⁰¹ Kostis Velonis, Gaining Socialism While Losing your Wife (After Popova's Set Construction for ‘Le Coçu magnifique’, 1922), 2009, wood, acrylic, iron, plywood, spray, fabric, 450 × 170 × 92 cm
⁰² Kostis Velonis, Life without Democracy, 2009, wood, plywood, acrylic, spray, 190 × 390 × 42 cm
⁰³ Kostis Velonis, How to Build Democracy Making Rhetorical Comments (After Klucis' Design for Propaganda Kiosk, Screen and Loudspeaker Platform, 1922), 2009, wood, plywood, acrylic, spray, pencil, oil pastel, marker, paper, glue, 450 × 660 × 776 cm
⁰⁴ Kostis Velonis, How one Can Think Freely in the Shadow of a Temple, 2010, slide projection. Courtesy of the artist.
⁰⁵ Kostis Velonis, Working Class Discourse, 2010, ceramics, wood, acrylic, 33.5 × 22 × 21 cm
⁰⁶ Kostis Velonis, Revolution essentielle, 2008, wood, acrylic, fabric, MDF, plywood, wax, 107 × 140 × 120 cm
⁰⁷ MKostis Velonis, emorial to Collective Utopia, 2010, wood, acrylic, watercolour, 141 × 80 × 54 cm
⁰⁸ Kostis Velonis, Reconstruction of the Model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International as an Instrument of Research for Domesticity, 2009, wood, acrylic, veneer, plywood, spray, 110 × 30 × 30 cm
⁰⁹ Kostis Velonis, Farming to defeat town designed plans, 2010, acrylic, watercolour and pieces of wood on paper, 56 × 76 cm
¹⁰ Kostis Velonis, Design for a monument, 2010, acrylic and watercolour on paper, 76 × 56 cm
¹¹ Eisenhower in a helicopter inspecting the Parthenon, 1952. Megaloconomos Agency, Parthenon Project, Democracy and the State, slide projection, 2010

Thanos Stathopoulos: The Loneliness on Common Ground exhibition that was presented at the National Museum of Contemporary Art had its roots in the 2009 Kunstverein Hamburg exhibition (How One Can Think Freely in the Shadow of a Temple). Could you tell me what the differences were between these two versions of the exhibition?

Kostis Velonis: The exhibition in Hamburg featured larger installations, while smaller works were first presented here, with the exception of Révolution Essentielle, 2008, which had been presented at the Brussels Biennial two years earlier. But curator Dafni Vitali and I both thought that this particular work was necessary to complete the exhibition’s narrative. The most important difference is that the installation plan at the Kunstverein allowed works to be viewed from all angles, more like sculptures, whereas emphasis at the EMST was on a frontal view, which highlighted the element of synthesis and combined with the space’s specific features to create a sense of theatricality. Both options, I think, are useful in stressing different aspects of the works that account for their structural makeup as much as their ideological and notional treatment.

TS: I suppose theatricality was a requirement from the start?

KV: It was at once a requirement and a necessity.

TS: And was there perhaps a comic element implied in this hint to theatricality?

KV: When I speak of theatricality I am referring to the ambience created by the objects on display. But the element of comedy is almost a precondition for certain works, such as the one based on Popova’s set design for the Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922. The grotesque masks moving along the Taylorist assembly line-cum-factory where the action is set, which represents the couple’s home, reflect the acts of the jealous husband, Bruno. The structure of Gaining Socialism While Losing Your Wife, 2009, is voyeuristic: everyone is at once watching and being watched without exception. There is a comical aspect to every work, but if this happy unexpected twist that causes us to smile weren’t there, I don’t think I’d be interested in sculpture. Sculpture may at times slide suddenly into farce as it challenges its own transcendent quality. To contest the significant may well be a virtue — you must take some risks, otherwise your work becomes a sort of formalist feng shui. The comical element is not always to be found in the work’s form, or to be limited to form for that matter; it can also involve the work’s title. The title is a convention that serves self-referentiality, in the sense that it is a piece of rhetoric arguing the correspondence between the work and a reading of the work that can never be fixed. A thing that is not fixed yet aspires to convince us of its own self-referentiality cannot but be comical and thus facilitate the viewer’s detachment. It can be a deeply democratic experience, or at least an experience that makes it easier for anyone to take a stand. So the very solemnity of the monumental can become the object of satire, leaving ‘official history’ as a whole exposed enough to take a pummeling until it’s knocked down and out — and of course it’s not just the title that achieves that but the work’s overall antiheroic quality. Even the term ‘utopia’ — for many a taboo word since it always seems to betray itself — has a potentially entertaining content. Unfortunately, the working class was never emancipated. Now let us all laugh out loud.

TS: Still, I cannot really make out the satire in your works. I can more readily identify the conflict with ‘official history’ as you say, in what seems to be an existential preoccupation with the human comedy.

KV: Yes, that’s true. Satire is more akin to politics and to see my work in purely political terms would be an inadequate approach not really able to help fully understand it. Satire is interesting so far as it attempts to isolate something that is coming under fierce criticism — usually when we can easily identify references to current affairs. Such references can be quite conspicuous in a work. But if we cut through the surface, the human condition is revealed to us as a comedy of sorts, which can provide a general, universal principle for the collective fate of mankind. The work of art has roots in comedy among other things, in the sense that it exposes the unresolved tensions, the pervasive contradictions of life. The universe, in its rigid indifference toward our finite being, has but one lesson to teach us and that is that all human activity is futile save possibly art, given that art acknowledges our insignificance before the great void; that it knows of the impasse at the end of the road. Art tackles the unknown in ways that are well beyond reason or causality. Even with works that are thought to represent sculpture’s ‘finest hour’, like Rodin’s The Thinker or Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa, you can never be quite certain about the limits of the authoritative narrative. Artists reveal things almost despite themselves; experiences that illustrate enduring conflicts. What is more, the comical tends to prevail down the line even when the tragic was originally a conscious choice. Irony is an overwhelming force.

TS: It seems ‘the working class no longer goes to Heaven’ … By referencing Grommelynck’s Magnanimous Cuckold in Gaining Socialism While Losing Your Wife, reworking Popova’s set design and weaving the play’s plot into the work, you are effectively contrasting the revolution with romantic love and private-family life, the avant-garde with personal experience, loneliness and individuality, ending with a parody of the revolutionary project. ‘Utopia’ is left stunned.

KV: The working class ‘used to go’ to the factories and it is no accident that Popova envisions the interior of a house in a windmill like a factory. Her view as a member of the community of Bolshevik artists and intellectuals is that the home can no longer be perceived on the basis of standards that formerly applied, say, to the far-off rural cottage, an emblem of an obsolete order of things, not to mention those of a ‘Chekhovian bourgeois interior’ that dominated stage design at the time and continues to do so even today. What could this reflect other than a conscious disregard for the private sphere and a challenge to private property, seeing that the factory as representation, rather than the home, evokes the notion of the workplace, the conditions of collective planning, coordination, division and, finally, an implicit acknowledgement of the necessity of communalism? The factory has a dual significance. It is the space of oppression, a symbol of the capitalist’s property and at the same time a symbol of the worker’s identity, the matrix of the revolution. Some of my recent works, such as Usine occupée and Labor Craft above the Clouds focus on this relationship between oppression and emancipation. Ideals inspired by the industrial revolution addressed the social imagination as much as anything else. The masses are more important than the individual. My work begins at that point where one would question the soundness of this view then and now. It is not something that can be pursued programmatically in the limited space of an ideological and political debate. It would be like trying to apply class criteria to interpret the myth of Oedipus. But a class-based conflict can often encourage an existential approach to things. The certainty of our death turns everything around.

TS: Unfortunately, no revolution was ever placed on an ontological footing; none was founded upon existential premises.

KV: This seems to be stating the obvious, but it also shows the ‘limitations‘ of revolutionary practice. For the discontented, mobilising to overthrow a system that fosters exploitation or injustice is a necessity among many others. Yet even if I conceded that social mobilisation is a broad enough term to include the intricate web of human relations, the issue of the self is one we must all resolve on our own. The thinking individual can develop independently of any kind of collectivity, irrespective of how necessary one may think collectivities to be. Freedom can be politicised because it is above all inherent to man; it belongs to the subject first and foremost as the ability to reflect upon the self. And since all are born and die alone, all have the right to become absorbed in their thoughts, to withdraw deep inside the self. All psychiatric views of melancholy aside, the melancholy man is a dreamer, a producer of art, who builds an arsenal of things-that-might-be to fight against the barrenness of the present. Desperation is the driving force of the visionary and the vision is part and parcel of the revolution.

TS: Left Wing Melancholy, 2009, At the End of Demonstration Day, 2009, You Just Fail, 2010, Mayakovski Shortly After his Suicide, 2008, Memorial to Collective Utopia, 2010, Révolution Essentielle, 2008, are just some of the works in the exhibition that echo the distress over what has been a collective failure. But the inadequacies of reality when compared to the imagination, the loneliness it promises in the absence of the vision and of revolution seem to be egging us on toward a new sensibility. Utopia cannot be disowned.

KV: True enough, it cannot be disowned, but the biggest problem remains that its collective management will breed dystopias; that it tends to run counter to basic human rights. The echo of collective failure that my work seems to carry, as you say, is only one aspect of the issue at hand and unless it combines with other elements, it runs the risk of offering little more than a sketchy description, even if this should use the ironic vocabulary of a modernist ‘assemblage’. Some may find such variation appealing, others not at all, but this is not really what is at stake here. My references to the past are filtered through the lens of a bleak contemporary reality, where the Left proves itself to be tragically shortsighted at the same time that a corrupt and bankrupt economic system threatens even the very survival of the planet itself, to mention just one example of my personal experience of contemporary social developments. The creative process is first of all a worldly affair; it is only later that the work has the luxury to fold back into itself. In that sense, utopia cannot be rejected; art’s call-to-arms that promises the possibility to turn your life upside down cannot be rejected. I don’t doubt that to others art can be nothing more than the passive reception of an aesthetic form, or perhaps a vulgar artifice, to wink in the direction of the Platonists. But visual discourse precedes philosophic discourse. And yet we cannot expect a work of art to give us all the answers, to settle all of mankind’s questions by some curious stroke of dramatic inspiration. Why else should we need the myths surrounding the great masterpieces of art if not for permitting us to demythologise them?

TS: I am under the impression that this sense of failure reaches a different pitch in each of the works I mentioned before.

KV: Actually, I would say that Révolution Essentielle in particular is at the other end of that spectrum. It is based on a poster created during the May 1968 protests by the Atelier Populaire, the group of students at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. This time I chose a poster that did not feature the explicit political slogans or familiar caricatures that the famous collective is known for. We see a tree branch against a red sun and the rubric ‘Révolution Essentielle’, calling attention to a set of ideals that seem somewhat removed from the militant spirit of those days. At first I was puzzled by this poster, but pretty soon I was overwhelmed by a rush of simple-minded joy. What was it that urged this group of art students to sign a poster so alien to its signature style, to focus instead on the issue of an ‘essential revolution’? Can we speak of a revolution in ontological terms?

TS: This title suggests a dialogue between some of your previous works of the past few years and a series of recent works that seem to form a more or less coherent group, concerned mainly with an idyllic, almost Arcadian view of doing and living well.

KV: We are perhaps at the point where we should try to peer through the crack at what the third or final stage of communism could be, at how one chooses to live in an ideal society and whether such a society might not already be there in front of us, beyond the metropolis. Certainly, all that may be just a fantasy inspired by urban myths about the nature of pastoral life, but all the same it is hard for me to accept that rural communities are only a relic of the preindustrial past. If we substituted urban populations (including all class distinctions implied in the citizen’s identity) with rural populations could we not reclaim the life of a community structured along the lines of a post-Fordist, ecological model of social organisation?

TS: How is this reflected in your work method?

KV: Well, for some time now I have been aware of certain analogies between this idea on the one hand and my work method and choice of media on the other. For example, I often use tree branches found around the countryside in Attica or materials that tend to fit the description of the humble leftover scrap wood. Can a practice of sculpture based on principles of ‘autarchy’ correspond to the vision of an actual autonomous rural community, or at least advocate the possibility of a pastoral utopia, to use a term borrowed from literature? Can this world of a ‘golden age’, the world one finds in Arcadian narratives, as contemporary political terms would have it, inspire contemporary democracies to outline new concepts and new boundaries?

TS: In others words, you mean a rural community as a realised political entity and your sculptural practice as a gesture that points in its direction. The link between manual labor and a use of lo-fi materials in your work on the one hand and a ‘pastoral utopia‘ on the other is evident in Working Class Discourse, 2010, a work that is unlike your larger architectural constructions inasmuch as it focuses on the bare necessities and perhaps foreshadows some your most recent works I have had the chance to see. At the same time manual labor suggests the practice of a craftsman. There is, I think, a certain sense of asceticism, which is at any rate a general characteristic of your work, as clear in the proportions and method of your sculpture as in your political approach regarding the building of democracy.

KV: My intention was that the work should be autonomous, that it should transcend any possible working-class connotations. I used scrap wood that I collected in downtown Athens, with the exception of the miniature wooden pallet that is a representation of a real object I often use in place of a base for other works. Here, it serves to underscore the work’s overall proportions, creating the impression of a scale model, or ‘maquette’. The concept reflects a rather conventional concern with allowing the work to fulfill its potential as ‘artefact’, further implying that an interpretation of the work should conform to its pragmatic, practical quality. I am more interested in the Constructivist approach of this relationship than that of Duchamp’s. And although today we may be using a different language when we speak of mass industrial design, the question as far as I am concerned is whether in fact we can move on to a production of socialist objects without applying modernist criteria of utilitarian design. But even such a shift could not change the fact that the historical Productivists have been replaced in part by designers. The theoretical ground that nourished the idea of the ‘original work‘ in the face of industrial production enables us to visualise the programmatic stages through which a work passes from execution, to production and then on to the market. The next question concerns the buyer and his motives. Tatlin’s or Arvatov’s notion of a work-object that responds to the minimum of quotidian human needs — whatever may fulfill the needs of the worker or low-wage employee — is obviously a far cry from contemporary art market practices. It is true that the dream of mass marketed affordable utilitarian design was ideally realised in Scandinavian countries, with their radical welfare state policies and democratisation of design, but it definitely did not reach beyond the independent field of design as such into the art world. And it is rather naïve and unfair, to say the least, to expect what was a brief period in the history of material culture, and art for that matter, to replace the familiar and safe channels through which the artifact transforms into a work of high art. Nevertheless, anything that presents a challenge to the safety of this status quo, upheld by the uninterrupted trade in symbolism between money, prestige and power, is interesting in and of itself. Our biggest objection today to the spirit of militant modernism concerns their hopeful vision of industrial production. In the contemporary world, where mass production is no longer a factor that determines a worker’s standard of living, the collective fancy does not really perceive a linear correlation of cutting-edge technology and the notion of progress. On the contrary, specialized craft comes to provide a remedy for what materialist thinkers would describe as ‘alienation’. Besides, even for the most intransigent strand of dialectical materialism, the objective was to turn the ‘byt’, the mundane life of the Russian people, into ‘bytie’, the ideal of everyday life. If humans are tied to matter by necessity, then what, if not the work of art, can be the ‘object’ that makes for an exception to the rule of human life? Why do away with the precious quality of the object if the object itself is not literally precious — that is, made of an expensive material such as gold or diamonds?

TS: But there are actually those interested in immaterial forms of art.

KV: I think that those who question the value of visual work — say, in the form of a sculpture or an object — while arguing for that of intangible, high poetry are being unfair to reality for no apparent reason. There are many poets who are well aware of how hollow this distinction is, who make poetry out of ‘things’ as I would make ‘things’ out of poetry. What matters, ultimately, is not the outcome, but the origins, the source of one’s inspiration. I am reminded of this passage from Francis Ponge’s Pour un Malherbe: ‘Whether rightly or wrongly and without knowing why I have always felt, ever since I was a child, that the only texts of any worth were those that could be carved in stone.’

TS: Of course, this critique of the object is not a novelty. It is already there in the ’60s, inscribed in the work of artists such as Robert Smithson, for example, who I suspect would find in Ponge’s words a plea for Land Art and Earth Works. Questioning the object is in fact part of a broader debate concerning contemporary art, which goes beyond this distinction to discuss the nature of the contemporary art work in what seems an increasingly inclusive field of art practice and experience, where conventional boundaries between genres are conflated.

KV: Fortunately enough, Land Art or conceptual art in their many forms did not manage to cast the ‘object’ into obscurity. On the contrary, since you mentioned Robert Smithson, it seems that experimentation with representing the object-space relationship had an active role in establishing a kind of photographic documentation, along with architectural plans, notes, and other ephemera as legitimate exhibits in visual art shows of the years that followed. At the same time it opened up new possibilities for traditional three-dimensional sculpture and provided fresh insight that proved very useful in recent attempts to renew the medium or make room for its emancipation.

TS: So where do you stand as a sculptor in terms of this general trend towards renewal?

KV: One of the reasons I am interested in sculpture, and I am not sure this answers your question directly, is that it gives me a limitless range of options, even if it means I should start from the three-dimensional only to end up working with color on a two-dimensional plane. There is this concern which I think I have often admitted in my conversations with fellow artists, painters and photographers mainly, that in their case the frame ensures some measure of certainty, that it offers a sense of security and that this is perhaps a reason for going that way, but at the same time it might make you feel restricted, like you have little choice of working beyond the fixed spatial limits it outlines. Whatever the outcome, it cannot extend beyond the space delimited in advance by the canvas, or paper, or photographic frame. But in my case it is almost impossible to predict to any degree of accuracy which way and how far my work will develop in terms of space. Reaching out across space without limitations is one of the enduring underpinnings of the sculptural quest and it can be as terrifying as it is liberating. In this light, my reading of Joseph Beuys’s views regarding a Soziale Plastik, a social sculpture that is, tends to invoke the notion of a phenomenology of perception. There is no doubt that Beuys is referring to an activist practice of sculpture, but I find it interesting to translate this activism into something that allows sculpture to lay an axiomatic claim on reality itself. Therefore, the picture on the wall is as much part of a ‘sculpture’ in whose shaping we unwittingly participate as is the pattern of my gestures across space. It follows that a renewal or redetermination of the medium takes place in such open-ended conditions that it should appear like a small spiral that coils on and on against an unfathomable background, a vast, endless space.


Kostis Velonis’ exhibition Loneliness on Common Ground: How Can Society Do What Each Person Dreams was curated by Daphne Vitali and presented at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) from 11 May to 5 September 2010. His new solo show Marx in Arcadia at AD Gallery, Athens, runs from 15 November 2010 to 11 January 2011.