The Perseverance of the colour red and the colour white as motifs of death.

"The hypnotism of patriotism"

Today stories of personal courage and sacrifice will be recited all over the land. Men severed of limbs, wives severed of husbands, women that fought like men, will recite their stories, pain and fearlessness to a proud nation.

But the story I would recite cannot be included though I would recite it with pride:

The story of a Deserter.

Led like lambs to the slaughter, my grandfather and his comrades were sent for years from place to place in lands they could hardly name, to fight a cause that the century that followed proved fake. In some unknown Balcan field, ill, very ill, he jumped on a train and left. Not out of fear but out of sanity. He was 21. He had been fighting since he was 18. He jumped on a train, and then on another, and then to a village, to herd cows, to marry, to bare children, to have my father, to have me. Died still young. But thirty years later. In an uncharacteristic manner, my father would tell us of his desertion with a laugh, never contempt. He felt proud. Because what pride could there be for him, in a national war, designed and directed by the red right hands of pre WWII politicians, that would probably have slaughtered an 18 year old uneducated boy, desist, he wouldn’t exist.

White Poppy, Red Poppy


Today, two wreath laying ceremonies will take place in the centre of the city.

Wreaths of red flowers (I think plastic) will be laid by all representatives of authority, of God and Country. It will take place in front of the Cenotaph, an empty tomb to those who fought and died. It is situated between Governmental and Royal Buildings.

Wreath and white flowers (I think plastic) will be laid by citizens, usually of an older age, representatives of utopianism, pacifism and non-violent resistance, of God and Man. It will take place in front of the Conscientious Objectors Memorial, a tombstone to those who chose not to fight, even though they died.

Both colours are the colours of death.

Red: blood: violence: violence: physical: screaming: loud: violence: the Shining: Cries and Whispers: American Psycho: red: violent: hell: active.

White: sterile: violence: violence: internalised: silence: quiet: violence: Cuckoo’s nest: Funny Games: Fargo: violent: heaven: irreversible: empty.

This colour coding seems to fit perfectly well the who, when and how of the two ceremonies. The rest of the people, in a mass exercise of conformity or in a mass expression of need for justification and answers, follow afoot.

But it is not a matter of choice, there should be no need for choice. But if I am to be true to myself, and in respect to my grandfather that made me, and as long as anomalies like the rise of fascism in the past and present do not make the pursuit of such ideals impossible, I will quietly only join the ceremony for those ‘who refuse to bow down to their fetish of bullets.’

And in a week, all these wreaths, red and white, will lay dirty, muddy, already decomposing, slowly, expectedly, until they become nothing but an annoyance. Garbage, irritating, cleaned eventually by a reluctant but relieved hand. Dirty, ugly and muddy, in their true colours. Plastic, decaying and fake in their true essence. And we see it. And we hate them.

more info:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adUYkPUI-KQ

http://www.nonresistance.org/docs_pdf/Tolstoy/Patriotism_and_Government.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day

http://www.ppu.org.uk/whitepoppy/index.html

Jannis Kounellis: various and Ugo Rondinone: Nude, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens

until 30 and 19 Sep 12

The building that the museum occupies, by Ernst Ziller, is a reminder of the elegance and affluence of the Greek Belle Epoque Middle Class. I never managed to despise them, maybe because they seem more exquisite and less hypocritical than our contemporaries. The heat and traffic of central Athens vanished at its door.

The fragments of Kounellis are the first to greet you. Followed in the adjacent building by more broken selves. These are naked and disturbing. Made of wax, they were produced by casts of actual people, making the details almost breathe.

Like the inhabitants of the upper floors, the permanent collection of the bronze-age Cycladic figurines, they, too, seem to be representations of dead people. They all rest, reclined, anonymous, almost monochromatic, their bodies pure but exposed to the elements, our eyes and to pain. They rest but they are not relaxed. The ancient ones hold their torsos in discomfort, the modern nudes, with their different coloured limbs, some dislocated from their body, try in this way to support the tension of their fragmentation. They are also broken, like so many Kounellis pieces. They are more like Bellmer dolls than human. The models are dancers, but the perfection of their bodies (some unconventional) is more disturbing than arousing. They resemble the Monster as much as the Odelisk. They deflect any attempt we make to reflect on them our own selves.

While they are naked, coats, shoes, hats, stand and hang forever bodiless in the next building. They are waiting for the return of their masters, be them factory workers, coffee shop regulars, our grandfathers but definitely not the privileged.

The room where the coats hang, feels like a shrine. It filled me with what others might call reverence. The coats are tired, old, poor, similar but not identical, they are the people they belong to, possibly for life. The people are next door, upstairs, just left, this is the waiting room, the changing room, their room. A thousand narratives and one spring out of their inner linings. Time is bathing their room and drips down and all over from their worn out sleeves. Are we them, are we witnesses? Are we back?

As much as I loved it, I felt uncomfortable. An unidentifiable feeling of guilt was annoyingly persistent, like the pain from my new boots, constant, temporary and inevitable. We staged some playful photos and left.

Another piece, a collection of identical bottles wrapped in a coat wrapped in a sheet was possibly another of the pieces I had seen before in the Ambika P3 Kounellis exhibition. Its, then, industrially charged meaning now has silently turned into a melancholic biography. The choice of works exhibited, their sequence, the space they occupy can change so much the climate emanating from the pieces themselves. So democratic.

Unlike the entrance fee. Probably inevitable, but nevertheless excluding most people from this experience, especially in these times. How even more ironic that Kounellis especially is so related to Arte Povera that this happens. And so, iconoclastic pieces, the Kounellis clothes, the Cycladic death figurines, are standing now silent, surrounded only by the empty, intellectualized rhetoric of the exhibition leaflet, and the hollow clapping of the already converted.

7 euro, the price of its shame.

More info:
http://www.cycladic.gr/frontoffice/portal.asp?cpage=NODE&cnode=74&clang=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jannis_Kounellis
http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/jannis-kounellis1/
http://www.artnet.com/artists/ugo-rondinone/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Ziller

Adam Dix / Tim Phillips: Programming Myth, Sumarria Lunn

until 30 Jun 12



In all the houses we knew when I was growing up a piece of furniture would always be present that nowadays would look peculiar. Like the one below.




Most would have this characteristic cushion and would be made out of wood. I hated the telephone tables. They always meant no privacy. They would be mathematically placed in the most accessible and open space in each house. Sometimes whole romances, secret calls in the middle of the night, whole dramas would be played out around them. The constant fear of being caught, the constant fear of a ring in public from a stalker or the torturing silence of a lover. Over time, my hatred for this wooden furniture turns into nostalgia.

Then there was the dentist’s. A waiting room wall covered top to bottom in an autumnal forest scene. Oppressive. Or there would be pictures of mountains. Closing down on you. Why were there always mountains?

And then, there were the visits to relatives or vague family acquaintances, formal, always on cold nights, dressed in Sunday best for people we couldn’t care less for. They would always have plastic flowers or foliage, inside crystal, next to the chocolates.

When I started descending into Sumarria Lunn, the long stairway, confined, with some extra steps, made me excitingly nervous. I would soon realise what a perfect intro the gallery stairway itself was for what I found inside. There they were, all of them: the telephone tables, the Alps, the plastic foliage. Interlocked into sectarian and alien funereal constructs with my childhood fears, TV sci-fi programmes, folkloric masks and rituals. As if suddenly stumbling into a Cult, or a forgotten civilisation, I realised these paintings and sculptures were so authentic that were it not for being in a gallery, I would, yes, be scared.

Ethno-rituals, Rudolf Steiner, Lost, The Freemasons, Quatermass, The Midwich Cuckoos, Maydays, Carnivals, childhood memories and childhood furniture, all sculpted into one document of an otherworldly time.

A compulsory visit for any sci-fi sensibility. Bizarre love triangles.


more info:
http://www.sumarrialunn.com/ http://www.ameliasmagazine.com/listings/e705/programming-myth-with-adam-dix-and-tim-phillips-at-sumarria-lunn-gallery#.T-h-YpH4LIg http://www.ameliasmagazine.com/listings/e705/programming-myth-with-adam-dix-and-tim-phillips-at-sumarria-lunn-gallery#.T-h-YpH4LIg

Gao Brothers, Nick Knight, Claire Morgan: Death, Show Studio Shop

until 31 Aug 2012



In Dublin once, there was an exhibition of three, only three, paintings by Dutch masters. I had thought, how bizarre, yet afterwards I realised that three is the exact perfect number of exhibits.

So, I was extremely pleased when now, years after, I entered the ShowStudio. Tucked away in a quiet laneway, hidden from the loud kitsch of Mayfair, a dead angel, a symmetrical cube and a firing squad are waiting in triptych.

Kate 2011, by Nick Knight, engulfed my heart immediately. I have always had a primeval fixation with wax statuettes. At 16, my friend had travelled with her parents to Bulgaria, she came back with the most beautiful gift, three vampyrettes, standing back to back in a column, dark, grey, waxy, I thought they'd be eternal. They melt ungracefully for 15 years.

Kate 2011 is their sister, an angel, woman, naked but not sexualised, dead. Her white waxy colour the most beautiful of whites. She is a Crucifix and she is hovering in a tiny tilt. How magnificent a little detail, I smiled.

Next to her, a perfect geometry of concentric cubes expands from a singularity. The imaginary lines of The Heart of Darkness, by Claire Morgan, are defined by spots, and those spots are dead flies. I would naturally tut at similar endeavours, but these flies are not just smirky material but they are a deadly, intelligent, exquisite and scary swarm.

The next room is occupied by a life-sized death squad and their prey: an almost stereotypical Jesus, dignified, inviting and wondering. You are welcomed to walk around them, and each angle makes this a different sculpture, making you observer from the sides or above, or both the victim and the executioner. The squad are all replicas of Mao. They are fat, overdressed, rigid and passé. They are old. They are the killers but they are the ones that are dead. Their Jesus is not the religious one. He is young, thin, and with a stature that is timeless and also contemporary, his hair is thick and untreated, not of an icon but of an eco warrior, a dissident, the one we will, probably, never dare be. They are all bronze, like all the statues of conquerors and butchers on horses. The squad are all alike. Bar one. One hesitates. Will we at least be him?
(Gao Brothers, The Execution of Christ)


more info:
http://showstudio.com/shop/exhibition/death
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gao_Brothers
http://nickknight.com/main.html
http://www.claire-morgan.co.uk/

Portal Painters: Heather Nevay, Whyn Lewis, Peter Thomson et al., Coningsby Gallery

until 23 Jun 12



Heather Nevay’s grotesque, ageless children, in boxes or with boxes stand still in transparent clothes on mythical landscapes. They also stand facing the exquisite elegance of Whyn Lewis’s harts and hounds that hover timelessly on monochromes. While Peter Thomson’s families - as nightmares - are forever self-absorbed, and noisy, in the next room.

This refreshing collection of new-surreal high-finish paintings has temporarily cast its net on a side street off Tottenham Court Road. Most of the busy lunchtime queuing and stressed of life passers by will continue their daily cycle undisturbed. The lucky few will fall gladly into this Venus Flytrap; this magical place that puts all work troubles into perspective, as these birds of paradise, though trapped, like us, stare back, for once, acknowledging us.

more info: http://www.portalpainters.co.uk/artists.aspx
http://www.coningsbygallery.com/
http://www.nevayburke.freeserve.co.uk/hnevay142.htm
http://whynlewis.com/whynlewis.com/Whyn_Lewis.html
http://www.peterthomsonart.com/

Bauhaus: Art as Life, Barbican

£10-£12
until 12 Aug 12



This is one of my very few negative posts, for which I apologise in advance. Since the exhibition though is a paid one, I thought that a balancing view might be of benefit to some.

So there it is..I was utterly dissapointed by the lack of narrative. The curation was tiringly safe and unchallenging, consciously avoiding the political and design context the Bauhaus challenged and the implications that this challenge caused. For a movement/school that had to close down and migrate by the then authorities, this exhibition seems like a desperate effort to institutionalise a thoroughly lowbreaking past.

more info: http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12409
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/02/bauhaus-art-as-life-review

Laura Kuch, The Doppelgangers, Vincula, UCL Art Museum

until 08 Jun 12

The UCL Art Museum opens its doors patiently and punctually every weekday at 1pm. Like a curiosity shop, it doesn’t shout about its treasures to the passing trade but waits, quietly, occupying another unappreciated world.

Their recent collaboration with the Slade ends today. Most of Vincula’s pieces are uneventful but still, beautifully serene. Apart from two: the Doppelgangers by Laura Kuch look so natural in the room that, at first, I thought they were part of it. And they might as well be. They are two oil paintings from 1913 by two female Slade students, sitting next to each other while working on a life drawing of a female nude. Insignificant on their own, though not without talent, the paintings now also stand, next to each other, in stereoscopic devotion. The one is framed, the other is bare (it won 2nd prize after all). The model has her head and body turned away from us, she is as obscure and lost in 1913 as Dora Karrington and Fanny Fletcher, who painted her, are. The Doppelgangers stand a breath away from each other, quietly producing this ectoplasm of a 1913 Slade Studio Classroom: the subject, the students, the easels, the brushes, the slow wind from Gower St, all materialise in the small space between them. I was drunk with the view. Then, I played ‘spot the difference’ as the Doppelgangers look identical, but not quite so. And then a bundle of words and analyses started flooding my head, of art theories and gender theories and la la la which I silenced and expelled as they were doing the Doppelgangers no justice. For this is art in its purest form: an over-conscious eye, an opportunity, a simple idea, and one of the most complete, clever and honest pieces of found object art, that I have seen, was born. All out of a simple, single act: moving one object gently next to another.

After that, 1+1 can equal almost anything.

more info:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart

Smyrna: The destruction of a cosmopolitan city 1920-1922, Benaki Museum, Athens

until 18 Mar 2012

I was lazily looking outside the metro window at the city I only recognise so much, when I heard the familiar, slow, low, junkie voice. Through his over-dry mouth he was reciting his speech and the only thought I had was that all those years of books have paid off and I do not feel repulsed, only sad. I did not give him any change, neither did the two girls on my right, hair salon frequents. As soon as he left, and loud enough for everyone to hear, they huffed their relief: 'God, they don't even get it, do they! They come so close! Idiot!'.

I returned to my sightseeing. A few minutes later I was queuing at the Smyrna exhibition at the old Benaki Museum. The queue seemed to be a clone of the area itself: affluent, aged. The ticket was 5 euro. I was relieved as it was fine to me, but saddened I realised that now most of my friends there wouldn't be able to afford it. This queue obviously could.

For the next half hour I walked slowly between them looking at the blown up pictures of more clones, this time from the privileged classes of Smyrna pre 1922. Children dressed in immaculate navy clothes, the same costumes they'll be wearing later on, in the photos on the wall opposite, dirty, scared, climbing escape ships. Tragedy, as war always is, as any burnt city front is. The extremists and the dispossessed went amok, and the old city became the new, where my dear friend was later born.

"They are not unforgotten lands, they are unliberated" voiced a woman on late tv and I was nauseous.

What were they seeing?

"She was Mrs Theodoridou's grandmother" explained a lady in-between the shining of her old golden jewellery and her husband.

What do they see?

The curation is safe. A few captions, no commentary. No obvious juxtapositions, and a linear presentation of events apart from a few overlaps. The title of the exhibition is similarly ambiguous in its intentions. No dialectic. But also no hysteria. I was pleased. Is this a step forward for an extremely hurt, bled but also nationalistically indulgent state?

Sobriety.

But there is another Benaki museum in Athens. A few miles away, situated in the working class, deprived part of the city, home now to the new disposessed, those haunted by war, hate, poverty, criminals, killers, mothers, lost souls, workers, prostitutes and musicians in the gutter, from lands we cannot even name. You see them daily, collecting scrap metal from wherever inside stolen supermarket carts, walking them down the highways for miles and miles to sell them for who knows what.

What do they see?

Outside this other Benaki Museum, these people that will never make it inside, seem like clones too. Generalised, impersonal. Disgusting. Pests. Like the junkie in the metro. Like the guy that terrorised and mugged someone I love. Like the child in the navy clothes landing in Athens in 1922. Like them, landing every day in a port to annoy us.

What do they see?

Nothing.

The parasols are frozen in time. The teachers posing in late edwardian photo booths are just photograms. The straw hats keep reflecting the sweet Ionian light, they are never to see the knife on the throat. No. These houses that burn, the promenade in smoke, are there, safely away, frozen, still, in 1922.

"The documentary will start in 5 min" came the announcement. They all rushed not to miss the start.

They saw nothing.

The look of nostalgia in all their eyes and words as they walked out. "Where do you want to go back to!?" I wanted to ask her politely. "You do have enough and more". She would look back, her face old, wrinkled, tired, the face of a class that is dying. "Oh, my dear, back then. When we were all oblivious".

I would nod, and leave her in peace. I know what she means.

Because we all know, that when the pest shows up on our tv, car window, on the streets of the other Benaki,the sound of his scratching, scrap metal cart sings only one tune: your days of plenty could soon be over.




more info:
http://www.benaki.gr/index.asp?id=202010001&sid=1121&cat=0&lang=en

http://mediterraneanpalimpsest.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/smyrna-the-destruction-of-a-cosmopolitan-city-1900-1922/

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/inourtime/section1.html

Hannah Battershell: Lost Worlds, Framers Gallery

until 25 Feb 12

Used tin boxes of medicine, coffee, other utensils, always find their way to hosting something small or something special; things that have no other place (like pins) or things that have to be carefully preserved (like a time capsule or a memory). The tin box will usually be pretty or become pretty with time. It protects. Corrosion doesn't reach you as easily if you are inside a tin box.

Inside a saccharine tin box inside the humble Framers Gallery, protected from dust but not from eyes is a small moth. She is painted on a small button and it all reminds me of an Edwardian entomology box I once bought as a wedding present. There are other boxes, too, some wooden, with Edward Gorey figures on standby. All, a collector's children.

The wall Hannah Battershell occupies is full of beautiful, playful and comforting appropriations of contemporary miniature practises and a lovely reminder of the intriguing and timeless art of boxes, like the ones by the master, Joseph Cornell.

And maybe that is where their essence, and their differences, lie. Cornell was a forced loner, trapped in a house and world due to external circumstance. The stale air in his boxes is full of these smells of decay, loneliness, obsession and illness. And in being so, they enclose something horribly valuable: his whole internal world.

Hannah Battershell's boxes, for the time being, seem to still be letting a bit of air pass through.


more info:
http://www.hannahbattershell.com/
http://www.theframersgallery.co.uk/exhibitions.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/cornell.html
http://thisiscolossal.com/?s=miniature

Various Artists: Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany, Saatchi Gallery

until 30 Apr 12

repost:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/gesamtkunstwerk-new-art-from-germany-saatchi-gallery-london-6265755.html