Maria Papadimitriou, T.A.M.A./Sentimental, 2003, video-installation

In recent years we all feel that contemporary art in our country is in a special phase of transition. This is how it always was, you might say; yet, as in all transitional situations, we feel to be at a restless spot, an uncertain, confusing passage (poros). All indices point to the pathology of this phenomenon: shaken confidence, amplified internal conflicts and mistrust, lack of a recognisable orientation and a cultural strategy.

Where just a few years back we had more certainties, enthusiasm and even a smug autism, today scepticism and awkwardness seem to spread out. Dazzled by the momentary glamour of certain exhibitions, we were rather late in recognising the mechanisms of self-fulfilment and the blind wanderings to which our recent culture was headed.

What bothers us most is the scant recognition of our artistic product by international art events and its limited presence in the global cultural mosaic. It seems that we have to do with a restless microcosm which remains in the half-light, if not in the dark. The question that inevitably troubles each of us at some point is whether our recent — and current — art is degraded by an always colonial and prejudiced reigning gaze which remains inseparable from the power structure, or whether it actually remains weak and deficient. Although they are never made public, such thoughts tend to become common to all.

Let us not delude ourselves. The global fluidity may have nurtured some ambitions, but the bottom line appears rather poor. Despite the increased potential for international promotion afforded to our country by a series of spectacular events — to which we must include the 2004 Olympics — the international recognition and promotion of our contemporary art remains marginal; the peculiarities of the Greek idiosyncrasy, the hallucinatory qualities of our landscapes and the weird untidiness of Greek cities seem to prevail. Notwithstanding some notable flattering comments and reviews for cultural events like Outlook, Breakthrough, the DESTE Award, The Grand Promenade, some of the Greek participations in the Venice Biennale and, recently, the 1st Athens Biennial (Destroy Athens), the problem remains. I do not disparage the occasional participation of Greek artists in international group shows, but this is also limited, sporadic and isolated.

Our feeling today is that we have a ‘minor art’ ­— or ‘minor artists’. The difference is not negligible: for instance, an unknown artist from Britain or Germany finds different opportunities and reception on the part of curators, critics, collectors and cultural institutions in the international art centres — what we used to call the dominant ‘art system’ — than an artist from a minor European country like ours, which Western imagination associates with an ideal holiday, with an adventurous incoherence and ultimately with a charming quirkiness.

I know several people who would smile condescendingly and raise an objection by citing artists from other minor countries of Latin America, Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe. Yet these examples only serve to confirm certain cultural constructs and the ascendancy of a folkloric attitude of the bulimic Western gaze. If we think about it, in those artists we ‘discover’ more or less what we knew already: something demonic, traumatic, violent, metaphysical and exotic, a kind of magical metropolitan consciousness or an ‘Ostalgie’. Despite the host of reflexive and post-colonial revisions, those seen as ‘non-Westerners’ or artists from minor countries are almost obliged to deal with issues of identity, and those from the major ‘scenes’ of the West with technology, biopolitics, sexual difference, the spectacle, effigies, electronic terrorism and other global concerns.

It is not hard to imagine the vacillations of our local artistic production against such a cultural scheme. Indeed, younger artists may travel more, resettle more easily, be fluent in foreign languages and open to the global versions of the mediascape, yet they still carry in their luggage a disparate thing which is not easy to shed, although they often delude themselves into thinking that it remains unseen. Today we should not perceive this accursed local share as something that perpetuates an unchanging metaphysical identity nor in a essentialist way, but as the concrete result of historical conditions, changes, repressions and differentiations, and as such we could describe it as the ‘peculiarity of the Greek case’.

The question is not ‘what we are’ but ‘why we are what we are‘ or ‘what we could be’ or even ‘what we would like to be’. It is a pity that the 1st Athens Biennial touched on these issues in its stated intentions but did not pursue them. I insist: the disturbing and uncomfortable ‘locale’ is never local or localist because it is not constant; it is a changing multiplicity of relations that generates different subjectifications. So here is one first definition of this accursed local share, from which we can learn a lot about our contemporary history and culture without having to seek parallels with the Part maudite that Georges Bataille described admirably in 1949.

I have said elsewhere that the architect Dimitris Pikionis once described this kind of cultural condition as ‘of different minds’ (diha-froneonta) — what we would term ‘schizoid’ in contemporary terms. In a few words, it condenses all the traits of a cultural neurosis, as it possesses a series of symbolic expressions of conflicts, ‘deferred’ [Nachträglichkeit] imaginary and, above all, multiple fusions between desires and defences.

I do not believe that our contemporary art is without worthy artists and artworks which process some of the above characteristics and stand out. Some indicative examples of artists from different generations who were active in the last decade: the cheeky paganism of Thanassis Totsikas, the enigmatic paradoxes of Apostolos Georgiou, the ‘bodies without organs’ of George Lappas, the mnemonic atlases of George Hadjimichalis, the inhabitable microcosms of Maria Papadimitriou, the intuitive handcrafted mysticism of Nikos Alexiou, the meditative environments of Nikos Navridis and the psycho­analytical drive of Christiana Soulou demonstrate the possibility of doing such a thing. I am following with great interest the precarious return of Kostis Velonis and Dionisis Kavallieratos to sculpture, the political intertextuality of Nikos Charalambidis and the “mal d’archive” that haunts an artist like Vangelis Vlahos and leads to a contemplative but always concrete genre. The documentary realism of Eva Stefani and Stefanos Tsivopou­los, the open forms of Alexandros Psychoulis and Lina Theodorou, the corporeality of Georgia Sagri and Yorgos Sapountzis, the psychographic heterotopias of Eleni Kamma and Anastasia Douka, the dark polytropy of Athanassios Argianas, Poka-Yio, Dora Economou and Dimitris Foutris, the hybridism of Jannis Varelas, the artisan electronic suburbia of Andreas Angelidakis, the suggestive environments of DeAnna Maganias, the accumulations of Nikos Tranos, the precision and the shaken realism in Ilias Papailiakis, Panagiotis Loukas and Vangelis Gokas, the ‘states of exception’ of Zafos Xagoraris, the structural riddles of Vasso Gavaisse, the fragmented narratives of Loukia Alavanou and Katerina Christidi point also to other complementary paths.

Do not hasten to treat this list as closed, since many similar examples could have been used instead or in addition. So if contemporary Greek art does not attract international recognition, it still seeks to relate (often vaguely) to Greek society and its rapidly changing conflicts as well as to a series of global concerns around issues of public sphere, ‘topocritique’, territorial practices, alterity, media culture, imagination, everyday life and linguistic experimentation.

While Hal Foster spoke about the ‘artist as ethnographer’, I believe that these days the more prevalent model is that of the artist as art director of some existing, diverse cultural material. This figure seems to preside over the management and the processing of images and the interface between the new artistic practices and their context. The small-format approach often proves more suitable than large compositions. I am not claiming that there are no simplifications and attempts to impress, the angst of reception and a frantic chase for the new which multiply the names in what is a small art scene to begin with; yet what above all else characterises our contemporary art product — and which it often tries to repress by causing diversions — is the ‘varieties of borderline’ (the cutting-edge condition) which bring back the heat and the contradictions of the accursed local share. This is a borderline situation which makes any domestic cultural product hover within gaps, within an unspecified “third space” and highlights the paradigm of irresolution.


The absence of meaning and the change of paradigm

British physicist and epistemologist Freeman Dyson [i] proposed a line of reasoning which may come useful here: he claimed that history showed a high incidence of failure in human pursuits and a high rate of abandoned research because of the inevitable difference between the models we select and reality as it actually is. The conclusion seems clear: if we invest our artistic present and future in one idea, we are almost certain to waste our energy the wrong way; if, instead, we promote more alternative, ‘weak’ and even clashing models, we are — statistically­ — bound to achieve something, even if it is only the ability to keep going by staving off the suffocating feeling of stagnation and disrepute.

We all know that our local art production is not used to this variegated coexistence of models and views, and our cultural debate is often infected by offensive insinuations, envy, intolerance and sly denigrations. This is a long and enduring phenomenon in our artistic behaviours, and has reached new heights of delirium in certain blogs.

I will not expand here on the consequences of this fixation to which I am naturally averse. The crux of the problem is this: if contemporary art itself is a critical act, where we lag most is not in the field of aggressive commentary but of interpretation. The desperate escalation of the absence of meanings confirms the lack of new readings and critical interpretations. Such an interpretative critical stance, which studies the sources (works and their critical reception) and has views and reflexivity, is the oxygen of the so-called evaluative criticism but also of art life itself, triggering debates, narratives, theoretical quests, restructurings of the dominant semantics, side meanings, recombinations and fallbacks.

Of course, I am not talking here about the empirical sentimentalism and the verbose didacticism of which our home critics have often been guilty in the past, nor about stopping at general and vague forays into biopolitics, Foucault or Rosalyn Deutsche. These are certainly key elements of our cultural practices which, however, we need to ‘make concrete’. As you may suspect, I am making this allusion because I expect much more from the Reading Group: its members have the theoretical background and the writing skills to try their hand in this area. The establishment of the Department of Theoretical Studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts creates similar expectations.

For example, the exhibition In Present Tense: Young Greek Artists may have been questioned as to its merits, yet a careful study of the catalogue shows that unlike earlier event, it attempted a systematisation and a first reading of the artists and the exhibited works. Even if this reading is not always original, it is well documented and employs modern conceptual tools with which our critical and artistic culture is only just beginning to familiarise themselves.

So unlike what most people believe, the yearned-for recognition of our artistic production beyond the borders is not a question of promotion, exhibitions or funding. They do help, of course, but the quest remains for a special character, a conceptual framework for its understanding and, above all, its perception and — why not? — its enjoyment by others.

The writers and artists of the 1930s generation established a platform for cultural extroversion based on the mythicising of the ‘folkloric’ and the mild fusion between local and international. That model may have been exhausted, but it was never replaced by some other one of equal cohesion. The artists of the 1960s generation activated the dormant potential for participation of Greek art in the international artistic discourse by favouring policies of modernity and the subject (Nikos Kessanlis, Vlassis Kaniaris, Chryssa Romanos, Takis, etc.). I do not know whether we have any other option than ‘a paradigm shift’, [ii] adding tension to the ambiguities and to this ‘accursed share’ we have been carrying awkwardly for decades.


Translated by Tony Moser


[i] Freeman Dyson became known for his work around the possible existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. He deals with a wide range of subjects, among which I pick out the role of domestic appliances in scientific revolutions and the social effects of reprogenetics.
[ii] To this end, it might be particularly expedient to make use of the work of some outstanding writers of the ‘everyday experience’ such as Christos Vakalopoulos, Costis Papagiorgis and Evgenios Aranitsis.