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
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