The Damien Hirst Formula

issue 13 - May-June 2007 Contents 03 Editorial 40 This is (not) a performance (or is it?) 07 Drafts Kostis Stafylakis and Vana Kostayola put up a language game of corporate structure re-institutionalization, claims Elpida Karampa 12 A Hylo-Idealistic Romance A spectre is haunting the contemporary Greek art scene, claims 48 The Damien Hirst Formula Christopher Marinos reviewing the plethora of American art exhibitions About the ironic enticement and the antinomies of decentralization writes in Athens Despoina Sevasti on the occasion of the exhibition Damien Hirst 24 The Burden of Self-consciousness 54 The spirit of the game Real becomes elastic in Panos Kokkinias’ photographic work, claims For the installation by Nikos Papadimitriou at AD Gallery and his esprit de Alexandra Moschovi competition writes Giota Konstandatou 34 Interview Jimmy Durham 58 Book review Stella Sevastopoulou discusses with Jimmie Durham about his Cherokee Dimitra Sakkatou presents the program of contemporary art teaching at roots and the Western hierarchies public schools organized by Locus Athens I believe that the Greek experience seems to be increasingly lacking with respect to a major issue which has tormented the Western subject and his art for two centuries: the establishment of a space of public dialogue, constitutively empty from metaphysics, to which Nnarratives contribute, oppositions, conflicts, disagreements, disobedience and consensus are declared and the political emancipation of identity and desire as well as the management of memory become objects of negotiation. The current juncture of the confiscation of Eva Stefani’s work and the impending trial of the Art Athina organizers (see p. 7) should, I believe, be investigated accordingly. Moreover, the fact that one of the most acclaimed and most sensitive works by Stefani is the documentary03 she made on Epaminondas Gonatas, a writer who is not easily accommodated within the Greek canon, demonstrates both the systemic quality evident in the parallel modernist narrative articulated in Greece, and the various transformations of the resistance of the contemporary Greek culture against modernism and its exponents. It is in a similar manner that we should regard the article titled “Art 2007” by Kostas Georgousopoulos in Ta Nea newspaper on Tuesday June 12, com- menting on Sophie Calle’s work, displayed at the Italian pavilion in this year’s Venice Biennale by curator Robert Storr. One of the key elements of Sophie Calle’s work is the way she manages and uses her experience as material in her narrative and photographic compositions. In this way she creates a com- forting narrative for herself, as she highlights the commonality of pain, and a complex narrative sketch, in which fiction and biography, text and image Editorial Editorial constantly question the accuracy of figuration and the validity of documentation. The work by Calle comprised a video of her mother on her deathbed, a phrase engraved on marble and the word “soign”, printed in various versions. On the other hand, Georgousopoulos, never having seen the work, as evident in his article, comments on the supposed exploitation of a dead person who is unable to react, making a generalization about art, namely that “Art used to mean craftsmanship, fit, skill. It was more than mere gadgetry. It was more than a best-forgotten naturalistic demand of an art as a ‘slice of life’. The difference is that here it has become‘a dose of death’.” I will not comment on the said naturalism and on what art used to mean. What is interesting here is that Georgousopoulos, one of the leading intellectuals today, an authority on theatre, an acclaimed drama translator, a poet and teacher, one of the key exponents of the contemporary Greek culture, can be entitled, indeed with great ease,04 to criticize a work without ever having seen it, to disregard its formal characteristics and harmony, to theorize about art in the absence of the work; to replace the work by its description, as if Madame Bovary is a woman who cheats on her husband and Guernica a painting in which cows have their eyes on the back of their heads. It is obvious that Georgousopoulos functioned as a simple newspaper scrivener, and his over- simplifications would not amount to much, unless this same confusion, replacing a work by its description, had not prevailed throughout the debate concerning Stefani’s work this past fortnight. Those who opposed the work debated whether the display of a masturbating vagina under the sound of the Greek national anthem is obscene or not; those defending the work argued that “no, it is not obscene, for art is free and it ought to be free,” forgetting to mention that if art is free it is by being art, by possessing certain irreplaceable qualities, its own terms of articulation, reception and negotiation. For after all art is supported by a fundamental tautology, a key achievement of modernism: Art is art because it is liberated from all other descriptive valuation systems, it manages all other descriptive, valuation systems by its own tools and it interacts with other valuation α. the athens contemporary art review ISSUE 13 • MAY-JUNE 2007 Editorial systems precisely at this vacant space of public discourse, which it thus fills. If we were to put it in the words of French philosopher Jacques Rancière, “Art participates in the political sharing of the perceived precisely because it is an autonomous form of experience. The aesthetic condition of art establishes the relation among the forms of recognizing art and the forms of political community in a way which rejects from the very beginning every opposition between an autonomous art and a heteronomous art, an art for art’s sake and an art in the service of politics, a museum art and a street art.” (Malaise dans l’esthétique, p. 48) To put it simply, those arguing that the act of confiscating the work was not censorship are cor- rect. Censorship requires a mechanism of totalitarian control and surveillance in accordance with a programmatic, dictatorial perception of the explicit and the illicit, of what belongs to the public sphere and what not. Here, there was nothing of the kind.05 Stefani is a university professor and therefore by definition an integral part of the public domain. Two days later, she was invited to give a lecture on cinema during the Karamanlis era at the Konstantinos Karamanlis Foundation. Does this seemingly contradictory function of two entities, on the one hand the police and on the other an official organization of the governing party, not constitute a contemporary variation of the fa- mous question by Konstantinos Karamanlis, “But who rules in this country after all?” In my opinion, it involves something more complex, more subtle than the mere fact that uncontrolled mecha- nisms control public life. And for this reason it is something which we must fully comprehend and urgently take a stance. This is a political conflict regarding the existence or not, the operation or its negation, the rein- forcement or the diminishing of this vacant public space of dialogue, of the fundamental demand, the key achievement of modernism. For, what was mainly called in question was not the possibility to display vaginas accompanied by the sounds of the national anthem. This debate takes place eve- rywhere and will continue to do so, as its topic fits perfectly those debated in the public domain. α. the athens contemporary art review ISSUE 13 • MAY-JUNE 2007 Editorial On the contrary, what was called in question here was the possibility for art to be an autonomous form of experience with its own valuation tools, its own terms of crystallizing and interpreting the political experience, its own terms of sharing the perceptible. In other words, I claim that what happened is by no means an act of censorship or an act or- chestrated mainly by extremist right-wing activists and intended to appeal to the conservative elements of society. In a certain respect this is what happened. What allowed it to happen, though, what makes TV channel viewership go up every time anything similar happens, whether this is Thierry De Cordier’s work or a song with satanic lyrics, Stefani’s work today, or a university professor teaching, say, “Representations of homosexual desire in Byzantine literature” tomorrow, what entitles Georgousopoulos to write about Sophie Calle’s work without taking into consideration the autonomy of aesthetic experience, what makes the flag06 a print on sandals and Public Television to have a 98% viewership on the Eurovision finals, the Archibishop Christodoulos to welcome the Euro Cup winners, right-wing extremists to beat up Albanian football fans, the Metro stations to look like fascist pavilions at the 1937 Paris World Fair, what makes all this possible comes down to facets of the same political position which transcends our familiar political formations and in fact claims the public space in its own way. It claims its own sharing of the perceptible. And the reason why the vehicles of aesthetic practice, artists and their works, give up, remaining silent, at a loss and in anger, alone, without a public with which to discuss things, or, on the contrary, are obliged to surrender to the commonplace, is because they do not realize that what they produce ought to claim, not another ideology, but another political stance before the creative act itself. • The preparation of the exhibition Destroy Athens largely contributed in the delay of this issue publication. For the same reasons the next issue will be published in September. α. the athens contemporary art review ISSUE 13 • MAY-JUNE 2007 Drafts Exhibition without title against of cinematic pornography as a form to television audiences.

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