I believe: theft is a food-collecting procedure. I do not sanctify them at all. I am just putting myself in their shoes, as if I had been confined,who the people I would meet would be. I obviously consider all this by means of crime reportage. But had I been in prison, what sort of people would I meet? That is, what sort of paintings would I paint? What portraits? I would paint the people around me. It is all about a journey, an encounter through actual situations.Then, in some way, both the prisoner as well as the solitary king could very well be you.No, they are not me.Are you not the solitary, romantic artist behind the iron-barred window

of reality? Genet, on the occasion of his visit to Giacometti’s studio, used to say that solitude is a secret reign, “an indiscernible awareness of incontestable uniqueness”.I personally felt that mystic reign or secret solitude in its most essential form in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, for Beckett himself had led a solitary life, - let us not forget that he died in a house for the elderly. That was no reign- that closed thing. But we can say that they were behaviors. We are not referring to the condition of being a king; we are all kings of ourselves and we are continuously conversing with our bodies and our brains. Our body shows us the environment. It is like a thermometer that indicates what exists around us. It is a procedure of seeing a person and not knowing what he is thinking about. That is the secret. And when you are peeping into a cell through the keyhole it is as if you were walking into it a little. But I had already negotiated that form of “encephalogram” before, in Spell Your Name. That is why I consider my recent work as a continuation. I employed the golden frame as a reference to eternity. Gold is an everlasting metal. Once more I am speaking of the time procedure. But again it had been an accidental thing, simply because the firstportrait I had painted based on crime reportage had been within a golden frame, the person’s sister had framed the portrait thus; that made me use the golden frame in every portrait. Later, it appeared like hagiography somehow. But as it had been accidental as a start, I continued to use golden frames. If hagiography was the outcome, that was that. It was similar to the chairs I had used in order to speak of time – the Death of a Salesman, the death of the petit bourgeoisie- initially I used to say that it had to do with my ecological



27

concerns. The fact that I collect chairs from waste means that I like them and I do not like seeing them wasted, thrown away.But those objects do reflect old glories, don’t they?They definitely do. Those are the qualities of the readymade. The point is to beable to see other images through it. Every time you use a ready made article, you also see more images than what is actually there. If we refer to the initial readymade artwork which was supposed to be a urinal and which Duchamp called “a Fountain”, I personally see no urinal; I can see a standing man peeing. And if we go even further I can see…have you ever seen little boys led to pee in ponds? Well, what I see is a man peeing and if it is a Fountain, we all bend and drink water there! One can view a multitude of images by means of the readymade artwork. On one side I wish to maintain the ambiguity and on the other, since it is all a detective artwork, I want the viewer to enter it and discover the findings himself. To enter and gaze through the microscope. Weall have something of a detective in us – we have seen so many crime stories in movies. Let the viewer discover the connotations, what the artist meant. Even I cannot actually interpret it- it is too soon. As far as my earlier works are concerned I can also refer to Art History. Viewers offer me various versions;that is very interesting, as they are liable to so many interpretations. My friend Margarita brought me a text by Georges Bataille, about the 1917 Russian revolution and how they secretly killed the king and put Lenin in his place and ultimately deified labor. That is what Bataille says…That provided anadditional clue. I consider the condition as an artist, and an artist leaves a lot of things open. In the novel I left many open fields, open to the viewer. Even

now, you are mentioning aspects I have never thought of.Yes, for instance, in another Calvino’s novel, “A King hearkens”, the palace is both the king’s body and his prison at the same time. As Antaeus Chryssosostomidis, the Greek translator of Calvino’s works says, such fables are the best way to narrate human passions and the eternal struggle between good and evil, by crossing from one literary genre to the other. That is what you essentially do when you speak about confinement. I do believe that the process of confinement is one of the most violent andharsh sanctions undertaken by man against his fellow men, so that what we call civil democracy can function. We should not forget that we findourselves at constant war. Man himself has both Good and Εvil within him, it is a perpetual war. Microbes are also living organisms but think how many fungicide ointments there are, which we use to cure the fungi on our feet and toe, how much medication we take. What is all that about? It is all a battle. Do not deny it: you have some type of insecticide at home. Do not tell me that you face ants with adoration. You walk on them and smash them. And if you find any of them crawling into your food, to steal that minutest piece of it,you get pissed and smash them or even panic. The war of man against other animals is not over.As we are discussing battles, let us come to present day affairs andcurrent reality. I was reading the other day in the press about the EL.AS’s ( The Greek Police’s) project to establish a ghetto in Exarcheia: to be precise as TA NEA newspaper (of January 20th, 2007) wrote, the code


Nikos Tranos, Cell, 2007. Courtesy by A.D. gallery.


29

name attributed by the Greek Police officials to the treatment of thehood-bearers’ action was the “Guadanamo Project”. Athens has been transformed into a battlefield and the Exarcheia residents experience acondition of confinement. It is like living in an open prison.Yes, that is true, I have though about it a lot. One is bound to think of it….In my opinion that piece of information synopsizes your entire new work, as it includes confinement, prison, current affairs, Guadanamo, cellsand the city. If you think of it, it is an event, a social condition, Crimen Majestatis par excellence. Yes. I can see what you man, although I have not read the article on the Exarcheia Guadanamo. The truth is that since one lives in Exarcheia one cannot but wonder about the whole procedure. There are times that I haven’t got the slightest idea what goes on at the Square as I live in Kallidromiou Street and my mother who lives in Evia call me and says, “There is word that they burned down the area again” and I cannot but wonder, even If I do not wish to, and ask myself “what is going on?” It is true that for us who are residents in the area the whole situation is like a confinement. We realize that excellently when we go to the ArchaeologicalMuseum area, there is a Special Forces squad at every corner and they are supposedly there to protect us. But that is not the case in reality; they are not protecting us at all. But apart from that, I consider Exarcheia to be the only living area in the city. It is a place where all happens at once, simultaneously. That can often be troublesome, as your eyes suffer from tear gas; in shortyou experience a daily routine that spoils the soup a little. You cannot have a

better car; it might get burnt. That is one of the negative sides. On the other hand however, you have the opportunity to see and learn about things, from fly-bills and street posters for instance, of which you have had no idea andwhich only appear in Exarcheia. It is a completely different life.You live at the heart of current reality.Definitely, within current affairs as you listen to comments almost everymonth. I have a friend who is a journalist and maintains that the artists who frequent Kallidromiou Street are something like P.E.E.A. the “Free Government of the Mountains”. There are numerous tribes who coexist here and that cannot be encountered elsewhere. Not only the anarchists’ tribe, but also that of the right-wing extremists. They all have their office premises in the area. Itis a place where…It is a pluralistic focus.Yes, and a very energetic one. Older people also live here, not only younger ones. I do not know how tolerant tribes can afford to be to each other - theyobviously aren’t. One can sometimes witness barbarous actions.Usually, those who speak about what is right are not mature enough so as to support and realize what it actually is. That is why they operate as groups and engage in vendettas, something long since gone in South Italy, ever since the 6th century B.C.: they did not blame the entire family if one member was shitty but only punished that particular person. Here they operate as groups.They are little regicidals…You could say that, in a way. But I experience the situation as a daily routine, I am not an analyst or anything. Occasionally some things annoy me and


Nikos Tranos, 4 to 400 skulls, i2007. Courtesy by A.D. gallery.


31


others please me. But it is a neighborhood I wouldn’t change for any other. It is a neighborhood which appears to keep me young. It is an active part of the city, it lives and works and it is not definitely the Psyrri quarter. Psyrri area orHermou Street, for instance, are now agoras but without forums, nor dialogue. There, only commercial transactions take place and nothing else. While, on the contrary, the ancient agora seems to have suffered some translocationand has moved to Exarcheia. That does not turn you into a better man or a better artist. Do not take it that way.At least it keeps you active and informed. That is enough.Yes.And young.Young. I think that yes, it keeps us young, even the older ones. My senior friends laugh when they hear that. They also utter one or two swear words, but quite innocently, I think.

• Nikos Tranos’s exhibition Crimen majestatis was held at A.D. gallery (3 Pallados, Psirri, tel.: 210 3228785, www.adgallery.gr), from the 10th of January until the 24th of February 2007.

http://www.adgallery.gr

Sotiris Bachtsetzis revisits

an artist for whom critics

state their admiration

far more often than

they actually decide to

approach his work.

Som

e re

mar

ks o

n th

e im

pres

sion

istic

pa

intin

gs o

f Tha

nass

is To

tsik

as

Tanassis Totsikas, Trip to the river Aoos, 1991.


33

The new series of works by Thanassis Totsikas in his personal exhibition at Gazon Rouge Gallery (Dec. 2006 /

Jan. 2007) is a comment on painting, on the art genre of “painting” as well as on the artistic subject. The series consists of 11 paintings (oil on canvas), a video and a photograph of imposing dimensions in the entrance to the exhibition area. A black and white photograph, which shows the artist – his easel and canvas next to him – standing outdoors, facing the visitor. The paintings are evocations of the landscape surrounding the artist’s unusual, improvised living space near Aghiokambos, Larissa. The paintings have been made at different places and times but allrevolve around the artist’s familiar paths. Abstract in style, these works manage to surprise, as they seem to have encapsulated the light in their

successive layers of daubs of paint on the canvas surface – one might call them taches – and their visual contrast.

Let us take a look back at related examples of vocabulary in visual art. The Ipressionists naturally spring to mind. The artist makes explicit reference to them. Such comparative reading may help us understand how a contemporary visual artist alludes to a now completely historical, no more topical period of art (Cézanne’s oeuvre, which is synonymous with the emergence of modern art), but it may also help us identify the reasons why he makes such reference.

A nostalgic allusion to early modernist painting can easily be ruled out. The same applies to the artist naïvely returning to a certain “orthodoxy of expression”. Rather, this is a planned, conceptual and

somehow subversive remark on the relationship between the viewer and the world; it is also a reference to the manner in which this mediation takes place. Let us not forget that the series of paintings is complemented by a video projection: a steadicam evocation of an idyllic landscape (the viewer can see and hear the stream of water flowing through the artist’sfarm, that is, the same landscape that Totsikas evokes in his paintings). Experiencing the landscape through the mediation of film isthe emblematic motif of this series of paintings and must therefore be examined at the level of the project as a whole.

Let us return to Cézanne’s oeuvre, since this is at the top level of signification in Totsikas’ allusions:His works have been made – or at least seem to have been made – in the manner of 19th-century outdoor

impressionist painting (en plein air). In fact, even according to what was common practice during the period, taking up a specific subject(poplar trees for Monet, the Mont Sainte-Victoire for Cézanne), which is visually captured again and again in the artist’s effort to grasp the ever-changing nuances of lighting and colour, to capture nature. (In Totsikas’ case, naturally, this does not involve the full adoption of Impressionsit and Post-Impressionist methods but their selective use.)

One of Cézanne’s frequent terms is the “motif”, by which the artist did not imply merely the subject of figuration but also the motive forthe incessant labour of observation and the act of painting. The motif is a kind of a core rhythmic-melodic pattern, which the artist processes in various versions. “Aller sur le motif” is how Cézanne described

Some remarks on the impressionistic paintings of Thanassis Totsikas

Thanassis Totsikas, Untitled, 2004-06. Courtesy of Gazonrouge gallery


35

his approach to everyday work, implying the development of a relationship with the physical object, what it movbilises within, and what is yet to be achieved. In Joaquin Gasquet’s question to Cézanne regarding the motif, the former remembers that the painter moved the palms of his hands away from one another and then clasped them back again into a knot. 1 This knot essentially represents the distinctive association between sujet and subject, a typical relationship in modern art. The performative two-way mediation of the work of art – between figuration and self-presentation of the acting subject, description and contemplation – replaces in modern art what had earlier on been narrative and figuration either as mimesis orimitation. Thus, a modern work of art reflects less the world than its

own relationship with it; it reflectssubjectivity as a relational substance. This is also what Merleau-Ponty discusses in his familiar analysis of the “discourse of painting”, of which an exemplary case he found in Cézanne’s oeuvre. “ Each painter’s style is the system of equivalences he establishes for his own use for this labour of revelation; it is the universal index of the “cohesive distortion” through which he concentrates the meaning, as yet scattered in his conception, and substantiates it in an explicit form… Looking at real or paper flowers, healways refers to his own world…”2 In effect, conception for Merleau-Ponty becomes the creation of style, the signifying gesture, while the philosopher in this interpretation evades both the question of essentialism (the work of art as an accurate substitute, a copy of

a certain being”, whether this is a perceptible object, or an “idea,” of the Platonic sort), and the question of subjectivism and expression-centrism3 (the artist who “expresses” his “inner” world through his work).

So far, so good. The work of Cézanne, the father of modernism, can be interpreted through such a theory. But what if we go back to Totsikas’ work, who is an artist predominantly of the “post-modern condition”? If, as Jameson put it,4 we go from a “deep” aesthetic of personal style, characteristic of modernism, to the “flat” aestheticof pastiche and the proliferation of styles, characteristic of the post-modern, then the question arises whether Merleau-Ponty’s statement regarding personal “style” can be of any value for a contemporary artist who in his recent work consciously refers to the now historical avant-

garde condition? If the concepts of creativity, originality and authenticity are questioned by the post-modern, and the autonomy of the artistic field is cancelled,then what exactly is the meaning, in Totsikas’ current work, of the signifying gesture, the “painting discourse” – assuming that this is what his allusion to Cézanne serves for?

The “staged” display of the “creator’s” photograph amidst his works in the gallery invokes how history books represent “the artist in his studio, or working outdoors”. It is this same convention that Totsikas wished to replicate in this show, but for what reason? Let us not forget that the photographic representation of the self in Totsikas’ work is a conceptual tool. In an older series of snapshots (C-prints, 1991), in which Totsikas poses in




36

front of his motorcycle on the banks of the Aoos River, or in front of his new car on the beach at Nei Pori, the two-way relationship between personal space and the individual is somehow staged, as is the relation of the self with “objects”. In his work “Ducatti-Totsikas” for the 47th Venice Biennale, the object-subject relationship is defined asalmost tautological. What Totsikas has managed so far is to turn the terms of the art object-subject relationship from a relationship of dependence into one of direct experiential participation. In his work, any utility item is a potential work of art (an improvised musical instrument, a painted iron sheet, the photographic documentation of a personal moment). This gesture of “transformation of the commonplace”5 – after Duchamp and Warhol – is not limited to a

level of conceptual reference to the actual nature and definitionof art, whereby the work of art is understood precisely because it is “interpreted” as such in the context of an “atmosphere of theory of art”,6 but continues to suggest its practical utility. The musical instrument is a musical instrument; a motorcycle is a motorcycle. Strangely enough, the conceptual differentiationexpands precisely as a tautological relationship.

Yet, this may be where the meaning becomes clear, in Totsikas’ recent “impressionistic” works, of that reference to the “discourse of painting”, the “allusive logic of the world of sensual perception”, to quote Merleau-Ponty. His recent work – which must always be interpreted in conjunction with his earlier one – alludes to an attempt to deconstruct painting that has

been going on for quite some time now, which nevertheless is yet to be explained. To be exact, it is not only painting – and more precisely impressionist painting, being at the core of the modernist canon (according to Greenberg) – that the artist deals with in his recent work, but any allusion to “the painted surface”, such as in effect theaesthetics of the monitor display, the pixel, which may be more in keeping with Totsikas’ efforts. (Thevideo projection at the gallery makes us think. One begins to doubt whether the work is a comment on painting, or on the video image.) The only 19th-century artist admired by Duchamp was Seurat, and that was due to the fact that Pointillism used a mechanic arm in place of a brush. For Duchamp, Seurat was a machine, an antique machine of the digital image, one might say today. It is in

this context that Totsikas’ work must be viewed – that is, through the aesthetics of utility. It is not the artist that uses the “medium”, but instead the use – painting – that establishes the artistic subject. Osmosis through action is the objective for Totsikas, too, as it was for the “legendary father” of modernism, Cézanne, only that the attitude towards nature vs. subject – a principal relationship for both of them – is different. In his own words, Cézanne as a painter writes that which has not yet been painted and makes it painting in an absolute manner”.7 Totsikas, though, does not begin from a romantic attitude of the dominance of the modern – perhaps not even from the need to parody, to comment, appropriate and from the eclecticism of the post-modern, but from a negative position, from a waiting stance (perhaps a stance



37

of a Taoist, “pataphysical” or merely philosophical questioning). He says, “In art one must not think positive. One must think totally negative. Art is a negative science.” 8

Cézanne’s ultimate goal was to replace experience for the gaze, touch for tache, as a way to achieve his absolute objective of uniting nature with art. 9 He would never find out ifhe had actually succeeded. On the other hand, this need for osmosis between the work and the world is also evident in Totsikas’ work. The artist principally restores the immediacy of the experience against the habitual blunting of the senses in everyday people, against the apathy and dull emotions of the people who live, according to Kierkegaard, in “the present time” and suffer for that.In the “era of spectacles”, this alone – if we decide that it does come across for the viewer – amounts to

complete success.Let us conclude with an extract

from the work of a young German philosopher that perhaps best epitomizes the moral purport of Totsikas’ aesthetic effort: “Thequestion regarding the subject is linked to the question regarding freedom and responsibility. The subject is that which is free with respect to responsibility. Responsibility means to crave the impossible. Responsibility is an absolute passion. An absolute passion, “destruction” and an excessive demand... The passion of responsible philosophy is to be free with respect to the real” 10

• Thanassis Totsika’s exhibition was held at

the gallery Gazonrouge (15 Victor Hugo str.,

tel.: 210 5248077, www.gazonrouge.com),

from the 8th of December 2006 until the 20th of

January 2007.

1 Michael Doran, (ed.), Conversations avec

Cézanne, Paris, 1978, p. 106-161, 108.2 Maurice Merlot-Ponty, “I Plagia Lalia kai

oi Fones tis Siopis”, in Simeia, tr. G. Faraklas,

Athens 2005, p. 88.3 See Alexandra Mouriki, Metamorfoseis

tis Aisthitikis, Nefeli, Athens 2005, p. 69.4 See Fredric Jameson , “Postmodernism

and consumer society”, in Hal Foster (ed.),

Postmodern Culture, Pluto Press, London

& Sydney, 1985, p. 114-123, as quoted in

Mouriki 2005, p. 168).5 See Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of

the Commonplace, Cambridge Mass., 1981,

p. 1-32.6 Mouriki ib., p. 166.7 Maurice Merlot-Ponty, I Amfivolia

tou Cezanne – To Mati kai to Pnevma, tr. Α.

Μουρίκη, Athens 1991, p. 43.8 A discussion between Thanassis Totsikas

and Christoforos Marinos in Totsikas, exh. cat.

8.12.2006-20.01.2007, gazonrouge, Athens

2006, p. 7.9 See Richard Schiff, Cézanne’s physicality:

the politics of touch, in : Ivan Gaskell; Salim

Kemal (ed.), The language of Art History,

Cambridge 1991, p. 129-180; p. 146.10 Marcus Steinweg, Behauptungs-

philosophie, Berlin, 2006, p. 17 (tr. S.B.).

http://www.gazonrouge.com

Maria-Thalia Carras

considers the colours of

the people behind Michael

Schmidt’s black and white

photographic installation.

The

fain

t un

ity

o

f his

tory

Michael Schmidt, U-NI-TY, 1991-1994. Courtesy of Eleni Koronaiou gallery


41

A Tale of Two Cities, that of the heart and that of the state; Michael Schmidt’s museum piece installation in

Eleni Koronaiou’s Gallery in Athens portrays fragments of lives captured through sixty years of German history. The installation runs across the gallery walls like the writings of an old typewriter narrating a story: systematic, restrained. Michael Schmidt’s photographs distil intense emotions. Neatly framed in silvery grey, his photographic installation expresses a rush of feelings contained, an attempt to create some sense of order from human disorder, perhaps an attempt to understand and explain even momentary pain. Meeting this strange community of people and places gathered incongruously together in the gallery space, you imagine a hum of different voices

calling out in UNITY. “U-NI-TY: the original book prints”, the title of the exhibition says it all, unity undermined by dashes, a metaphor for unity undermined by differenceor possibly the opposite, unity after all despite history.

Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945. His family moved to West Berlin just before the Berlin Wall divided the city in two. He followed his family’s plans for him and became a policeman. (Could it be that as a policeman he learnt the art of acute observation?) He later taught himself photography and in the seventies opened his own studio, where he would subsequently produce his most important work. His photographs capture his surroundings in Kreuzberg, where he photographed the area’s inhabitants, his immediate surroundings, his city, life’s details.

On show in Athens are a selection of the original book prints from his photographic work U-NI-TY, a series of images produced from 1991 to 1994 a few years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany. The seriesconsists of 163 black and white photographs. By interlacing images of the Nazi era with his own more recent photographs from the 1990’s, Schmidt recreates a subjective history of Germany. As he says, he wants “to give history a place in the present and hopefully the future and avoid being defined as amodel of the past”. Indeed a utopian spirit elevates the photographs from purist social documentation in the tradition of August Sander. In Schmidt’s photographs people may be boxed in, but on their own, out of any given social order, undefined, and only details in their

dress give hints of class or education. The people that are captured by Schmidt’s lens may be lonely but they are also freed, though perhaps disorientated.

You wonder who these people might be, what their stories are? Could that man be a chemist? A left wing artist? What is the relationship between those two girls? Could my fantasies be true? Their dark lips, their closeness, their sheer physicality create a feeling of empathy, empathy for their toughness. Schmidt’s photographic installation suggests relationships between disparate people, objects and places. These suggested relationships are not just based on what is depicted, but also how. One photograph is a close up of some office wood panelling; the grainsof wood curve round. Further on in the installation a similar wood

The faint unity of history

Michael Schmidt, U-NI-TY, 1991-1994. Courtesy of Eleni Koronaiou gallery


The faint unity of history

panelling can be seen in a half open office door. Schmidt suggestsrepetitions, rhythms in everyday urban existence, situations you pass again and again which are left unnoticed. In another photograph Schmidt focuses on a long officehanging lamp with the kind of pale white light that makes all those who work appear unwell. In another photograph you see the same light in a broader context. Indeed each photograph contributes to the mosaic of the whole, creating a complete environment. A man asleep, his eyes shut softly, relaxed, his chin tilted upwards, oblivious to Schmidt’s photographic gaze; Schmidt parallels this immediacy with a photograph further down in the installation of a Fascist idealized sculpture. The sculpture is shot from underneath, usually a position of reverence, and yet here Schmidt

black and white photographic installation is a testament to how much goes unnoticed in our daily lives, the people around us and their sorrows, our wall paper, a shops’ curtains; and yet it is these things that fill our lives with colour.It is these small things that repeat themselves around us that create the rhythms of our lives, our pauses, full stops and exclamations. It is these fragments that create history: history where everything is different and yeteverything is the same.

• The exhibition U-ni-ty: The Original

Bookprints by Michael Schmidt is held at Eleni

Koroneou Gallery (5-7 Mitseon, Acropolis, tel.:

210 9244271, www.koroneougallery.gr), until

the 03rd of March 2007.

43

is just a little bit too close: the sculpture looks slightly deformed, the eyes darkly inset as if exhausted by its own monumentality.

Decades of history are positioned next to each other. Images of Nazi youth doing gymnastics or on parade are paralleled with tired office workers. All brought down toa common denominator: black and white. Indeed often it seems that entry is negated, images are denied depth, history becomes flattenedas the images’ pixels (the bearers of history’s truth) are imploded. Some of the images, both historical and contemporary, seem to be photocopied almost to the point of vanishing, like traces of history or word of mouth experiences passed on from generation to generation. One wonders how much longer till there is a clean slate? These images move into photographic

abstraction, away from the strict scope of portraiture and yet they tell us as much if not maybe more. These photocopies or pages reveal images for what they are – just ink and paper, as if to say that all these histories, these people, this monument to them is ultimately also made up of nothing more than fleshand bone.

In turn, these dirty prints, this grid-like inkyness, seem almost architectural, transporting us full circle back to the actual subject matter of Michael Schmidt’s photographs: the urban landscape that surrounds him. The grey cement buildings with their closed windows, with dirtied melting snow or a close up of wall, desolate on its own: these images also deny access and are closed to readership, flirting withabstraction.

Ultimately Michael Schmidt’s

http://www.koroneougallery.gr

The

Vis

ual

o

f Mu

sic

Athanassios Argianas, Music for 4 Imagined

Theramins, 1981. Courtesy by

The Breeder gallery.

Esther Lemi translates in

text the visual translation

of music by Athanasios

Argianas.


45

One of my favorite musical pieces; I have never heard it. I am referring to December 1952 by Earl Brown. Its score

consists of vertical and horizontal lines instead of notes. The surface of the paper symbolizes the sound spectrum that the performer has at his disposal and every line represents a sound, while its proportions represent its time value. The performer is free to begin at any point he wishes and move at will.

The “freedom of will” is a value, which was greatly supported by the composers of the second half of the twentieth century. All this movement on the new forms of musical expression led to a more linear/drawing presentation of the music, either as a sketching of the first idea or as a final result.

The first musical idea usuallyconcerns sketchings of patterns’

alterations (e.g. spirals, fractals, natural phenomena). In reality, it always is a point that moves constantly. Anything that implies the alternation of a point into something else can be translated as a sound by a composer. A sound can be presented in a graph that gives information on the quality and the qualities of the specific sound,vice versa. The two basic pieces of information for a musical piece, which are the time value and the pitch, are two qualities, which in a score are translated into space (time value of the piece from left to right, and pitch differences between thenotes from the lowest [under] to the highest [over] frequencies). It is possible that a three dimensional structure can become a kind of guide to musical reading.

Despite the absence of sound at the first part of the show, the

visitor realizes the unity of the pieces through a mental relativity of the different facts that take place at theBreeders gallery. The pieces conserve their enigmatic role, but at the same time they assist the production of a common rhythm while each of them describes a recurrent movement of a different direction.

I begin at the natural phenomenon of rain, the way that G.Apolinaire handles it at its concrete poem “il Pleut”. The lyrics of the poem are written in a vertical parallel scheme. The “drops of words in motion” demand a differentattitude of reading, because to show the meaning of the lyrics we will have to follow the scheme of the words (from the top down direction).

Because the external structure of the poem allows the vertical simultaneous flow of facts, thereading becomes like scanning.

For that reason, while reading each specific lyric we will be having a totalview of the poem. This specific poemis used in the sculpture of Athanasios Argianas under the same name. The lyrics of the poem “il Pleut” can be seen in a showcase-like structure which lies in a diagonal arrangement into space. There is a series of short sharp angles or turns in alternate directions and on those lines the vertical strips that contain the poem’s lyrics are hanging. In combination to those strips there are also ribbons that are made out of knots equal in size to the strips. The reading here is also scanning-like the same way as it was in the poem. The “constant flow-like movement” is rushed because of the organised natural conclusion of the lyrics eventually becoming dettatched from the frame, and their random distribution during the days of the show.

The Visual of Music


46

The turned heads of the girls who reveal the detailed combinations of their braids in the gouaches of the “Braid Series 1” are variations of a common form: The procedure of braiding remains the same but because the direction changes every time, there is also a differentresult. This alternation is created by the constant minimum motion in space of the same exact action. This motion in space, the obscure but constant change of phase is responsible for the variety of the results.

In the “Lyrical Machines” the musical form is recognized through the applications of circular canons in a Moebius strip scheme (forms without a beginning or an ending). In reality it is the first time that amusical form of structure is implied within the show. The constant circular direction of the surface of

the canons demands at the same time a specific route into spaceand time. This parallel relationship produces rhythm, but not with the vague meaning of an internal rhythm which surrounds everything. From the moment that the direction becomes organised and strictly defined, this rhythm becomesa consistent repeated circular structure. A synesthetic here would say: “If these objects made sound, it would be revolving and endless”.

Even though there are elements that link the basement show to the groundfloor one, the visitor findshimself in a completely differentstage. There is a record player on a round table, and to preserve the promise of the title for the music production somebody has to move the needle to the edge of the record. I will overlook the beauty of the design of this machine, because here

begins the “Quartet for Whistling”.Returning to the original

space is needed for departure. The recapitulation of the first partis a common musical scheme [A-B-A] which has been used successfully for centuries. It is for consistent structures like these, that architecture has been characterized as “frozen music”.

A SMALL VOCABULARY

The score of the musical composition shows the direction of the melodic movements (pitch alternations) during the evolution of time-value. It concerns the representation of an idea in two dimentional space (the pieces evolution in time from left to right and pitch alternation between the

notes from the low to the high frequencies). While a melodic movement suggests a schematic change in a three dimentional space It is possible that an installation can become a kind of a guide of a musical reading.

The principal of the variation wheather it apears as a method in the process of the composition of any form (usually a phrase varies when it repeats itself ). Wheather it creates an “independent form”, a type of musical piece in which a theme is followed by a series of its variations (Theme and Variations). There are two kinds of variations: Variations of Form and Variations of Character. [Music, by Iannis Ioannidis 1978]

Phasing: A technique of composition during which

The Visual of Music


47

the melody itself is performed simultaneusly by two voices. While one of the voices remains stable, the other presents a gradual movement in time. However the listener continuous realizing that the two voices are one unit of a melody. Usually the alterating melody returns to the original tempo (rhythm) and later changes again. A construction like that (the opening and the return to the same point) reminds us schematically of the structure of the“Braid Series 1”. Furthermore the gradual alternation of some points during the change of the direction of the braiding fits the form if wereplace time with space.

Cannon is a composition style in which a voice (dux) repeats itself stricktly mimicing an other voice (comes) . The cannons were named that way because they had to follow

exactly that rule (rule=cannon in greek).

Circular Cannon: After the ending the voices return to the beginning so that the cannon can continue forever (cannon perpetuus).[Music Atlas, Nakas Publications 1994]

Moebius Strip is a two dimentional surface which topologicaly has only one side. [www.gym-cantor.bildung-Isa.de/Facharbeiten/Facharbeiten98/krause/#Einleitung]

With the term synesthesia we define a neurological state in whichone or more senses are connected to each other. The more usual forms of synesthesia among others are the synesthesia of graph-colour and the synesthesia of colour-music[Review Neurocognitive Mechanisms

of Synesthesia, Edward M Hubbard and V.S.Ramachandran, 1995]

Theremin is one of the firstelectronic musical instruments and it was created by the russian physicist Lev Sergeyevich Theremin (1896-1993). The production of sound is done with a movement of the hands up in the air.The performance of the pieces for Theremin is impressive because of the abstract form of the movement of the hands. The aetherial eerie sound of Theremin was used in the cinema industry of the sixtees in horror and sci-fimovies.

The lied form appears usually as a combination of two musical periods eather with an [A B] form (two part lied form) eather with the [A B A] form where after the second phrase the first one is repeated (three part

lied form). [Morfolofy of Music, A. Amaradidis, Nakas Publications 1990]

• Athanassios Argianas’s exhibition was held at

The Breeder gallery (6 Evmorfopoulou, Psirri,

tel.: 210 3317527-8, www.thebreedersystem.

com), from the 11th of January until the 10th of

February 2007.

The Visual of Music

http://www.gym-cantor.bildung-Isa.de/Facharbeiten/Facharbeiten98/krause/#Einleitung



http://www.thebreedersystem.com

http://www.thebreedersystem.com

Co

nte

mp

ora

ry

Test

imo

ny

Anisha Ashkar, Wild Eyes, 2007.

Courtesy of m.p.art productions.

Giota Konstandatou

wonders whether bipolar

schemata (Israeli/Arab,

man/woman, war/peace,

territory/world) recall

or reproduce in the

exhibition Purifying Love


49

Contemporary Testimony

The idea of producing two different but parallel projectsby Anisa Ashkar and Joseph Dadoune, artists from

Palestine and Israel respectively, dates back to their participation in Borderlines, an event co-staged in Thessaloniki in 2005 by the FORUM European Cultural Exchanges and the Municipality of Kalamaria.

Their point of convergence, the third location: Athens, a historically charged space in which their work actively takes shape, and the third artist: the Cypriot singer, Alexia, who served as the catalyst for both projects.

Before moving on to the individual works, it should be said that if anything about the exhibition stands out at first glance, it is its plethoricbringing together of numerous “local centres”, its deliberate strategy of artistic, cultural and inevitably

political proximity, the laying down of a current timeframe in which the works can be executed. And, of course, the place-between, Athens, in which the work is produced and judged. And, of course, the train of events that link--through its subject-matter: borderlines--the projects now being shown at the track7/artspace with the meeting two years ago must also link the show to the issue of Territories which has risen to such prominence in recent years; to the bipolar clash between Centre and Regions; to the question of the nativity of art in today’s globalized world; to discernible concern over the need to be politically relevant and cross-culturally active in a changeable, opaque, fluid geopolitical context in whicheveryone has declared open season on culture in order to bag the values.

Joint shows like this could not

have come about easily a decade ago when artists and curators had still to begin involving themselves so seriously in politics; when the vast biennials of the global era, with their eclectic, exotic accumulations of talents and singularities from around the world had still to become the global trend they are today. In the context of this international traffic we could have made out“local cliques” tending towards incorporation into the general framework, and the “diasporic practice” of small exhibitions like this which, though more autonomous, were also more into the game of the movement of artists and ideas transferring onto a larger scale. Which meant that it was largely artists who presented the distinguishing marks of their inner quality as a further advantage over and above the nett worth of their

art that were promoted; artists who conveyed the ‘territory’ from which they sprang as a geographical, social and mental condition, as testimony, bearing witness to the personal voice and history of people written in territory. If the story is also recorded against the backdrop of an armed conflict, as in the Israel/Palestine stereotype, then that can be considered an additional a priori point of interest.

But does that not recall or reproduce other bipolar schemata (Israeli/Arab, man/woman, war/peace, territory/world) in the context of a meeting delimited ab initio on the hard bipolar givens it seeks to annul?

The meeting runs the risk of ritually recalling difference: thereproduction of the banality of Evil lurks behind its good intentions. It is hard for the aesthetic of testimony



to avoid a provocatory disposition and kitsch sentimentality, especially when the artwork employs codes founded in historic mythologies, as is the case with the work presented by Anisa AShkar and Joseph Dadoune in “Purifying Love”. Both succumb to the allure of the mythic majesty of their host country, and reproduce it in the multiple symbols with which they fill their work (ancientGreek statues, the white marble of the past, the Acropolis etched into the mirror in Athena/Alexia’s hand) and in the space they use, the drama, the ritualistic representation. Dadoune is more allusive in the episodes recorded on his video, Ashkar clearer in her performance and its recording (Wild Eyes, 2007), a choreographic metaphor for the myth of the Medusa threatened upon the revolving sacrificial altar bythe yataghan held by a man, Perseus.

image of the great myths. Her choreography features repeats and never reaches a climax; the performance/installation with the action’s documentation gives the impression of a still life weighed down by the extensive annotation of its objects/fetishes. The fetishism of the self, the body, the image, the voice, of objects, of an erotic/sacrificial dance does not help givemeaning, it overdoes it; the element of gaudiness is almost unpleasant, the polemics flat and obvious. Thekitsch—which serves in Dadoune’s work as a tool for subversion—becomes the dominant code in the gestures of Ashkar and her dancer; in the heavily-laden décor; in the non-overturning or transgressing of the great myth which is used in a manner which seeks to be original.

And because the exhibition’s title also alludes to catharsis, we

50

In Bunker Blues, Joseph Dadoune shows a black and white filmshot in the Athens War Museum in which scenes from a man and woman’s meeting (Alexia Vassiliou is the female figure in the burka indiscussion with the artist (Dadoune), who plays a dictator, madman and then a child with his eyes tight shut) are interrupted by narrative, sound/music/song, silent frames of empty spaces and nothingness. White, red and black descend like a curtain between the film’s dramaticmoments, while the further two opposing screens which complete his triptych installation remain deep red throughout. The narrative speaks provocatively of people and places, sickness, death and the promise of happiness, the screen flashes onand off dizzyingly, and the film ispierced by cries, music, sounds. With its heavy, impermeable volumes,

the Museum building heightens the sense of a mausoleum, the melancholy of a distant, alienating space. Dadoune’s film is rhythmicand evocative at times.

Anisa Ashkar constructs a theatrical environment for her work, which consists of the video Wild Eyes, an installation in space with the furniture/clothes/objects used in the performance and the additional text inscribed in Arabic characters on the wall of the room. In the performance, she and a male dancer choreographically reconstruct the scene of an impending beheading as the goddess Athena recites, prompts, dissuades and sings seated in an armchair.

Anisa seeks to present the body as a ritualistic altar interpretable through the semiology of praxis, but her performance leaves behind the feeling of an excessive, caricatured



will convey our impression that the work fails to involve the viewer’s emotions; in failing to steer clear of conformity, the performance--and the installation that remains when the drama is over—serve only to confirm the commonplace.

• The exhibition Purifying Love by Anisa

Ashkav and Joseph Dadoune, with the

participation of Alexia is held at the gallery

Track7ArtSpace (1 Sidirokastrou & Amfipoleos,

Votanikos, tel.: 2111007082), until the 04th of

March 2007.

51

Inte

rven

tio

n a

t th

e

Kyp

seli

Mu

nic

ipal

Mar

ket

Reconstruction Community, Event at the Kypseli

Municipal, 2007.

“Reconstruction

Community” describes the

exhibition they organized

at the Kypseli Municipal

Market Occupation.


53

Intervention at the Kypseli Municipal Market

The Kypseli Municipal Market is a hot spot at the heart of the Fokionos Negri pedestrian street. Having remained

closed for three years, it was falling into disuse. This was a result of conflicting interests as well as ofthe general financial environment,characterized by exploitation of the capital appreciation of property and a general shortage of management with respect to major public spaces in Athens. A consequent trend is the disappearance of old established uses across large areas of Athens and the spread of uncontrolled commercialization (Psyri, Gazi).

In the case in question, this truly interesting interwar building was proclaimed a heritage building by the Ministry of Culture, following recommendation by three local associations. From then on, the matter regarding the building use

remained stagnant under invisible procedures. As a reaction to the abandonment and the feared illicit moves, the inhabitants, supported by the municipal movement Anichti Poli (Open City) proceeded to occupy the building. This highlighted the need to redefine thebuilding use, which – an occasion all too rare – became the topic for public debate. After the first tendays of organising events, the whole enterprise came at a standstill. The intervention by the “Reconstruction Community” was crucial for developments.

The “Reconstruction Community” is an initiative by people from different professional and socialbackgrounds who seek to assert their individuality in the public realm with the objective of reinforcing collective entities. The specificintervention is a turning point for

this community, which is in the process of formation, as it became active in May 2006. In Christmas it was decided to propose a differentuse of the market and a visual arts intervention was organised, entitled Pinapple, Doughnut, Cooked Raw Violence. Initially planned to last for five days on a nonexistentbudget, the intervention finallylasted for three weeks, during which more artists came to join. In all, 40 visual artists contributed their works. Moreover, open discussions, performances , theatrical happenings, video screenings and concerts took place.

The main organizational and curatorial concept for the exhibition was to avoid a competitive relationship between works and space. Specifically, the works werehung lower than usual. Moreover, the use of central lighting was

avoided, and the emphasis was on lighting in the interiors of the small shops which flank the mainpassageway/corridor in the market. These conditions helped the visitors to be aware of the traces of earlier use. The facility was transformed into a venue for the exercise of collective awareness.

Finally, the exhibition sought to make the visitors focus not on the works themselves, but on the collective experience of a relationship evolving and being experienced in real time: the demand for creative action in the public realm, which transforms the work of art into a dynamic process. In this respect, the principal role of today’s intellectuals and artists in the public domain is to become a kind of public memory, promoting the remembrance of anything that has been forgotten or ignored, connecting and “reconstructing”.

Reconstruction Community, Event at the Kypseli Municipal, 2007.


55

Intervention at the Kypseli Municipal Market

Passers-by at first stood in theentrance of the Fokionos Negri market, looking around somewhat embarrassed. The ones who got over their inhibitions and took the step forward, discovered an area in which they were expected to move freely – outside and beyond the behaviour patterns associated with the stereotypes of visiting officialart venues. In spite of the cold weather back in those days and the sparse amenities, gradually a vibrant group of people, a small community perhaps, developed, gathered around the gas heaters, held animated discussions and literally kept this meeting alive.

The activity of the “Reconstruction Community” at the Kypseli Municipal Market mobilized more artists, who after the end of the exhibition have already become organizing more exhibitions

and expressing their interest in continuing to mount art events in this spot. The mobilization of artists and other people (something of particular importance) is a practical example of promoting the active involvement of citizens – who had perhaps been inactive until now – in the public domain.

The following visual artists participated in the event:Elena Akyla / Vaso Vouyouka / Dimitris Georgakopoulos /Irini Yorona / Nikos Gritzonas / Charalampos Dermatis / Yorgos Diamantakis / Angeliki Douveri / Thalassini Douma / Michalis Zorgias / Vassilis Theos / Yannis Kavalaris / Angelos Kaltsis / Melinna Kaminari / Vassilis Kanellopoulos / Anna Katsimbra / Kali Katsouri / Harris Kondosphyris / Manos Kornelakis /

Alexandros Manganiotis / Kyriakos Banos / Foteini Nakou / Ippokratis Navridis / Athina Nikolaou / Aimilia Papafilippou / Yannis Pappas / ZoiPappa / Foteini Polydorou / Christian Rupp / Panagiotis Sidiropoulos / Thanos Stathopoulos / Tzela Tangalidou / Yorgos Taxiarchopoulos / Spyros Tsakiris / Anna Tsouloufi /Dimitris Chalatsis / Yorgos Chilaris / Cartel

• The “Reconstruction Community” (www.

reconstruction.gr) realized its group exhibition

…Pinapple, Doughnut, Cooked Raw Violence

at the Kypseli Municipal Market from December

26 to December 30 2006

Vis

its

Katerina Nikou meets

Angelo Plessas and discuss

about Neen and the post-

internet era in a studio

without walls

PH

OTO

: AN

DR

EAS

AG

ELID

AK

IS


57

Visits

Angelos Plessas describes himself as an autodidact. Born in 1974, he lives and works in various places

including Athens and New York. He has presented solo shows in Athens, London and Los Angeles, and taken part in group exhibitions in Athens (the Benaki Museum, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Deste Foundation), Grenoble (Centre National d’Art Contemporain), Tokyo (Media Arts Festival), New York (Deitch Projects), and elsewhere. He will be taking part in the Mulher Mulheres group show in March, curated by Adelina von Furstenberg, in São Paolo, and he will be at Athens’ Blow de La Barra gallery in May, as part of this year’s Art Athina.

K.N.: So where would you like to meet? Shall I come to your studio?A.P.: Look, I live in Kavouri, but

that isn’t my only studio. I work everywhere on my laptop, so my studio can be anywhere…K.N.: How about the Benaki Museum, then?A.P.: Good idea, I love the space.

Meaning these Visits depart somewhat from the rule and expand past the four walls of a room and into the Benaki Museum on Piraios Street.

Angelos Plessas declares himself an autodidact in the sense of his not having studied what he does, which is mostly websites and computer drawings. When he first got interested in computersand the Internet, it never even occurred to him that he was making contemporary art. It was Andreas Angelidakis and Miltos Manetas who put him right on that! He met Andreas in a chatroom, and Miltos

in ‘reality’ some time later through Andreas. His first work, entitledAround Myself, depicts a rounded Internet Explorer window framing a photograph of Angelos which gets bigger when you click on it.

Later works are dominated by images of women filtered througha vintage aesthetic, minimalist figures which dance or remainimmobile depending on where the viewer positions the cursor (www.whatremainsisfuture.com, www.elasticenthusiastic.com), male and female symbols used allusively (www.heelsandballs.com), and others in which he comments on how women relate to him, their environment, and their place in it (www.alldaydoingnothing.com, www.shenevertoldherlove.com, www.paranoidturnaround.com, www.tryingsohard.net).

But that’s not all! There are also

oneiric, poetic drawings that could be illustrations for contemporary fairy tales (www.oneaftertheother.com, www.thoughtsofafishinthedeepsea.com). His works are predominantly black and red. Though they apparently reference abstraction, they still manage to use simplicity and humour to comment on current issues.

His subjects are inspired by the Internet, research in local libraries, by his travels. When he has created a site/work, he buys the domain name/title from the Internet registry to ensure its uniqueness.

Recently, he embarked on a series of sculptures in the virtual world, Second Life.

“Has it ever been a source of concern to you that anyone can see your works from their own homes, meaning you don’t get direct feedback?” Of course, and that’s one

http://www.whatremainsisfuture.com

http://www.whatremainsisfuture.com

http://www.elasticenthusiastic.com

http://www.elasticenthusiastic.com

http://www.heelsandballs.com

http://www.alldaydoingnothing.com

http://www.shenevertoldherlove.com

http://www.paranoidturnaround.com

http://www.tryingsohard.net

http://www.oneaftertheother.com

http://www.oneaftertheother.com

http://www.thoughtsofafishinthedeepsea.com

http://www.thoughtsofafishinthedeepsea.com

ISSUE 10 • FEBRUARY 2007

Visits

of the reasons I do exhibitions in real spaces like museums and galleries, so I can get a direct insight into people’s reactions. Angelos tells me he’s mad about himself! He checks how many visitors his sites have had every day, and has created his own MySpace page where he can receive e-mails about his work and meet other interesting people, as well as www.angelosays.com, where he uploads anything that grabs his attention.

He stresses that he doesn’t do technological--in the sense of net--art.

But, you need technical knowledge to access his work, I counter. “Might that not exclude part of the public?” I don’t consider someone viewing a project on the Internet to be technology. Nowadays, that can be taken for granted.

“We live in a post-Internet age in which we are all more or less ‘responsible’ for the material on the Net. There was a time when none of us knew what an e-mail was, but we all use them now. Now what could be simpler than visiting a website from the peace and quiet of our own home or from the office? That’s whatI mean when I say technology can now be taken for granted.”

I don’t miss my opportunity to impress on him my distrust of the Internet with respect to interpersonal relations; as I see it, the former negates the latter. “As I see it, far from negating personal contact, the way I use technology actually realizes it via another dimension.”

He’s met and worked with people from all over the world, which wouldn’t have been possible without the direct, rapid contact the Internet affords. He has a lot of

α. athens contemporary art review

Angelo Plessas, TipToeBehavior.com, website still, Courtesy: Priscilla Tea Vaccari.

http://www.angelosays.com


Visits

friends, and he often turns to the Web when looking for collaborators. His new programmer, for instance, was chosen after all the formal procedures (CV, interview) had been observed, and lives in Estonia!

“My computer is my canvas and my paints. I don’t consider technology routine.”

Which is how we get to Neen, an idea Miltos Manetas conceived and later developed along with Andreas Angelidakis and Angelos Plessas. Neen is a movement in progress which combines contemporary art with philosophy, architecture and music and seeks to gather people who share the same inspirations under its umbrella. Their last event was organized by Rafael Rozendaal, one of the group’s Neen Stars, in the Netherlands at the Club Stedeljik. The idea was to gather together a number of artists, all of whom

received their invitations via the Internet, in a cosy restaurant where they could eat and get to know each other. The group took care of the décor, and the Neen websites were projected on the eleventh floor (formore details, visit www.neen.org). Neentoday, another event, was held at MU, an art centre in Eindhoven, and sponsored by Vannabe.

I ask him what he considers to have been his most radical career move to date. “For me, radical means making art anyone can see from their home (whenever they like) and which, though it can be reproduced by any computer, is still unique.”

He is positive about the state of contemporary art in Greece, and thinks there’s a lot going on. He likes artists like Magritte, the Surrealists and even the Futurists, Lucas Samaras and a number of his peers.

Laptop in hand, Angelos sees

me off at the end of the interview.He’ll be leaving for London, Brasilia and Milan in a few days time. What impresses me is how modest he is about his career. It might seem clichéd, but it’s a truly rare thing.

http://www.neen.org

For memory’s archive in

W.G. Sebald’s work writes

Effi Yannopoulou.

Bo

ok

revi

ew


61

In the third part of his Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu attempts to discuss William Faulkner’s short-story “A Rose for Emily”, exposing

the ways in which Faulkner uses the writer’s contract with the reader in order to entice him into a “naïve” reading and to surprise him by the truth of the final solution. Althoughthis narrative contract – based on conventions and prior convictions, according to which the reader abandons himself to the writer and accepts what is true and what is false in the literary text – has changed significantly since Faulkner’s times.The modern reader who confronts The Emigrants, W.G.Sebald’s firstnovel to be translated to English, published in Greek in a splendid translation by Yannis Kalifatidis confronts not the surprise of the final resolution but a series ofquestions concerning what is known

and familiar to him in literature. First of all, regarding genres: Both Sebald’s Emigrants and his other, unfortunately scant, writings remain, in a way, of indeterminate genre and pose a series of questions. Is this fiction, biography, documentary-literature, travel writing, or all of this at the same time? Specifically,in this case: Are the subjects of the biographies recounted by the narrator in The Emigrants real? And who is this narrator? Is it Sebald himself? Or does the author merely lend the narrator certain biographical details? If the latter holds true, is it the same narrator in all four stories? After all, are The Emigrants four distinct narratives, or are they perhaps four chapters of a novel, whose center is not the four (supposedly) biographied persons, but the archivist-narrator who researches, travels and seeks

the facts that will enable him to reconstruct these four lives?

These four narratives, independent from each other, at least on the surface, unequal but also ranging in size (from twenty to one hundred pages) have each a full name as a title: Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, Max Ferber, and comprise (probably) one narrator’s effort to reconstructthe biographies of four persons, who in the latter half of the 20th century found themselves away from their home countries (Lithuania in the first case, Germany in the otherthree). They thus comprise a roll of names (or of dead persons), which subverts the initial independence and suggests a sense of unity.

Yet, what is the most striking structural quality of this book is the interpolated black and white photographs, which sometimes

seem to illustrate, sometimes to document and other times to complement the narrative. Still more questions arise then. Does the image become a source of inspiration, a structuring principle for the narrative, or perhaps is derived and charged with new meaning by the latter? In fact, photography –an organic element in Sebald’s literature, as Taro cards in Italo Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies− works both ways. On the one hand, random photographs, chanced upon in flea-markets and antique shops,and photographs from the writer's past often provide the source for his writing, just like the photograph described at the conclusion of The Emigrants. This, paradoxically, is not included in the book, although the author acknowledged in an interview that it had been his source of inspiration. On the other

Book review


62

hand, staged photographs, created by Sebald in order to produce evidence for the narrative, so as to serve the research he conducts with respect to the characters of his stories, or intertextual clin d’oeils towards the reader, such as H. Selwyn’s photograph after the Nabokov’s famous photograph in the mountains above Gstaad (Nabokov and his butterflies hauntthe stories of The Emigrants). Besides photographs, the reader encounters reproductions of archival material, tickets, newspaper and notebook clippings, evidence of narrative truth. For, one way or another, Sebald uses photographic material as evidence, as proof of what we have seen, and at the same time he questions the credibility of this evidence, manufacturing or arranging his images in such a way as to serve his story.

At the same time, in the book proper, the author appeals to the reader’s vision through his writing. The Emigrants are full of meticulous descriptions of the landscape, especially, but also of cities and resorts, as well as the reference made to painting, photography and architecture, particularly in the fourth story, that of painter Max Ferber. Sebald invites the reader, both through his photographs and his writing, to look closely, to study the images, the places, to decipher their story. For, in some respect, Sebald’s literature is almost counter-narrative; it does not narrate; it describes and invokes the image as well sa the description as testimony to its truth.

This aspect of his writing brings Sebald closer, or perhaps on the antipodes of visual artists, such as Sophie Calle (who combines

photographs with narrative and diary entries) or Michael Blum, who recently showed his work Tribute to Safiye Behar, Kemal Ataturk’s supposed concubine, an archive of captivating accuracy for a person who was invented by the artist. In Sebald’s work, reality and invention, image and writing become an organic entity, structured so that it maintains uncertainty at the receiving end. If, in the visual arts, narrativity complements and structures the image, in Sebald the narrative is emancipated from its temporal dimension in order to become a memory archive. In this archive, photography recaptures its primal function, that of recording the visible reality, a substitute for memory; or, in Giorgio Agamben’s words from the “Judgement Day” (Profanations) “photography is always more than an image: It

is the location of a distance, of deviation, of an extraordinary rift between perceived and conceived, between verisimilitude and reality, between reminiscence and hope”; it recalls all the names that were lost and asks that we remember them as they are going to come out once again on the final day,Judgement Day. It is about this relationship between photography and memory that Austerlitz, the hero of the novel of the same name (soon to be published, again by Agra) speaks, when he describes the “moment when you make out on the processed paper the shadows of reality coming out of nowhere, just like memories”.

But who are Sebald’s emigrants? What is it that characterises the four men biographied in the pages of this book? Loss of the homeland, of the place of childhood, of memory, of

Book review


63

language sometimes, the awareness of exile, of not belonging torments them all. Casualties of the atrocities in the 20th century and the post-modern convention, they live in a melancholy world of shadows. They either end up killing themselves, like Selwyn and Bereyter, or wilfully elect to dissolve their memories, like Ambros Adelwarth, who willingly engaged in shock therapy; or yet again they seek to deal with their ghosts through art, like the painter Max Ferber, who fled Germany in1939, escaping the concentration camps, in which his parents vanished nevertheless. And the fifth person,the narrator, the meticulous archivist who records, researches, collects accounts in order to gather together these fragments of lives and to reconstruct the memory, essentially becomes one with his characters, in a process of elimination or

assimilation, as put so effectivelyin the last story in The Emigrants. Ferber and the narrator meet in a café in Manchester. The painter sits in front of a fresco which shows a desert landscape; underneath the neon lights and as his skin is black with coal dust, Ferber looks “as if he had just jumped out of the desert scene, or as if he were part of it”. He goes on to comment on the story of a photographic laboratory assistant, “whose body had assimilated so much silver during his long career, that in the end he became a kind of photographic plate”.

• Emigrants by W. G. Sebald is published by

Agra publication (www.agra.gr), translated by

Giannis Kalifatidis. English edition, Vintage, 2nd

edited 2002

Book review

Publication: The Athens Biennial – Non-Profit Organization

Publication Advisors: Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Christopher Marinos, Martha Michailidi, Alexandra Moschovi, Panayis Panagiotopoulos, Michalis Paparounis, Poka-Yio, Yannis Stavrakakis, Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, Augustine Zenakos

Editor in chief: Theophilos Tramboulis

Assistant editor: Maria Foteinea

Contributors to this issue: Sotirios Bahtsetzis, Effi Yannopoulou, Maria Thalia Carras, Giota Konstandatou, Esther Lemi, Christopher Marinos, Katerina Nikou, Rallou Panagiotou, Reconstruction Community, Rodya, Despoina Sevasti, Kostis Stafylakis, Yannis Stavrakakis

Text editing: Katerina Panoutsou

Translations: Michael Eleftheriou, Eleanna Panagou, Dimitris Saltabassis, Titika Saratsi

Lay Out: Vassilis Sotiriou

Design: The Switch Design Agency

p. 2: Nikos Tranos, Cell, 2007 Courtesy by A.D. gallery.

Documents

a. the athens contemporary art review 10