The exhibition space of the art and design collective venue K44, hosted a huge installation consisting of cardboard wallpaper, a collage which stands as the imprint of the private — yet overt — activity of artist Dimitris Ioannou as a master DJ. 514 cardboard boxes — mailers for 12-inch vinyl records that he bought mainly from eBay and online music stores, in his capacity as a DJ. Most probably the cardboards are empty, the content of survival is the cover, the trace of the desired vinyl, which was ordered, packed, posted and sent for performance purposes, is absent. 514 cardboard boxes, juxtaposed provocatively one next to the other, in a flat, sleek, very ‘superficial’ surface space. The artist is deliberately adding physical and metaphorical barriers at a precisely chosen moment in time — he time after ordering and receiving the LP — he introduces the trace, the framed moment at which the rules of exchange between inside and outside are altered and frozen and another meaning of exchange — the actual aura of such a ‘give and take’ — comes into being. Ioannou seems to be using a rigorous system of classification in order to examine the issue of serial collecting and archiving and the identity it produces, if so.

Symbolically, music by vinyl, the sonic and temporal movement and flow are here arrested by material musical memories and associations in the form of the sent cardboard. These associations are captured and preserved in a sacred form, alluding to the archival methods of ‘preserved history’ originally arrested as a form in the curiosities cabinets of the medieval, Renaissance and 19th century museum classification system, which presented a perfect and complete picture of the world. The wallpaper collage seems to be mocking the modernist systems of classification and the object becomes a gadget indicative of its time, challenging the viewer to guess about its content.

The whole body of work — in the discursive act of repeatability — raises a number of issues in relation to the act of collecting as it has evolved from modern times onwards. In his essay The System of Collecting [i], Jean Baudrillard states: ‘it is true that one peculiarity of the object, its exchange value, is governed by cultural and social criteria. And yet it is I who possess it — which, in turn, allows me to recognize myself in it as an absolutely singular being’.

Ioannou criticises with autobiographical nostalgia his own narcissistic tautology but also the system of classification, archiving, value and exchange reminiscent of the gestures of Mark Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke and Michael Asher who — through a conceptual postmodern twist — defined the limits of classification as well as the limits of the identity of the object and its association with the culture of commerce, by subverting the relationship between meaning and value, between production and prescribed result. [ii]

As anthropologist Marc Augé comments about the present, contemporary art is a universal experience, similar to mass tourism. The events, the meetings, the performances, the sites of performance are in some way the actual reproduction of the context of their production. Consequently while context creates content, art defies its presence by its absence, creating a new hermetic space. [iii]

In the You got A good one environment, the empty object in looped sequences, processes the mechanics and functionality of objects taken from our immediate vicinity and everyday hell. It does not appear that the artist/DJ alludes to a romantic vision of ruins. His ‘homage to vinyl’, as Edwin Ramoran states in the catalogue of the exhibition in K44, is a real life homage to on-line digging and on-line tracing which creates in an almost spectacular manner empty spaces which seem originally to be of no importance because of the absence of immediate and visible usefulness and aesthetic ‘functionality’. The whole installation of the artist who spins the DJ set with J-Pop, D-Pop, disco funk and kitschy ’80s favourites is an archaic emblem of the obsessive game of ordering and collecting, a silent antechamber dedicated to the collection of present time.

Part of the ‘property’, part of the relics of the triumph of collecting, were re-installed in Bergen, Norway in the You got A good one! (the Burgen Mix). [iv] The transgression of the ‘dirty urban experience’ boxes to a different city in time, marks the synthetic, semiological effect of lack of content. The boxes seem more disconnected set in the glass windows of the gallery in the Norwegian resort. The address 11 Saripolou Street marked on each of them marks a dislocated, abstract presence in a physical present. Marking once again the passionate ideal of possession in the context of a global networking appropriation.


[i] Jean Baudrillard, ‘The System of Collecting’, in The Cultures of Collection, ed. John Elsner & Roger Cardinal, Reaktion Books Ltd, London, 1994, pp. 11–12.
[ii] Craig Owens, ‘From Work to Frame’, in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, University of California Press, 1992.
[iii] Marc Augé, Où est passé l’avenir, Editions Panama, 2008.
[iv] Gallerie for samtidskunst, Bergen, Norway, 9 December 2008 – 25 January 2009.