Splendid Isolation, Athens

...recovering through art
from the effort of creating it.

Constantine Cavafy

As one of the curators invited to contemplate the subject of Heaven, I have oriented my thinking on this immeasurably broad topic by naming my exhibition Splendid Isolation, Athens. I wanted to let my work be guided by an immersive approach rather than a topical or thematic one, though notions such as the loss of innocence, nature and utopia are echoed throughout.

A biennial is both a specialized review for art professionals and a spectacular event for the general public. A biennial may hypothesize, but it is not a classroom and not all interpretations of its value are correct, for every presentation of visual culture is framed by a specific context, which delimits—and also enhances—the scope of what it can reasonably mean.

A successful exhibition of this sort offers more than the value of the individual works shown and more than the curator’s interests; one must find a way to assume an approach that lets the show’s specific context uniquely determine the foundation for the meaning within it. My approach to, and investigation for, Heaven took two scenarios into account: the first Athens Biennial of contemporary art—Destroy Athens (2007)—and my own first thematic exhibition [ME1] of contemporary art—Splendid Isolation, Summt (1997) in Germany.

The first Athens Biennial imported a structure of architectural elements to radically direct viewers through a labyrinthine parcours—a rigid design principle which remains a powerful part of our collective memory of the show. It was this formal structure employed by my curatorial predecessors (and current co-directors) along with the theme they chose for this second biennial—namely, Heaven—that led me to return to an exhibition I co-curated in 1997 which dealt with another form of cultural determination through the importation of formal and architectural structures. Splendid Isolation, Summt, the show in question, featured ten temporary installations and took as its starting point the utopian, as well as proletarian, promises of a popular form of garden colony introduced at the turn of the century as a workers’ movement reform project. These gridded garden parcels (Schrebergarten in German) were designed to alleviate social inequality by showing that harmony could be achieved in an artificial paradise.

How structuring entities function to direct creative activity, social practices and aesthetic experience remains a topic of interest. Thus Splendid Isolation, Athens (2009) includes a number of art works that employ some formal or structural principle, whether it be as rigid as scaffolding, as symbolic as a monetary exchange, as modular as blocks, or as flexible as narrative. For many artists in the show, some existent form—be it physical or immaterial, biographical or contrived, religious or scientific—offers a means by which to re-consider, re-form, re-imagine or even re-structure a momentary or lifelong place of inspiration.

While grids, multiples and measuring systems do recur in Benita–Immanueal Grosser’s Participating, at the Same Time (1995-present), Anastasia Douka’s Chain (2009), Miltos Manetas’ 51 Chairs and a Few Assholes (1991) and Michael Gibson’s YNWA (2009), there are also a number of works in which the artist’s approach was directed by purely imaginary or fictional sources, including Adrian Williams’ The Carrier (2009), Ry Rocklen’s Viewfinder (2008) and Mai Thu Perret’s Positiveland (Isolation Bungalow Furniture) (2006). In Ryan McNamara’s video I Thought It Was You (2008), the artist tries to let go of the body’s structural consciousness in spaces defined by a gay identity, while in Hsuan Hsuan Wu’s I Don’t Know What You Are Talking About #2 (2005), the artist’s cognitive self consciousness withdraws into alienation. Malcolm McLaren has culled reknown artist personas from archival advertising footage for his second moving-image montage, while Kalup Linzy assumes multiple gendered [ME2] personas for a live audience and Angelo Plessas gives us a mobile monument cum cruising/meeting/performance platform. With these multi-media projects, we inhabit diverse scenarios and sites.

In the given architecture of its exhibition space, Splendid Isolation, Athens is comfortable in its transitional placement between interior and exterior. The ongoing collaboration with Andreas Angelidakis has provided an opportunity to let this architecture remain ‘given,’ though its ramps, exits, vents, and open-plan pose challenges. Added elements now belong to the space, just as the transition from inside to outside [ME3] belongs to the installed works and to my concept for the show. Presentations of subtle perception [ME4] such as Willem di Rooij’s group of canvases Silver to Gold (2009) and Martin Oppel’s Untitled, bricks (2009) are also well-suited to this transitional setting, while the gradual accumulation of material in a tentative urban arena illustrated by Lara Almarcegui’s photographic documentation Cavar (1998) contrasts with, but also compliments, the massive material abundance of Christodoulos Panayiotou’s 2008 (2009).

Ettore Sottsass’ photographic series Metafore (1973-1978) is positioned throughout Splendid Isolation, Athens so as to function like punctuation in written prose, tracing his endeavours to find space to pause for poetry. In this historic work, Sottsass frames (i.e. contextualizes) open space utopically with elements that look like architecture, but function only to structure and support ideas in the mind.

Splendid Isolation, Athens, Artists

Benita-Immanuel Grosser’s minimalist installation that spans interior and exterior surfaces of the exhibition venue serves as both a reflection of their conceptual approach to space and a platform for their ongoing project Participating, at the Same Time. Since 1995 Benita-Immanuel Grosser have been integrating the theory and practice of yoga into the context of art. A grid based on the floor plan of their Sivananda center in Hamburg, Y8 (pronounced 'yacht'), is usually transferred onto the floor of an exhibition space in-between and with-in the installed works and given architecture. For the duration of the 2nd Athens Biennial, yoga sessions will be held in the evening to offer visitors an opportunity to direct the attention of the senses inwardly.

Hsuan Hsuan Wu is an artist, who was born in Taiwan, but whose artistic sensibility and maturity has been refined by foreign settings, where an urban pace and proximity established certain rate and compositional conventions in her time based works of photography and video. An extreme sense of isolation dominates Hsuan Hsuan Wu’s visual narratives as with the series, I Don’t Know What you are Talking About where the performer inserts herself into a crowded location -- a carnival or crosswalk -- to eat a meal without any acknowledgement of the public swarming like bees in her immediate surroundings. The character -- could it be the artist? -- seems to inhabit a self-defined space of alienation where there is no room for not belonging. In her own carefully chosen words: “That is what attracts me: being peripheral at the center of the world”.

Em Kei aims to challenge the traditional meaning and function of familiar objects and symbols through a process of radical redetermination. Her ongoing series entitled para/site projects consists of seemingly spontaneous interventions where by the artist changes, restages, and even replaces public monuments. By blending diverse media, such as paper streamers on a marble memorial or plastic flowers on a politician’s figure in brass, these alterations transform the traditional interpretation of a person, place, or event to unveil hidden, unseemly, or even ridiculous affiliations. Em Kei’s Monument of the Unknown (Hooligan) is positioned to face the sea and be surrounded by the art and artifice of this 2nd Athens Biennial site. While the work may seem to be a mere ironic anti-memorial to the complicated local politics of place and name, its significance goes beyond this site-specific context to memorialize an international community of anti-hero’s heros.

Kalup Linzy performs most of the characters in his video and performance works satirizing the tone and narrative of television soap operas and cocktail lounge cabarets. Ironically enigmatic and at times tender beyond reproach, Linzy can make an audience laugh at one moment and cry the next. Often on stage in drag, his precise lyrical style and delivery recall comedians like Richard Pryor and queens like RuPaul. For Splendid Isolation, Athens, Lindzy will be performing songs accompanied with a video installation from the albums: SweetBerry Sonnet, Sampled and LeftOVa.

Miltos Manetas is a Greek-born painter and multimedia artist known for his paintings of computer hardware, internet websites, videogames, and virtual projects about people involved with these technologies. Though Manetas is internationally known for his ground breaking digital and virtual art activities, when he made the work entitled, 51 Chairs and a Few Assholes (1991), which is part of Splendid Isolation, Athens, he had never touched a computer and was clueless about web based media. Nonetheless, it was this hand made serial work of minimalist installation sculpture and the conversations with local art community members at the time, which led Manetas to radically reconsider his art practice and start making art for and with the internet. Then and now, active community engagement remains vital for Manetas’ work.

Though Ryan McNamara acts as the sole performer in his works, friends and colleagues often contribute to his creative process. Inspired by the loss of a loved one, “grandma … whom I always considered an active collaborator in my practice,” and set in the seedy frontiers where queers meet, I Though it was You (2008) allows the artist to reconcile roles that do not usually commingle. To begin the work, McNamara commissioned a choreographer to create a score that evoked the body failing. Mother filmed, and transvestites in the bar directed. In the video installation, a double projection of McNamara’s sincere attempts to perform the dance piece in two anomalous locations invites viewers to get critically close to his body’s inability to perform. The viewer is left to wonder if the artist is able to be successful at making his body perform its own loss of ability.

Like his first video work entitled, Shallow (2008), Malcolm McLaren’s Paris (2009) is a montage sequence of music clips and moving images. Premiering in Greece as part of Splendid Isolation, Athens curated by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz for the Second Athens Biennial, McLaren’s Paris is a psychogeographical portrait of its namesake city composed of advertising footage from 1900 to the present. To accompany the cinematic image sources, McLaren, a music legend, incorporates his 1995 CD recording with the same title, Paris, bringing that impressive sound narrative to life in pictures.

In Martin Oppel's work, forms defy the logic that their materials appear to dictate while the materials are not at all what they appear to be. With a dialectical strategy the artist seeks to combine opposing ideas or categories i.e, nature and culture, science and fiction, product and process, and past and present. The series of "brick" sculptures" juxtaposes the stark practical language of buiding materials with the symbolic nature, and illusory physics of light and color. Grey minimal constructions made of light foam, not heavy concrete, reveal at a second glance, to contain a parallel dimension of hues, suggesting a hidden landscape reflected perhaps in the colors of twilight (the in-between hour). The sculptures also bring to mind the timeless persistence of iconographic building traditions such as Ziggurats and Pyramids, while at the same time introduce a familiar modern geometry. The compositional vernacular of past and present are both recalled at once.

Christodoulos Panayiotou has made a number of works about negotiating the projections and desires surrounding Cypriot identity and history. Panayiotou’s critical approach seems simultaneously acerbic yet sincere, topical yet broad, personal yet objective. One may not too easily isolate the mission or message his work conveys. For his pyramidal sculpture which premiers at this 2nd Athens Biennial, the artist collected masses of shredded Cyprus Pound bank notes that were exchanged for Euros as part of an agreement authorized by the central bank of Cyprus in 2007. Though 2008 seems at first glance to be a comment on the recent economic crisis, the work is not merely about commemorating current global trends. More than a monument to money or its failure, this towering mass of defunct currency stages symptomatically the unequal or not yet compensated exchange of culture in the region.

Mai-Thus Perret’s works of ceramics, textile, painting, sculpture and film have utopian ambitions but are often executed with a personal touch -- a hand-made aesthetic combined with a modernist vocabulary. Since 1999 Perret has been writing a story entitled “The Crystal Frontier” about a group of women, who decide to set up an autonomous community in the desert. The story unfolds as an imaginary narrative space while the works inhabit the physical exhibition space to engage the viewer theatrically. Perret’s work for the 2nd Athens Biennial, entitled, Positiveland (Isolation Bungalow Furniture) (2006) is a set of Hermann Miller pendant lamps coated in latex. Although the objects emit no light, the space becomes charged with a plethora of references ranging from fetishes of the home and the body to homespun garments and myths.

Angelo Plessas’ Monument to Internet Hookups, (2009) is part of The Angelo Foundation series of installations, performances and website, that the artist initiated in December 2007 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. As an outdoor sculpture, shelter, performance stage, and salon the work offers a meeting place for people who share interests, ideas and sexuality. The Monument to Internet Hookups is a black triangular framed pyramid, which gets transported to its Athens Biennial site in Trocadero park on a float in the Athens Gay Pride parade carrying the artist’s signature black and white board members who wear Angelo Foundation block heads.

Ry Rocklen’s interest in the renewal of found objects has been evident in a number of works made from materials salvaged from the street, found in the trash, donated by friends, or acquired in thrift shops. His hybrid sculptural objects are often presented with an accompanying text, which brings the work to life. The following story juxtaposes Rocklen’s contribution to this Athens Biennial, entitled Viewfinder:

One day while leaving a party at a friends house I noticed an old wicker love seat sitting by the side of the road. It was extremely fragile and I was at first hesitant to pick it up, but my sweetheart encouraged me to take it back to the studio. Once in the studio I tipped the wicker love seat onto its back. Through this change of position it was transformed into a portal to look through. The love seat in its new configuration reminded me of a pair of binoculars and it was through this association that I came up with the title "Viewfinder". This title inspired the use of mirror tiles on the outside of the wicker seat. Within each mirror a different view of the world surrounding "Viewfinder" is contained. I like to imagine if a couple were sitting in the "Viewfinder" as it lay on its back they would have a clear view of the sky.

With his works of radically diverse media, from 35 mm film to flowers, from photography to fabric, Willem de Rooij continually refines his visual art practice through a process of distillation. A restraint use of images and an extremely considered use of narratives, references, and materials all support de Rooij’s fundamental interest in the interstice of image and ideology. Sites and situations, patterns and colors may regain associative cultural function, while beauty commands the viewers’ attention. Following his earlier photographic studies of color gradations that seem like atmospheric abstractions but directly implicate charged political content, de Rooij conceived a new work especially for this 2nd Athens Biennial. Siver to Gold (2009) is a mixture of canvas, silver, and gold threads, which have been variably combined to produce a slow progression from silver to gold across different metallic shades in the weaving of five fabric panels. The dazzling beauty here is achieved by the transitional effect of a transformative experience that may be framed by a range of aesthetic values.

From 1972 to 1978 Ettore Sottsass worked on a series of constructions and photographs called Metafore marking expansive landscapes with raised temporary structures made of fragile, defenceless materials. He chose bits of string, wood or cardboard, a rock, a box, or a cloth to construct physical albeit ephemeral case studies. Each scenario seems to create a concrete opportunity for pause and reflection in an otherwise undefined and immaterial world. Every photograph has a hand written title, statement, or comment often phrased in the form of a question. Herewith Sottsass’ mode of inquiry, as an architect, sculptor, photographer, and philosopher beseeches the viewer to experience objects in space hypothetically -- in other words, as figures, poetically.