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Contents

Editor’s Note

Drafts

Interview

Jonathan Callan talks to Augustine Zenakos

The Archaeology of democratic antagonism

Sotiris Bahtsetzis writes about the exhibition

Archaeology of Today

A lonely dog scouts a balcony

Maria-Thalia Carras writes about Zafos Xagoraris

Books

Alexandra Moschovi writes about Ed Ruscha

The symbolic body of Vera Lutter

Natasha Adamou writes about Vera Lutter

Book Review

Theophilos Tramboulis writes about Going Public

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The publication of a magazine under

the internet umbrella of the Athens

Biennial may, by definition, imply

that there is a functional

interrelation between its actual

content and the context in which

this organisation endeavours to act.

This is not just a truism. The Athens

Biennial aims to explore the

potentials of accommodating

contemporary art in a city that is still

in limbo, wavering between its own

convictions and reservations. It is

exactly in this ambivalent niche

marked by both certainties and

uncertainties that a. aspires to

establish its seat. The magazine is

first and foremost a platform for art

criticism. Every act of criticism

stipulates a reserve of convictions:

the ideological and aesthetic

threshold from which the critic sets

off and the certainty that his word

will not be consumed in polemics

and antagonisms but will set the

frame for discourse. At the same

time though, every act of criticism is

equally a statement of incertitude;

not only as far as the validity of the

claims and the clarity of perception

are called into question, but also as

the very conditions of judgment are

concerned.

But this as far this magazine’s

kinship with the Athens Biennale

goes. ·. retains its own criteria and

sets its own goals. Every month, the

editorial board select a number of

exhibitions that take place in Athens

and which raise the most interesting

as much as fertile aesthetic,

theoretical and political issues and

discuss them, setting as sole

prerequisite for contributions the

sustained, critical approach. By

commenting upon what is out there,

we suggest that which does not

exist yet.

Art is primarily a negotiation of

relationships; of relationships that

develop between interarticulated

forms as well as among people who

are historically registered as political

subjects, but, most importantly, of

relationships among agencies

embedded in a field that is still

under formation. The role of

criticism is, to a great extent, to

diagnose and unearth such affinities.

It is a common demand among all

those interested in art and the issues

it raises to explore these

relationships not as a field of

consensus, but as a political terrain.

Art in itself, with its transformations

and qualms is a web of forms that

calls for a web of discourses which

entail a web of actions.

Theophilos Tramboulis

Please e-mail ·. your comments, views,

and critisism, at a@athensbiennial.org

04

Institutionalize yourself...

The absence of institutional support

for contemporary art in Greece has

for many years been considered one

of the main problems for young

artists and art professionals. With the

National Museum of Contemporary

Art preparing its first exhibition of

young Greek artists in November,

the 1st Athens Biennial being

organized by three young people

who don’t represent an official

institution, and the DESTE

foundation announcing a turn to a

more experimental profile in favor of

young artists along with the DESTE

prize focusing on young artists, the

situation seems to be changing.

Having more institutions than ever

before focusing on contemporary art

and setting their own legitimizing

discourses, the institutionalization of

young Greek artists is likely to

become the main field for a dialogue

(or contradiction) between them.

This institutional pluralism will

probably open up the field for a

more democratic dialogue on

contemporary art in Greece.

Nevertheless the ideological power

of the institutions based on their

inside/outside quality and processes

of top-down selection rather than in

bottom-up practice should not be

underestimated. Maybe this is finally

the time for Greek artists to take

matters into their own hands and to

participate on their own terms

rather than acting as chameleons

hopping to be included in the

institutions’ agendas. Although we

shouldn’t forget that the new

generation of galleries was the only

one struggling to provide

professional and focused support to

the young Athenian art scene, the

absence of enough artist-run

initiatives and the artists’ failing to

demand their own terms of

participation is one of the main

reasons (together with the absence

of strong critical discourse) that the

role of the gallery in Greece is often

overestimated in terms of

evaluation. Meaning that young

artists are appreciated according to

the gallery by which they are

represented and that being

«professional» and adjusting to the

requests of the market has ended up

constituting aesthetic criteria. Young

Greek artists need to become more

conscious of their work and itsDra

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context in the local and the global

society, in order for this

institutionalization in progress to

lead to a more pluralistic and

interesting artistic production and

not to merely a better-

instrumentalised circulation of

artistic production.

D. Zefkili

A position

I have often had this thought about

Dostoyievski’s character in Crime and

Punishment: the succession of his

musings is theoretically

irreproachable, to the point indeed of

being a masterpiece of cohesion. The

only problem – and simultaneously

the element that makes his musings

finally unacceptable – is that the

starting point lies totally outside

(moral) reality. In the end – although

it is hardly a misapprehension that

the success of a construction depends

on its internal cohesion – a necessary

precondition for any construction is

the real position on which we will

attempt to found it. Yet, what else

defines a position as real, if not only

the fact that it constitutes the space

that is contained within the outline of

the soles of our feet?

Rodya

Parks or sewers?

There is an old story about a mayor

in a small Greek provincial town,

who says to his friend: "This year, I

am going to rebuild the sewage

system for everyone in this town."

"What are you, an idiot?" his friend

snaps. "Rebuild the park, not the

sewers. No-one can see the sewers."

It is not cheap to completely make

over a park. I am not in position to

say whether park-building is more or

less expensive than sewage-

building, although I am sure that a

fair amount of money is necessary in

both activities. I am, however,

slightly better versed in the

economics of cultural events. I

know, for example, that if you spend

four million euro on a show, it is

bound to be worth something. Even

more, if you hire an ingenious

curator, who can call on favors from

artists and gallerists the world over,

you will probably wind up with

something to be genuinely proud

of. And proud you will be – at least

for three months or thereabouts,

until the huge banners come down,

and the posters on bus stations

become dog-eared and filthy.

On the other hand, you could

probably set up a fairly decent

residency program for artists or

curators with about fifty thousand

euro per year. Now, honestly, which

one of the two sounds like a better

deal? Four million for three months,

or fifty thousand for a year? Oh, right,

I forgot, residency programs do not,

as a matter of practice, include either

banners or posters on bus stations.

Of course, one cannot do away with

shows, and create residency programs

in their place. Nevertheless, and I am

just thinking aloud here, perhaps

criticism against an admittedly

inefficient cultural policy, as in the case

of, say, Greece, should not focus too

much on the amount of money being

spent. Maybe the point should be

entirely different: What is the money

being spent on? Parks or sewers?

Axarneus

Drafts

Jonathan Callan talks to

Augustine Zenakos about

his interest in the slight

conditions of materiality,

and explains why he thinks

England is not a visual

culture

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Jonathan Callan recently presented

a series of sculptures, wall-pieces,

and works on paper – most of

which have use books as both

subject-matter and material – at

the apartment gallery, in Athens.

Born in Manchester in 1961,

Jonathan Callan has exhibited in

Cologne, in Los Angeles, and in

New York, among other places. His

work is part of collections in major

museums and foundations, such as

the Henry Moore Foundation, the

British Museum, and the Museum

of Modern Art in New York. During

the same time as his exhibition in

Athens, Jonathan Callan also

exhibited work in Pittsburgh’s

Mattress Factory. He visited

Athens briefly for his opening, and

luckily found the time to talk a

little about the ideas behind his

singular artwork.

You often point out that you were

trained as a sculptor. Is that of

particular importance?

"When I say I was trained as a

sculptor, what that really means is

that after I did a degree in Fine Art

at Goldsmiths, I then took a break

for four years and then I went to the

Slade. The Slade was departmental,

and it seemed most appropriate that

I apply to sculpture, because I had

made a series of objects at the time,

and everything that I did – and still

do – is very physical. Now, perhaps

there’s an issue whether what I do is

sculpture, or what exactly it is that I

do. I would describe myself as an

object maker."

Does that mean that you have no

sympathy for the notion of an

artist as a ‘supplier of ideas’, or is

the ‘hands-on approach’ just your

personal way?

"Now, that can lead to all sorts of

misunderstandings… I don’t know, I

was always interested in conceptual

art. At the same time, I always

wanted to make objects. Ever since I

was very young, I made objects,

when I was a child I made

environments. But, gradually, as I

had to face the different ways of

becoming an artist, I had to think of

something to make art about. I was

wondering, what was big enough, or

important enough, to make art

about? And I realized that the things

I was really interested in were banal.

I could be interested in the joints in

the floor, the way they are, how

some of them are filled with dirt and

some of them are not, how the

varnish has worn off in some places

and not in others. Or I was

interested in tiny details in

architecture, not the things that

have to do with the architecture

itself, but more the things that

show how it has been amended by

the people that live in that building.

So, my interest was always in very

minimal, very slight conditions of

materiality. For a while, I didn’t really

think I could make work about that,

I didn’t feel it was a big enough

subject, I felt I needed some other

kind of philosophy. There is a

character in a Saul Bellow book who

is always searching for the big idea.

He is not sure what it is, but he is

Jonathan Callan

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Jonathan Callan, Masterpieces, 2005

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sure that when he finds it, he will be

able to base on it his whole life as a

literary critic. Of course, he never

finds it, he just wastes his life. I

identify with that, because I thought

to myself that here I am, waiting to

get a grand idea, whereas I

shouldn’t be doing that at all. I am

interested in dirt and fluff. So, I

began to have a more irresponsible

attitude towards making things."

On the other hand, the objects

you make seem very well thought

out. Even more, they seem to have

a very specific kind of content…

"Well, yes… As a result of being

interested in conceptual art, I also

have an interest in Anglo-American

philosophy of the 1960s and the

1970s. A lot of the work made by

conceptual artists was very

influenced by Anglo-American

philosophy of the period, which was

basically linguistic philosophy. I also

realized that I was living in a

particularly literary culture. That is

what England is. It is not a visual

culture. It may be recognized as

having a visual culture now, but that

is something that has only happened

in the last twenty years or so."

What do you mean that England is

not a visual culture?

"If you think about its history, and

you try to also think about people

that have left their mark on its

culture, you will talk about writers,

poets, play-writes, and philosophers.

You wouldn’t be able to talk about

painters or sculptors. There is maybe

Constable, or Turner, or Moore, but

then you are struggling, you are

really struggling… So I feel that the

whole culture is so literary that it

makes people view the world in a

very particular way. It seems to me

that all the people writing about art

don’t do so because they are

interested in art, but because they

are killing time until they write their

first novel. In retrospect, that is how

I think I began working with books.

As a way to speak about a literary

culture in a visual way?

Well, yes. I regard the book as a

cultural object, but first and

foremost I see it as an object.

Whenever language comes into

things, it seems to change

everything incredibly. So, what I

wanted to do is to show how

language affects the way in which

we see the world. So, whatever I do

with a book – and I do many

different things with them – I am

always, above everything else, going

to show it as an object. In a way,

what I am saying is that the world is

a very physical experience.

The exhibition of works by Jonathan Callan

was presented at the apartment gallery (21,

Voulis Street, Athens, tel. +30 210 3215469,

http://www.theapartment.gr) in December

2005 and January 2006.

The interview with Jonathan Callan was

published in the newspaper To Vima tis

Kyriakis, on 08/01/2006.

Jonathan Callan

The black hole of political

passion is the deficit of

democracy today, says

Sotiris Bahtsetzis, reviewing

the exhibition Archaeology

of Today at Els Hanappe

Underground

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The Archaeology of democratic antagonism

The exhibition Archaeology of

∆oday, curated by Despina Zefkili

and Vangelis Vlachos in Els

Hanappe Underground, presents

the work of visual artists stating

questions about the historical

recording of the political topicality

and the contemporary

configuration of subjectivity alike.

What happens when the subject (in

its political aspect as well as in its

psychic aspect) is shaped through

socially expressed aspects of

animosity and antagonisms? The

democratic paradox, according to

Mouffe,1 lays precisely in the

emergence of the antagonistic

nature of the democratic act as its

foundation. The rationalist

perception of human nature, and

the rationalist command for the

«consent» of the communication

model not only does not constitute

the necessary basis of democracy,

but it results in undermining it, as it

shapes the inherent negative

aspect of sociality. The denial of

this fact constitutes the basis of the

multiform «democratic deficit» in

our exponential depoliticized

societies.2

The works presented in this group

exhibition refer to revolts of the

youth of Belfast, to armed conflicts

in Kurdistan, to the political stand

for the recognition of the «Republic

of Kosovo», and record unorthodox

political acts and postures beyond

«democratic consent.» The works of

the exhibition want to arouse our

appeased «democratic» perception

and to turn our attention to the

element of passion, which,

according to Yannis Stavrakakis, is

one of the most important

components of the political acting.3

Of course it concerns the passions

that produce collective forms of

coincidence, even if these

coincidences of a class of

sentimental and libidinous

investments are deriving from the

subject itself as personal choices.

However, they don’t cease to be

the driving force of the political.

(We should think that it is not by

chance that the weakening of the

political, parliamentary arena is

owed to the exploitation of this

element either by extreme right

party demagogues or by neo-liberal

culturepreneurs. Recently, in

England more people voted for a

TV show like Survivor than for the

parliamentary elections!)

Hito Steyerl (Germany 1966)

presents the video November as an

elegy for a childhood friend,

murdered in 1998 as a suspect Kurd

terrorist, becoming, due to her

violent death, a symbol of militant

resistance to the wider public

opinion of social-democratic and

radical origin in Germany and at

the same time, an image of

«immortal rebel» for the Kurds.

(Andrea Wolf, German in origin,

chose to fight within the frames of

a struggle for independence on a

national level, beyond the limits of

her own nationality and within the

frames of what is called today

«international terrorism».) Duncan

Campbell (Ireland, 1972,) presents

the video Now Bright, Now Dim

about the life of the Irish politician

Bernadette Devlin, leading figure at

the movement for the

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Exhibition view with work by Albert Heta

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independence of Northern Ireland.

Devlin is presented as a «bad

angel» since she managed to rouse

the crowds by the power of her

speech, and the heroic directness

and the social impact of her

political actions.

Albert Heta (Kosovo, 1974)

provokes by her unorthodox

political transformation of the ex

Serbian embassy in Centinje,

Montenegro to Embassy of the

«Republic of Kosovo» by placing a

flag and a sign, works that have

been criticized and vandalized. The

memories and the continuous

conflicts of the recent war in

Yugoslavia seem not enough to

cover the immanent antagonisms

in the name of a rationalist

arrangement.

What is of particular interest in

these works, as emphasized by the

curators, is that personal

experience precedes the official

«objective» historiographical

recording. For example, Zbynek

Baladran (Czech Republic, 1973)

collects archive material,

animations and old, propagandistic

films, which are edited and filled up

with sound documents or texts

attempting a non-linear

«excavation» in the history of his

country, bringing to the surface

successive layers of historical and

personal memory. At the same time

Yannis Grigoriadis (Greece, 1971)

captures in photographs the

Romanian production cars DACIA

with a background of public

buildings of the Ceausescu period,

and records instances of social

changes as imprinted in public

space. That way, the subjective

perspective of the personal

memory does not necessarily

provide an alternative conception

of history, but constitutes an

unorthodox interpretation,

permitted now only to «illegal»

terrorists, to artists (that is to the

drop-outs by convention) or to

someone combining both.

These recordings are within the

frames of a journey to unwitting

identifications and social structures

under very concrete historical

conditions of possibility and

appearance. They reveal (especially

in Baladran’s work) how the

libidinal bond is a hub for the

understanding of the existence and

the reproduction of various

powerful and long-lasting

identifications. Come to the edge.

We might fall. Come to the edge.

It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE!

With poet Christopher Logue’s

encouraging voice in the

background, Stephen Sutcliffe

(England, 1968) describes in his

video with the same title, how an

apparently innocent game of high

school pupils is transformed into a

pupil’s ritual humiliation, obviously

not matching in age or in

appearance with the rest.

Isn’t this video a compendium

presentation of the reflections

developed in this text in an effort

of a personal interpretation of the

exhibition? In a kind of felicitous

and brilliant anthropologic

microphysics we discover the brute

force (which becomes even more

unfamiliar since it appears in the

heart of the socialization, the game)

The Archaeology of democratic antagonism

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Exhibition view with works from left to right by Zbynek Baladran and Yannis Grigoriadis

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The Archaeology of democratic antagonism

as the black hole within the frame

of democratic antagonism. The

neo-nazi movements and the

terrorist actions are not very far

from now. Of course, this black hole

is revealing to be the aspect of the

Lacanian Real, as the statutory

absence around which is organized

the human experience and

indirectly as the condition for the

creation of any identity and social

articulation through coincidences.

In the basis of every collective

identity, group, clique, nationality

lays then statutorily a potential of

violence, which retains its structure.

Every possible consent and policy

of reconciliation is, according to

ªÔuffe, of a hegemonic nature and

always includes violence: The

violence of «democracy», the

violence of «history», the violence

of «freedom». It is characteristic

that today, in societies dominated

by political alienation, by cynicism

and by the equalization of

democracy to a lukewarm,

hypocritical and essentially false

neoliberism, every one of us has to

adapt his private and public face in

a sort of «absolute» consent, in a

normalized hierarchy of identities,

which are though already

predefined (classified to national,

sexual, ecological, religious

personae and relative groups of

interest and pressure – lobby) in

such a way that antagonisms die

and there is the danger of

formalization and equalization of

singularities, and also the danger of

the absence of personal

responsibility and political stance.

The call «come to the edge» in

Sutcliffe’s video does not stigmatize

moralistically the aggressiveness

and the violence as an archaic

phenomenon but it should perhaps

be considered as a signal to take

leave of the identifications which

constitute our anaemic

«democratic» identity and to

rediscover the passion as a driving

force of the political acting and as

an indirect possibility for the

compensation of the «democratic

deficit», disproving at the same

time the elements that have

converted democracy into an

obvious horizon, almost

synonymous to the depreciation of

the political participation. How can

we face this statutory violence, how

can we handle the endless

antagonism, are questions that a

society and a public sphere without

exclusions, organized in such a way

within the frames of the «militant

pluralism», has to pose, so that it

will allow the achievement of non

coercive consents.4 The artists are

posing the actual question again.

1. Chantal Mouffe, The democratic Paradox,Verso, 2000; greek edition: Polis, 2004, with apreface by Jiannis Stavrakakis.

2. Stavrakakis, ibid, pp. 6, 13.

3. Stavrakakis, ibid, p. 25.

4. Mouff, ibid, p. 254.

The exhibition Archaeology of ∆oday,

curated by Vaggelis Vlachos and Despina

Zefkili, was presented in Els Hanappe

Underground (2, Melanthiou Street, Psyrri,

http://els.hanappe.com), from December 7,

2005 to January 21, 2006

Alexandra Moschovi looks

at the different ways the

readymade has been

translated in Ed Ruscha's

body of work and its

aestheticized approach

at the exhibition

in Bernier/Eliades

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Ed Ruscha’s fascination with

typography, design, the book and

the readymade dates back to the

late 1950s when as a student at the

Chouinard Art Institute, a primarily

professional art school in Los

Angeles, he was introduced to the

hot applied arts of the day, earning

a modest living from part-time jobs

in advertising and book layout.

Wavering between commercial

practice and fine art, his pop-

inspired paintings of the early 1960s

combined words and images that

were directly appropriated from

popular and consumer culture to

reintroduce the "noise of everyday

life" into art (and comment upon

their rapid commodification no less).

Although Ruscha admittedly felt

some sort of affinity with Andy

Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who

are now considered his "aesthetic"

contemporaries, it was the work of

Jasper Johns and Robert

Rauschenberg that played a

formative role in his artistic

evolution. On the ontological

antipode of gestural automatism,

the mainstay of Abstract

Expressionism, the "premeditation"

that characterized those neodadaist

works synopsized in Ruscha’s eyes

what would become his motto, that

is, to use his own words, "having a

notion of the end and not the

means to the end".

The brightly painted logos "Spam",

"Fisk", "Flash" or "Honk" that

featured in his paintings in the early

1960s would prefigure his

involvement with linguistics, being

treated as both visual and acoustic

readymades, much in the manner

that the Brillo Box or the Campbell

Soup cans were used as iconic ones

in Warhol’s work. Indeed, the

printed word, completely

unreferenced and detached from its

original commonplace, a "pre-

formed, conventional,

depersonalised, factual, exterior

element", as Johns would describe

the flags, targets, numbers, and

letters that he first employed, would

soon become prevalent as an

autonomous morpheme in Ruscha’s

work. By not naming the author as

the origin and signified of the text

that came to substitute for the work

("found words are the most pure

because they have nothing to do

with you", he has claimed), Ruscha

endeavored to expand the semantic

space in which an artwork can be

interpreted. This idea of

intertextuality as a span across

disparate texts, sources, media,

practices and audiences still informs

his work forty years later.

The exhibition Books, held at

Bernier/Eliades gallery, testifies to

this ongoing intertextual logic by

bringing together an assortment of

recent works that address the

subject of books, a particularly

favored theme and format in the

course of the artist’s fifty-year long

career.

The show opens with a series of

small-scale paintings of books

produced in the last two years. Here,

the purposefully generic, pictorial

representation of books floating on

raw linen or neutral background is

lined up against tautological titles

like "Open Book with Worm Holes"

and "Composition Book" or cryptic

palindrome words such as

"Stratotarts" and "No Son", reversing,

in effect, the functions of denotation

and connotation in both systems.

In the adjacent room, there are five

studio photographs picturing

variedly ragged edges of books, in

which the background has been

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Ed Ruscha, Books, 2001, 4 silver gelatin prints, 1 Cibachrome print, edition of 20

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blacked out in the negative. This

detachment of the objects from

their actual space and time is meant

to add a metaphysical dimension to

their otherwise blunt photographic

depiction, blurring the boundaries

between the indexical, the iconic

and the symbolic.

Opposite these imprints of the

"real", the book as an actual object

reclaims its three-dimensional

physicality. Since the beginning of

the 1990s, Ruscha has been

employing second-hand books as

readymades on the covers and fore-

edges of which he paints or

bleaches out letters, words and

made-up phrases. Marcel Duchamp

once explained that the titles of his

readymades were originally devised

"to carry the mind of the spectator

towards other regions more verbal".

In the series in question, though,

this function is knowingly

exaggerated as the painted or

bleached out words and the book’s

original title overtly and, at times,

meaningfully draw up against each

other: the word "Mom" is painted on

the cover of a 1983 edition of

Agatha Chisties’s The A.B.C. Murders;

a guide to Practical Dental

Metallurgy is renamed "History" and

a copy of Leadership Training for

Teenagers reads in bright blue

lettering "Get it? Got it? Good".

Unlike his photographic accordion-

fold book Every Building on the

Sunset Strip (1966), also included in

the show, in which title and content

are intentionally tautosemous, the

choice of the readymades in this

series does not seem to be dictated

by a singularly identifiable

delectation, making the already

complex combination of reference,

self-reference and semiotics that has

become Ruscha’s conceptual(ist)

trademark even more enigmatic. As

is the inclusion of three

monochromatic paintings from a

series of abstract city grids that the

artist produced in 2003. The only

common denominator between

these works, which some see as a

belated tribune to Minimalism,

embedded paradoxically with

subjective undertones, and the rest

of the exhibition is the written word,

the factual street names that visually

prevail over the otherwise abstract

and idiomatic mapping.

Despite their kinship to

conceptualism and the similarities

they bear with other language-

based works, namely those of John

Baldessari and Bruce Nauman,

Ruscha’s works do retain their

pictorial as much as aesthetic

integrity presented as autonomous

artworks, framed and glazed on the

gallery’s wall or showcased in

wunderkammern-like vitrines. One

cannot claim that there are grand

gestural opportunities here. Still, the

overall impression of the show, no

less owing to the compromised

museological mise-en-scène

mentioned above, is that of an

aestheticized approach to the

alleged (i.e., according to Duchamp)

anesthesia and visual indifference, of

the readymade, emphasizing the

artist’s autographic mark and

idiosyncratic choice that make the

mass-produced object unique.

The exhibition Books by Ed Ruscha was

presented at the gallery Bernier/∂liades (11,

∂ptahalkou Street, Athens, tel. +30 210

3413935, http://www.bernier-eliades.gr) from

November 24, 2005 to January 14 2006.

Books

The Amps of Zafos Xagoraris

are a network

for transmitting silence,

says Maria-Thalia Carras

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21

A lonely dog scouts a balcony

A lonely dog scouts a balcony.

Silence. He is being watched.

He walks round and round,

head down, tail between his

legs. The balcony is his

universe; a small world. This

abject dog, whose pointless

amblings are caught on

camera, captured in a human

landscape full of borders and

boundaries is the most

haunting image from Zafos

Xargorari’s latest exhibition,

Amps, at a. antonopoulou.art

gallery in Athens, exactly

because he is alone within

what constitutes a networks

of relationships, signs and

noises - a large city.

Like many recent exhibitions,

Amps is closely linked to

architectural observations and

mappings of cityscapes

through different media, its

aesthetics therefore are

closely related to

documentation based

practices. Indeed the

exhibition is based on an

acoustic performance, a sound

installation, carried out on the

balcony of the gallery in the

heart of Athens where sounds

from the gallery were

transported by amps to the

legendary shed of Simos the

Existentialist (an Athenian

figure of the 50’s) and sounds

from the city were transported

into the gallery; a commercial

institution, a market space

linked to anarchic residues of

the past – begging the

question can the two truly

exist within the same space

both metaphorical and real?

Amps suggests a rhizome, a

network of human exchanges

where subtle links between

people and places are created.

Listening to the amps you

ascertain fragments of speech,

hope, laughter and gossip and

then simply when tuning out

you hear the buzz of a city,

where human activities blend

into one – a communion of

sound; Sometimes however

they pick up on the absence

of sound. Xargorari’s

positioning of the amps in the

abandoned city of Famagusta

on the Green Line in Cyprus

reminiscent of John Cage’s

landmark 3’44" reflected the

noise effervescent in

emptiness, the sounds of

silence, as Simon Garfunkel

once sung. Or as Yiorgos

Tzirtzilakis mentions in the

catalogue accompanying the

exhibition, Zafos Xargorari’s

project reflects the «concepts

of the Silent center, of limits,

of dead or inert zones, and of

the mechanisms of prohibition

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Exhibition view

23

A lonely dog scouts a balcony

and penetration.»

The amps, whether positioned

in Famagusta, a war stricken

and consequently abandoned

city, or in New York, or in one

of Athens’ cement ridden

balconies, seem like bared

down stick figures, post

nuclear survivors with what

appear as immense eyes

foretelling some angst ridden

future. Within the ruins of

Famagusta they seem as

ghost like figures, haunting

memories of a once thriving

city whilst in Athens they feel

like cries of loneliness,

futuristic anthropomorphic

machines.

In the actual exhibition space

they seem less pertinent, as if

bizarrely out of place. The

presentation of the amps in

the gallery space is indeed

less interesting – they remind

you of an old friend that has

put on too much weight and

feels slightly uncomfortable

with himself. Accompanying

the amps there are some dry

almost scraped thin acrylic

paintings most of which

represent barbed off spaces or

cityscapes alongside amps

seemingly reiterating again a

lack or breakdown of

communication, an absence or

void yet somehow they seem

like secondary readings there

to pad up the sound

installation. Instead they

weaken the very strength of

the exhibition – the silent

center becomes full of noise.

The exhibition AMPS of Zafos Xargoraris

was presented in a.antonopoulou.art

(20, Aristofanous Str, Psyrris,

tel. +30 210 3214994, http://www.aaart.gr

from January 14th, 2005

to February 17th, 2006

The photosensitive paper in

the camera obsura is the

symbolic body of Vera

Lutter, says Natasha

Adamou, reviewing the

exhibition at Xippas Gallery

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25

On the wall of a dark room,

against a hole opened at the

opposite wall allowing the light

to go through, a reverse idol of

the external landscape appears.

The camera obscura (dark

room) was observed for the

first time, according to some

sources, in Europe during the

13th century; others claim that

it has been used even earlier in

China and the Arabic countries,

while Aristotle had already

described its mechanism. It

evolved during the Renaissance

and was been used as a tool in

painting, and at that time it

was the most direct and

accurate way for the optical

recording of the visible world.

Jonathan Crary notes, «In the

17th century, the camera

obscura had been the most

widespread model in order to

explain human vision and

represent a subject’s relation to

the external world.»

In an interview to Peter Wollen

for Bomb magazine, Vera Lutter

goes back to the incidents that

led her in the use of the

camera obscura. Having

completed her studies in

Munich, and in a dead-end

period concerning the

sculpting that she has been

practicing until then, she

moved to New York on the

occasion of a scholarship.

There, Lutter settled in the 27th

floor of an old, industrial

building. For a sculptor, the

experience of this space was

catalytic. The way she

experienced the light and the

urban landscape, which

«invaded», as she describes, her

body and flooded the space

through the windows of the NY

loft, impressed her so that she

wanted to transform that exact

experience into a work of art.

The room itself became the

medium, the vessel in which

the conversion was going to

take place. A photosensitive

paper positioned on one of the

walls took the place of her

body, and with the aid of a

pinhole (a handmade camera)

at the opposite window, and by

obscuring the room, she

moved on to her first attempt

to imprint the traces of her

experience.

The Athenian gallery of Renos

Xippas presents Vera Lutter’s

first solo exhibition in Athens.

The ethereal, silvery shades

provide in Lutter’s monumental

prints a transparent quality, so

atmospheric that – despite the

heavy protecting glass – give

you the feeling of moving into

thin air. The images come out

from long exposure of the

paper and record the density of

the time passed, in layers of

light. The experience of the

impressed spaces is not as

The symbolic body of Vera Lutter

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Vera Lutter, Erie Basin, Red Hook II, July26, 2003, unique camera obsura-silver gelatin print

27

The symbolic body of Vera Lutter

direct as someone would

conclude judging from the

directness of the recording

process. The tones in the idols

of the spaces are reverted and

create optical resonances,

gradations varying from a hazy

white to a lacquered black

transparency. The images, the

experience of light

accumulating on Lutter’s

symbolic body, the

photosensitive paper, convey

the radiance of another world,

constitute reflections of a past

time, and function as notes in

the history of painting and

photography.

The dynamic vertical and

horizontal axes that determine

the perspective in the

compositions of the

photographs shown in the

exhibition, delimit urban

landscapes, industrial areas,

airports, shipyards, factories

and skyscrapers imprinting

«places, buildings and spaces

which represent the evolutions

of the 20th century

economies», Maria Lind

observes, and function as «a

modern version of the

historical painting of the 19th

century.» Indeed, these austere

images seem to keep an

«objective» distance; they have

a glass-like pureness without

the swing of an emotional

trace. Lutter herself, points out

this «tame» quality of the

prints, resulting from her

present technical skills

comparing her recent images

to her first attempts, in which

the traces of a more rough and

clumsy human gesture can still

be spotted.

The delicate tonic scale reveals

the materiality of the medium,

giving the impression that a

thin, gray powder covers the

surface of the photosensitive

paper; so thin that even a blink

of the eye would be sufficient

to let successive layers unfold

in the air. This impression of

accumulated time, along with

the fact that the artist has

chosen not to put the titles of

the works in the exhibition, and

finally the process itself of

capturing the image, give at

these places and buildings

their monumental character,

making them seem eternal.

The exhibition of works by Vera Lutter was

presented at Xippas Gallery (53D, Sofokleous

Street, Athens, tel. +30 210 3319333,

www.xippas.com) from November 14, 2005

to February 11, 2006.

Larissa is an empty space

in the Greek landscape.

Can the artistic pretext, asks

Theophilos Tramboulis,

constitute resistance to the

articulation of a direct

political discourse?

Bo

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29

Book Review

Going Public is a periodic, art and

research program, which "is based on

the collective, urban, artistic research

and the presentation of works of art

created specifically for each

exhibition," according to the Italian

critic and curator Claudia Zanfi, who

inspired and coordinates the project.

The publication of Going Public for

2005 included two supplementary

events: The first one, under the general

title Communities and Territories, took

place in the Center of Contemporary

Art in Larissa last summer, aiming to

"shed light on the life of areas

bordering the Balkans, on the

emigrational streams and the activities

of the minority communities that have

settled in Larissa"; the second one took

place in Modena, Italy, in the autumn

of the same year, intending to "explore

the cultural and economic exchanges

in the new European territories" from

the Balkans to the Baltic sea. It thus

formed two axes of interest, from the

east to the west, and from the south to

the north, which correspond to the

populations’ routes of transfer in the

contemporary post-soviet landscape.

Going Public: Communities and

territories welcomed participants from

across the board: theorists such as

Carlos Basualdo, Gianmaria Conti,

Marti Peran and Yorgos Tzirtzilakis;

architects such as Haricleia Hari; as well

as and artists such as Vangelis Vlahos,

Pablo Leon de la Barra, Maria Loizidou,

the Open Cinema (Maja Bajevic, Adrian

Paci and Marieta Potrc), Maria

Papadimitriou, Alexandros Psyhoulis,

Nikos Haralambidis, and last but not

least, Rikrit Tiravanija, who despite not

being able to attend, also participated

with his work. Finally, a series of

workshops, among which the Love

Difference by the Cittadellarte-

Fondazione Pistoletto, complemented

the research side of the program.

Greece is, in various ways, a fertile

ground for the reception and practice

of the art that combines artistic act,

activist action and ,time and again,

scientific research, often being hastily

described by the adjective "relational."

One need only to reflect upon the

historical and rather incomplete urban

constitution of the Greek state, which

allowed the creation of centrifugal

communities to such a degree that a

specific conviction could reduce this

fragmentation of the political body to

an ultra-historic national characteristic,

to verify the aforementioned claim. In

the era of transfer to the urban

centers, refugees from Asia Minor, not

officially recognized ethnic

communities or internal immigrants,

marked no man’s lands to the state

control and the infiltration of the

official ideology that left their imprint

on every level of the superstructure,

from education and language to the

configuration of mechanisms of party

constitution, and from urban planning

to the structure of the economy. These

zones where the new refugees from

the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Asia

settled constitute prime fields of action

for the artists that see a post-modern

event in these vacant spaces.

In recent years, the Going Public

program and the subsequent

catalogue published under the aegis

of the Center of Contemporary Art in

Larissa are included in a series of

activities and publications that

interact and complement each other,

defining, if not a tendency, surely a

distinguishable division in the body of

contemporary Greek art and research.1

The emergence of the architectural

and urban planning determinant as

an index of historic dynamics, the

collectiveness as abolition of the

boundaries between artistic activity

and political act, the interest in the

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Exhibition view with work by Rikrit Tirananija

31

Book Review

region against a hard-to-define

center, constitute the definite

characteristics of a discourse that

attempts to locate the work of art and

the political action alike in the interior

of this no man’s lands.

In the same vein, it worths

highlighting the fact that Going Public

was organized in Larissa, a city that

does not normally enjoy the

participation in the public dialogue

that corresponds to its economic

vigour. This is not simply the

translocation in the provinces of a

certain type of activities that emanate

from and refer to the center in lieu of

gratuity what is, in other words,

condescendingly termed

decentralization. On the contrary, it is

the utilization of an innate

characteristic of Larissa: a city typecast

by the idiomorphic and stereotypical

impression that it has no cultural

product other than what is in excess of

the farmer’s subventions; a city that is

deprived from what seem to stand for

the only metaphysical justification in

the Greek collective consciousness, the

sea, constituting such a no man’s land

in the Greek landscape. Larissa

accommodated a collaborative project,

but, at the same time, was equally

brought to the fore as the emblematic

locus of the Greek fragment par

excellence, a model city of the

hovering, collective, oppressive

stillness, which, and I mean it positively

as much as literally, is the only Greek

exportable idiosyncracy at the

international cultural dialogue

There are two types of texts in the

catalogue Going Public. On the one

hand, there are texts of theorists -Marti

Peran ("Local Communities and Artists

Nomads"), Carlos Basualdo and

Reinaldo Laggada ("Experimental

Communities"), Georges Tzirtzilakis

("The Community as a Person, the

Ground as an Existence")- which offer

the frame at large and the terms of

autonomous, autonomistic and

relational actions of the organization.

On the other hand, there are

descriptions by artists recording the

conditions, the explanations or the

traces of their action. They constitute,

in a narrative and allusive way of some

sort, evidences of the political

discourse as well as of the researching

dimension they acquired during the

event as work of art.

The catalogue Going Public is an

illustrative example of the ability to

detect and administrate the voids of

the political constitution. Nomadic

communities, settlements for refugees

and ephemeral traces emerge as

preferential spaces for the formulation

of a new narrative of politics.

Nonetheless, a crucial question

remains pending: to what extent may

the artistic pretext constitute a sort of

resistance to the formulation of a

straightforward political discourse and

could this be regarded as the gaze of

someone of romantic disposition

looking down to the void and thus

substituting a new type of symbolic

elusion for action?

1. The catalogue Going Public could be read

in parallel with the catalogue Paradigms of

the Greek participation in the 9th Biennale of

Architecture, publication of the Ministry of

Culture, 2004, as well as with the volume The

[Un]common Place, edited by Bartolomeo

Pietromarchi, Fondazione Olivetti and Actar,

2005. Besides, the first workshop of the

examples on the subject "Regions –

Networks" took place at the Center of

Contemporary Art in Larissa and participants

in the Going Public catalogue, such as

Yorgos Tzirtzilakis and Maria Papadimitriou,

have contributed in all three volumes.

In the next issue of ·.

"The Generation of Dissent – Greek Art in the 70s" – Christopher Wool & George Condo

– Vassilis Polychronakis – Dimitra Vamiali – Anastasia Douka & Sifis Lykakis

Publication: Athens Biennial – Non-Profit Organization

Editor-in-chief: Theophilos Tramboulis

Contributors to this issue: Natasha Adamou, Sotiris Bahtsetzis, Maria-Thalia Carras,

Alexandra Moschovi, Despina Zefkili, Augustine Zenakos

Text editing: Katerina Panoutsou

Translations: Maria Efstathiou

Lay-out: Dimitris Stathopoulos

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