Damfino (Chorus of the Breezes), 2024
Wood, marine plywood, rusty iron, acrylic, oil
“Things Become Islands Before My Senses” presented by @perasmaistanbul
#kostisvelonis #sculpture #vagabondobjects #breezes #slapstick #damnifiknow #environmentalslapstick
"The Boat" is a classic silent comedy film directed by and starring Buster Keaton, released in 1921. The film follows Keaton's character and his family's escapades aboard a small homemade boat. Drawing inspiration from themes and motifs in Keaton's silent short film, Kostis Velonis' "Fragile Ship Adrift" series informs his work across sculpture, installations, drawings, and ephemeral events, serving as a metaphor for the human condition. It explores individuals' navigation of life's unpredictable seas, often feeling vulnerable and adrift. The juxtaposition of the ship's precarious situation with moments of humor and slapstick underscores the irony and absurdity inherent in human existence. In "The Boat," Keaton navigates a series of comedic mishaps and perilous situations aboard a small vessel, highlighting the fragility of human endeavor against nature's vast and unpredictable forces. Similarly, the "Fragile Ship Adrift" series delves into themes of resilience, determination, and the absurdity of human striving in the face of adversity. The second body of works, "Fair Winds and Following Seas," features a 2024 sculpture crafted from marine plywood. This piece embodies the essence of the nautical phrase 'Fair Winds and Following Seas, which originates from two distinct sources and is universally embraced as a maritime blessing, wishing travelers a safe and fortunate voyage. 'Fair winds' symbolize the blessing of favorable breezes guiding one's journey homeward, while 'following seas' signifies the supportive currents propelling one toward their intended destination. This sculpture encapsulates the optimism and hope inherent in these phrases, celebrating the guidance and support we seek in our life's journeys.
callirrhoe_BLOOM
Courtesy the artist and Kalfayan Gallery Collaboration with Callirrhoë Commissioned by OCEANIC PRO #KostisVelonis #BLOOM #callirrhoeathens
Marine plywood, fiberglass, iron putty, polyester spray filler, wood
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Everything Ι touch turns into me
Archaeology of Gesture
When ancient objects exit their flows, they are transformed, becoming visible, familiar, and autonomous. When we interact with them, we re-think gazes, gestures and behaviours and create new functions. In an ever-ending archipelago of protocols of handling, working, and owning artefacts, this exhibition proposes a radical non-use. Exploring the diagonal commonhold of gestures and artefacts as objects of necropolitical desire, the exhibition functions as a parasitic council that suggests alternative gestures, new forms of movements, stares and thoughts etched on gestures of handle, care, love and sharing.
A rhizome of non-proprietary uses, it summarizes a long research on how gesture, language and value intersect, influenced by Latour’s Berlin Key. Reframing the value of gesture and its embodiment, it urges us to grant no one narrative or discursive practice a preferential role, by reinforcing the idea of incessant metamorphosis by the means of gesture. It highlights an inverted gesture that portrays ecstasy instead of reverence. This creates and augments a series of singular environments and personal perspectives for engaging antiquity as gestural, liquid, performative and heterogeneous, rather than fixed and monocultural.
April 12 - May 4, 2024
Curated by Evagoria Dapola
Space 52, Athens
What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.
We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,
and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.
Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.
Lisel Mueller, 1996
outside
It was a long time ago –
An enclosure, on heath land, an outcrop in the heather and gorse;
A circle of rusted railings, decrepit, close to collapse, ominous –
We ran wildly round this broken construction,
revelling in its anonymity and ambiguity,
but aware of the notice boards fixed to the railings, eroded into blank facades, but emanating warnings, and threats of danger,
It was our discovery, and it would be our place;
We squeezed into the empty space, enclosed by these disintegrated posts;
we hurled ourselves around the inside perimeter –
stumbling on the coarse grass tussocks,
landowners of somewhere unknown to the rest of the world,
blissful, ecstatic and full of excited fear of what this place might be,
this dissolving steel ring syncopating earth and sky…
inside
the staircase splits into two, left and the right –
on the left, a door into the long, narrow attic,
a small window, a horizontal half moon, at the far end;
this dark space seems detached from the rest of the house;
the water tanks gurgle, the pipes groan and grumble;
on a grey blanket, shells, stones, dried plants are laid out in rows;
a secret museum has found its place…
it’s high up, remote,
an adventure where the tops of trees are framed by the half moon window,
and the life below is miniature.
upstairs
one staircase looks at another –
above, air;
so much empty, gaping, intangible space;
out of reach,
but that is where the adventure is,
to climb into the empty space, to look up, hoping for the sky;
to sense the weight and light and time of empty space
intruded upon by the reach and stretch of unnameable things –
plaster, cement, colour, clumsy, elegant, surprise, hang, lean, stretch…
the excitement of perilous moments, the sentient fear of vertigo…
and here, these big shapes, anthropomorphic, stare and wait,
dumb, curvaceous, still, biding time…
Phyllida Barlow, 2020
Ι often watch the television show “Hoarders.” One of my favorite episodes features the pack rats Patty and Debra. Patty is a typical trash-and-filth hoarder: her bathroom contains horrors I’d rather not describe, and her story follows the show’s typical arc of reform and redemption. But Debra, who hoards clothes, home decorations, and tchotchkes, is more unusual. She doesn’t believe that she has a problem; in fact, she’s completely unimpressed by the producers’ efforts to fix her house. “It’s just not my color, white,” she says, walking through her newly de-hoarded rooms. “Everything that I really loved in my house is gone.” She is unrepentant, concluding, “This is horrible—I hate it!” Debra just loves to hoard, and people who want her to stop don’t get it.
I was never sure why Debra’s stubbornness fascinated me until I came across the work of Jane Bennett, a philosopher and political theorist at Johns Hopkins. A few years ago, while delivering a lecture, Bennett played clips from “Hoarders,” commenting on them in detail. She is sympathetic to people like Debra, partly because, like the hoarders themselves, she is focussed on the hoard. She has philosophical questions about it. Why are these objects so alluring? What are they “trying” to do? We tend to think of the show’s hoards as inert, attributing blame, influence, and the possibility of redemption to the human beings who create them. But what if the hoard, as Bennett asked in her lecture, has more agency than that? What if these piles of junk exert some power of their own?
This past fall, I met Bennett at a coffee shop near the Johns Hopkins campus. Sixty-five, with coiffed silver hair and cat’s-eye glasses, she sat at a table near the window reading the Zhuangzi, one of the two most important texts of Taoism, the Chinese school of thought that emphasizes living in harmony with the world. “The coffee isn’t very good here, but the people are nice,” she told me, conspiratorially. She took out her phone. “I have to show you a picture.” She turned the screen toward me, revealing a photo of two dead rats lying on the pavement—an image at odds with her kindly-neighbor looks. “I was walking by the university, and this is what I found,” she said. I leaned closer. The rats, who had drowned in a rainstorm, lay in artful counterpoint, as though posing for a still-life.
Dead rats are almost a theme in Bennett’s work. In her best-known book, “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things,” from 2010, she lists some of the objects that she found on a June morning in front of Sam’s Bagels, on Cold Spring Lane, in Baltimore:
One large men’s black plastic work glove
One dense mat of oak pollen
One unblemished dead rat
One white plastic bottle cap
One smooth stick of wood
These objects affected her. “I was struck by what Stephen Jay Gould called the ‘excruciating complexity and intractability’ of nonhuman bodies,” Bennett writes. “But, in being struck, I realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to a passive ‘intractability’ but also included the ability to make things happen, to produce effects.” Bennett likes to reference Walt Whitman, who once described people who are highly affected by the world around them as having “sensitive cuticles.” Bennett hopes to cultivate a sensitivity in her cuticles. That means paying a lot of attention to everything—especially to experiences that might otherwise go unnoticed, uninterrogated.
The idea that objects have agency might be familiar from childhood. When we’re small, we feel connected to a blanket that can’t be thrown away, or to a stuffed animal that’s become a friend. As adults, we may own a precious item of threadbare clothing that we refuse to replace—yet we wouldn’t think of that shirt as having agency in the world. It seems pretty obvious to us that objects aren’t actors with their own agendas. When Alvin, another Hoarder, says that “things speak out” to him, we know that he has a problem.
Bennett takes Alvin’s side. “The experience of being hailed by ‘inanimate’ matter—by objects beautiful or odd, by a refrain, by a piece of cake, or a buzz from your phone—is widespread,” she writes. “Everyone is in a complicated relationship with things.” In her view, we are often pushed around, one way or another, by the stuff we come into contact with on any given day. A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head on the concrete, in a series of events that’s the very last thing you planned or intended. Who has “acted” in such a scenario? You have, of course. Human beings have agency. But, in her telling, the piece of plastic acted, too. It made something happen to you.
The idea that a piece of plastic has genuine agency places Bennett in an intellectual tradition that originated with the late French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour. “When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls,” Latour wrote, in “Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime.” Latour thought that we needed to stop arbitrarily restricting agency to the human sphere; by extending our sense of who and what may act, he argued, we might more easily acknowledge obvious facts about our world. “A force of nature is obviously just the opposite of an inert actor,” Latour wrote. “Every novelist and poet knows this as well as every expert in hydraulics or geomorphology. If the Mississippi possesses anything at all, it is agency–such a powerful agency that it imposes itself on the agency of both regular people and the Army Corps of Engineers.”
Stuff has agency. Inanimate matter is not inert. Everything is always doing something. According to Bennett, hoarders are highly attuned to these truths, which many of us ignore. Non-hoarders can disregard the inherent vibrancy of matter because we live in a modern world in which the categories of matter and life are kept separate. “The quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations, such as the way omega-3 fatty acids can alter human moods or the way our trash is not ‘away’ in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds as we speak,” she writes. Hoarders suffer at the hands of their hoards. But the rest of us do, too: that’s why a modern guru like Marie Kondo can become famous by helping us gain control over our material possessions. Bennett describes herself as something of a minimalist—but her minimalism is driven by a sense of the agency of things. “I don’t want to have such a clamor around,” she told me.
In a park called Druid Hill, we walked along a path through the woods. Bennett paused, then led us off the path, down a hill so steep that we had to grab at small branches and tree trunks to slow our descent. We stopped to consider an especially notable dead tree. I thought it looked a little wistful.
“It’s stretching its hands out to the sky!” Bennett said, lifting her own arms up and laughing.
In Bennett’s most recent book, “Influx & Efflux,” she describes an encounter with an Ailanthus altissima, or tree of heaven—a fast-growing tree with oval leaves—on one of her walks around Baltimore. “I saw a tree whose every little branch expanded and swelled with sympathy for the sun,” she writes. “I was made distinctly aware of the presence of something kindred to me.” Ailanthus altissima is often considered an invasive species. Bennett’s musings have an ethical component: if a nuisance tree, or a dead tree, or a dead rat is my kin, then everything is kin—even a piece of trash. And I’m more likely to value things that are kindred to me, seeing them as notable and worthy in themselves. Most environmentally minded people are comfortable with this kind of thinking when it’s applied to the pretty part of nature. It’s strange to apply the concept of kinship to plastic gloves and bottle caps. Bennett aims to treat pretty much everything as potential kin.
Wearing bright-silver sneakers, she dropped her arms and headed off into the woods. I hastened to keep up with her. Soon, we stumbled upon something we found hard to precisely describe.
“What is that?” Bennett asked, her voice rising.
It seemed to be a shock of almost luminescent bright-orange stuff growing right out of the ground. She bent down to touch it.
“It’s plastic,” she said, at first disappointed but then intrigued. The individual orange bristles were sticking straight up, like vertical pine needles.
“How’s it in?” Bennett asked. She turned to me. “Try to pull it out!” I leaned down, grabbed an orange handful, and yanked. It wouldn’t budge.
“This is amazing,” she said. “This is almost like a trick someone’s playing on us.” She took out her phone to snap a photo, then nodded. “That’s an excellent find,” she said.
In “Vibrant Matter,” Bennett uses the phrase “thing power” to capture the lively and active qualities of objects. She describes the things that she came across near Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Road as “vibratory—at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire.” She argues that there’s a sense in which even metal is alive—it can crack in interesting ways, and “the line of travel of these cracks is not deterministic but expressive of an emergent causality, whereby grains respond on the spot and in real time to the idiosyncratic movements of their neighbors, and then to their neighbors’ response to their response, and so on, in feedback spirals.” Borrowing a phrase from the philosopher Mario Perniola, she concludes that there’s a “sex appeal of the inorganic”—“a shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter.”
Did I find the orange thing in the ground enticing? Not really—but it had done something to me. In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Ever since, we’ve tended to think of ourselves as living in a disenchanted world, from which all magic has been stripped. Bennett asks us to entertain the possibility that “the world is not disenchanted”—“that is, not populated by dead matter.” Her response to the disenchantment of the world is to deny that it ever happened in the first place.
Bennett is a philosopher and political theorist. But her intellectual work is not primarily about creating new theories. In her writing, she expertly distills and juxtaposes the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum, and others, but her goal is often to create a mood. She wants readers to adopt and embody an ethos that makes room for the vitality of matter. In her view, it’s a useful attitude. “Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy or inspiration to enact ecological projects,” she writes. We might find it hard to “contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities.”
Could noticing an old Snickers wrapper in the park really help us save the world? There might, or might not, be an element of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Philosophy in the idea. Bennett conceded that her point of view could be criticized as being “bullshitty,” or “airy-fairy.” But she likes to “take perspectives that seem implausible and find the good intuitions embodied in them, and then go with it,” she said. “I don’t believe crystals have the power to do this or that, in any New Age way,” she continued. “But what’s the intuition that prompted it?” The intuition behind New Agey crystal enthusiasm involves a sense of the fascination crystals create in us. They have inserted themselves into human civilization in any number of ways—as dishware, ornamentation, and aids to worship, as writing instruments (graphite is a crystal), and as a primary material in microchips. The study of their unique structure has been important to various branches of scientific research. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, a crystallographer who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1964, described herself as “captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.” Even in Hodgkin’s telling, the crystals did the capturing. Perhaps the New Age crystal enthusiast and the experimental scientist have something in common.
On a meta level, Bennett’s work suggests an attitude that we might take toward others’ attitudes. When I mentioned to her that her excitement about thing power might be thought of as stoner philosophy, she more or less agreed—but then went with it. “If you encounter somebody that is different from you, maybe, if you’re good at lingering for a moment or two in wonder at that person, you can postpone the moment of fear or rejection,” she told me. The subtitle to “Vibrant Matter”—“a political ecology of things”—hints at an interpersonal politics: in her view, politics should always include a sense of wonder, not just at marmosets, viruses, rivers, pieces of plastic, concrete, and dead rats but at other people.
Bennett and I left the park and found ourselves in a spooky area beneath an expressway. We decided to walk up a nearby hill, toward a hip neighborhood called Hampden. In front of an extraordinarily ugly apartment building, we ambled to a stop. Bennett was trying to show me something with great enthusiasm.
“This is a famous Baltimore thing called formstone,” she said. “It’s like stone wallpaper.” This seemed right: the formstone, out of which the building’s façade was constructed, looked like a kitschy stucco version of a medieval stone wall. Bennett pointed to an otherwise unnoticeable flaw in the formstone.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a crack with caulk in it,” Bennett answered, triumphant.
I wasn’t getting it right away. Later, she explained to me that the caulky crack was interesting to her because it showed that there are tendencies in the formstone itself to “guide and shape and nudge and call upon people even as they’re designing things.” A person put a bunch of caulk into the wall of a building, she said, but this person was “guided” by the specific, independently established shapes and contours of the formstone. Often, she went on, “you basically have to follow the form of the material.” Agency goes both ways.
It was hot, and I was tired. An hour before, I’d been entranced by a dead tree; now the houses and lawns and trash and lampposts and caulk cracks were starting to lose their vibrancy. I felt a strange sense of guilt. Was I letting Bennett down—letting the formstone down, too? “Even if, as I believe, the vitality of matter is real, it will be hard to discern it, and, once discerned, hard to keep focussed on,” Bennett writes. “I have come to see how radical a project it is to think vital materiality.” It’s not just that concentration can be wearisome. Bennett had shown me that picture of the dead rats for a reason: being genuinely open to and affected by everything around us means that there is no picking and choosing. It is everything or nothing—the good, the bad, and the ugly. This can be inspiring; it can also be overwhelming. Perhaps this explains why so many hoarders feel bewilderment and distress: they’re burdened and sometimes beaten down by their hoards. Human beings have a lot of difficult work to do if we’re to learn to recognize the inherent worth of all vibrant matter.
Bennett hopes for a positive outcome. During my time with her, I thought frequently about an old house in Detroit which my spouse and I have been rehabbing for many years now. It was built in 1917. It has its ways. We started our rehab project with many grand ideas about completely transforming the layout of the house. But because we’ve been doing the work ourselves and going slowly, the house has had the opportunity to get its two cents in. It doesn’t speak like a person, of course, but it communicates, day after day, season after season. The house has revealed to us how light travels around its surfaces and interiors in winter, spring, summer, and fall; some of the changes we were planning to make have come to seem wrongheaded with that further information. Other changes we hadn’t even considered suddenly became possible and exciting: its intermittently crumbling ceilings opened the possibility of increasing the height in some rooms.
Working on the house has started to feel like an ongoing dialogue. Rather than imposing our preconceived ideas onto a bunch of inert matter, we often find ourselves asking, What does the house want? People who visit sometimes remark on the special feel of the place. They’ll ask, How did you make this house so cozy? The answer, as Bennett has shown me, is not clear and definitive. We listened to the house, and the house listened to us. Enchantment happened. ♦
By Morgan Meis
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-philosopher-who-believes-in-living-things
O όρος slapstick αναφέρεται στις χοντροκομμένες φαρσοκωμωδίες του αμερικάνικου κινηματογράφου, στις οποίες οι πρωταγωνιστές συμπεριφέρονται με ανόητο τρόπο και κάνουν συνέχεια γκάφες. Όμως από τον γενικό αυτόν ορισμό απουσιάζει ένα στοιχείο: αν και περιλαμβάνει τη θεατρική παράδοση των κλόουν και των μίμων, λείπουν τα gags, τα στραβοπατήματα και οι πτώσεις, που προκύπτουν από μια απρόοπτη «συνάντηση» με τα αντικείμενα. Το αμερικάνικο burlesque διασταυρώνεται με την πρωταγωνιστική παρουσία αντικειμένων που παράγει γέλιο.
Το slap stick είναι μια συσκευή που αποτελείται από δύο λεπτές ξύλινες σανίδες, οι οποίες βγάζουν τον ήχο του «χαστουκιού» (slap) και χρησιμοποιείται στην Commedia dell'arte όταν ο ένας κωμικός χαστουκίζει τον άλλο. Εδώ συγκρατούμε την ευεργετική χρησιμότητα του slapstick -ή αλλιώς batacchio στην ιταλική του καταγωγή- να καταφέρνει με ελάχιστη δύναμη να παράγει έναν δυνατό κρότο, όμοιο με το δυνατό ράπισμα που θα δεχόταν ένας κωμικός στο πρόσωπο. Από αυτήν τη λεπτομέρεια οδηγούμαστε σε μια ιστορία των πραγμάτων, που ως έπιπλα ή ως μηχανήματα δεν εξυπηρετούν μόνο τις θεατρικές ανάγκες για να καθορίσουν κάποιο πολιτισμικό περιβάλλον αλλά συμμετέχουν ενεργά στην κωμική πλοκή.
Όταν παρακολουθούμε τις κωμωδίες του Buster Keaton η του Jacques Tati δεν χρειάζεται να έχουμε ενημερωθεί πάνω στην κλασική πραγματεία του Henri Bergson για «Το Γέλιο» (Le Rire) για να διαπιστώσουμε ότι ο τρόπος με τον οποίο παράγεται το κωμικό στοιχείο προκύπτει από μια συνθήκη αποπροσωποποίησης του υποκειμένου, ότι εν ολίγοις γελάμε όταν ένας άνθρωπος αντιδρά ως αντικείμενο.1 Το 1900, ύστερα από αιώνες αδιαφορίας για το κωμικό, ο Bergson με το δοκίμιό του μας εισάγει στον αυτοματισμό των κινήσεων στη φυσική κωμωδία. H σταθερή έλξη της σύγχρονης τέχνης από το κωμικό και τη σκληροπυρηνική φαρσοκωμωδία αποτελεί το προηγούμενο μιας ασυνείδητης πλευράς στην γλυπτική παραγωγή. Αναμφίβολα, υπάρχει ένα νοητό νήμα που συνδέει τη σημερινή γλυπτική που εμπνέεται από το παράλογο και το κωμικό με την παράδοση του batacchio.
Μονάχα που εδώ η μπερξονική επιχειρηματολογία αντιστρέφεται, καθώς το γέλιο και η ευθυμία προκαλούνται επειδή αυτήν τη φορά είναι τ’ αντικείμενα που θυμίζουν την ανθρώπινη φύση.
Ίσως το πρώτο παράδειγμα που θα σκεφτόμασταν ως προς την αποδοχή της κωμικής σημασίας του αντικειμένου θα ήταν οι δημοφιλείς performative γλυπτικές εγκαταστάσεις των Peter Fischli και David Weis, όπως στο video Der Lauf der Dinge (1987). Σε αυτό το έργο αναγνωρίζουμε ότι τ’ αντικείμενα διαθέτουν το δικό τους αυτόνομο σύμπαν και εντάσσονται σε μια ακολουθία αίτιας και αποτελέσματος, καθώς ετερόκλητα υλικά έχουν τοποθετηθεί με τρόπο ώστε να προκαλούν μεταξύ τους αλυσιδωτές αντιδράσεις.
Αρκετά από τα καλλιτεχνικά κινήματα του παρελθόντος συστήθηκαν μέσα από την επίθεση στη σοβαροφάνεια της θεσμικής τέχνης. Θα λέγαμε, επίσης, πως το παράδειγμα του Marcel Duchamp με τα objets trouvés του θα αποτελούσε από μόνο του το αντικείμενο μιας σπουδής πάνω στο slapstick. Η μοντέρνα γλυπτική παύει να χρησιμοποιεί τη γλώσσα του αναστοχασμού και γίνεται αξιοπερίεργη ενώ η αποδοχή μιας τρισδιάστατης σύνθεσης με παρορμητική διάθεση έναντι μιας εξειδικευμένης παραδοσιακής τεχνικής κλείνει το μάτι στην επέλαση του εφήμερου και της στιγμιαίας απόλαυσης. Η ευρωπαϊκή πρωτοπορία, θέλοντας να αποτινάξει τη βαριά τεκτονική κληρονομιά της γλυπτικής μέσα σε αυτές τις αλλαγές νοοτροπίας για το πώς ορίζεται η τέχνη στους μοντέρνους καιρούς, ασπάζεται τον λόγο του θεάματος, ακολουθώντας τις κινηματογραφικές τεχνικές του πυρετώδους περιβάλλοντος του αμερικάνικου burlesque. Εμπνέεται από τις στιγμιαίες εκρήξεις βίας και ηδονισμού, που μοιάζουν να είναι τόσο διεγερτικές αλλά και πολύ σύντομες.
Η γλυπτική, μέσα στον ορυμαγδό των επανασυστάσεων του μέσου, θα συμπορευτεί με το κωμικό στοιχείο, το οποίο θα διατηρηθεί ακόμη και όταν ο τελικός καγχασμός θα απευθύνεται στην κρίση του θεατή που δεν κατανοεί τη σχέση φόρμας και περιεχομένου. Αυτή η αμήχανη στιγμή εμπεριέχει μια slapstick αντίδραση. Το slapstick αφορά άλλωστε εξίσου και τη διάθεση του θεατή που αντιμετωπίζει τη μοντέρνα και σύγχρονη τέχνη ως μια φάρσα.
Η επιμονή μας να συλλάβουμε την επιρροή της φυσικής κωμωδίας στην τέχνη και ειδικότερα στη γλυπτική θα μας επιτρέψει να την ψηλαφήσουμε σε έργα και καλλιτέχνες όπου το κωμικό στοιχείο σπάνια επισημαίνεται από την κριτική της τέχνης. Το slapstick στην εικαστική παραγωγή δεν γίνεται αισθητό με την ίδια ευκολία όσο η φαντασμαγορική και πληθωρική επιρροή του καρναβαλικού στοιχείου, παρόλο που και αυτό συνυπάρχει στη διευρυμένη κατηγορία του θεάματος και της θεατρικής performance. Αυτή η παράβλεψη μας αναγκάζει να δούμε ξανά την απορρόφηση των οπτικών gags στη μεταπολεμική γλυπτική σε καλλιτέχνες όπως, για παράδειγμα, οι Joseph Βeuys και Bruce Nauman. Οι δυο καλλιτέχνες, ενώ κινούνται σε διαφορετικούς και αντίθετους πόλους, επιδίδονται σε μια απογυμνωμένη και ανήσυχη φόρμα η οποία διαμορφώνει τις σχέσεις δράσης και αντίδρασης μιας gag χειρονομίας.
Αυτό που κάνει κάποια γλυπτά να συνωμοτούν με μια θεώρηση του slapstick είναι και ο αυτόνομος -σχεδόν χειραφετημένος- χαρακτήρας τους σε σχέση με τη συνηθισμένη στοχαστική φύση της κλασικής γλυπτικής. Από μια διαστροφική γενναιοδωρία του δημιουργού τους κάποια γλυπτικά έργα μοιάζουν να «επαναστατούν».2
Στη σύγχρονη γλυπτική παραγωγή δεν επικρατεί μονάχα αυτό το στοιχείο της ανέγερσης αλλά συμπληρώνεται με τη συνθήκη μιας εύθραυστης ισορροπίας, η οποία μπορεί να καταλήξει σε πτώση. Μαζί με τις συνήθεις ποιότητες της γλυπτικής φόρμας συνυπάρχει και η αίσθηση της προσωρινότητας, της κατάτμησης της κάθετης δομής, της αντιμνημιακότητας, της αστάθειας, της αναταραχής. Σε πολλές κατασκευές έχεις την αίσθηση του κίνδυνου της κατάρρευσης των υλικών. Αυτή τη φορά γνωρίζουμε ότι το βίωμα δεν προέρχεται αναγκαστικά από τον χώρο της τραγωδίας.
Σε ό,τι αφορά την ελληνική τέχνη και ειδικότερα τη σοβαρή και με ιδεολογικοπολιτική κατεύθυνση ελληνική avant garde, έχουμε συνηθίσει να αποδίδουμε περισσότερη σημασία στην τραγωδία, ενώ τα κωμικά στοιχεία τα θεωρούμε παιδαριώδη και άνευ σημασίας. Όμως ήδη από τη δεκαετία του '60 μια υπολογίσιμη ομάδα καλλιτεχνών προσθέτει στα αντικείμενα ένα επιθετικό και συγκρουσιακό status, χωρίς να αποκλείει από τις πολιτικές και κοινωνικές προεκτάσεις του έργου το μειδίαμα και τα χαχανητά του θεατή. Με ή χωρίς πολιτική ρητορική, αρκεί να αναφέρω τις κατασκευές και τις performances του Αλέξη Ακριθάκη, του Βλάσση Κανιάρη, του Θόδωρου, της Λήδας Παπακωνσταντίνου και του Takis. Ως προς το εύρος του slapstick σε νεότερους καλλιτέχνες θα ανέφερα ενδεικτικά τα παραδείγματα της Χρυσάνθης Κουμιανάκη, του Διονύση Καβαλιεράτου, του Γιώργου Γυπαράκη, της Μυρτώς Ξανθοπούλου, της Ειρήνης Μίγα, της Μαρίας Γεωργούλα, του Γιώργου Σαπουντζή και της Μαλβίνας Παναγιωτίδη. Σε όλες αυτές τις μεταφράσεις του κωμικού αποδίδονται στιγμιαίες εκρήξεις βίας ή και ηδονισμού που είναι ταυτόχρονα τόσο εφήμερες όσο και ευχάριστες.
Στους καλλιτέχνες που επισήμανα διαπιστώνω αρκετά συχνά την καταγραφή της διαδικασίας της ημιτελούς ταυτότητας μιας αδέξιας κατασκευής. Σε κάποιες περιπτώσεις η επιδεξιότητα είναι τόσο εμφανής ώστε να καταλήγει σε μια καρτουνίστικη απόπειρα μιας λιτής γεωμετρικής κατασκευής ενώ άλλοτε η τελειότητα ή η ατέλεια συνδυάζεται με την υπογράμμιση ενός αταίριαστου σημείου στο σύνολο της σύνθεσης. Η τελευταία στηρίζεται σε μια ανήσυχη ισορροπία των συνδετικών στοιχείων της, τη στιγμή που ο ρυθμός και η κίνηση επιτείνουν τον εύθυμο χαρακτήρα του έργου. Όταν υφίστανται μηχανικά «αξιοπερίεργα» μέρη στην κατασκευή τότε αυτά είναι φανερά. Το slapstick απογυμνώνεται, δεν καμουφλάρεται.
Εκείνο που θα έκανε κάποιον Γάλλο τεχνοκριτικό να επικρίνει το slapstick γύρω στο 1916 ως μια «αμερικανική επιληπτική εισβολή των κωμωδιών»3 βρίσκει μια θεραπευτική λειτουργία στο «άξεστο» και το «καλλιεργημένο» κοινό εδώ και δεκαετίες, ώστε ακόμη και οι επιφυλακτικοί διανοητές της σχολής της Φρανκφούρτης, για να θυμηθούμε ειδικά τον Adorno, να το ασπάζονται στην πολεμική τους ενάντια στην κατεστημένη τάξη πραγμάτων.
Η χαλάρωση μας μπροστά σε μια τρισδιάστατη κατασκευή μπορεί να απέχει από τις αντιδράσεις που θα είχαμε παρακολουθώντας μιαν αμερικάνικη κωμωδία του βωβού κινηματογράφου με τα σωματικά ξεσπάσματα και τα απανωτά γέλια. Εντούτοις, όταν το εκτεθειμένο έργο ξαφνιάζει με την παιγνιώδη υπόστασή του απελευθερωνόμαστε από το βάρος της επιστημολογικής κατανόησης και ερχόμαστε σε ρήξη με τον κομφορμισμό μας. Και είναι ευτυχές και παρήγορο ότι η θεσμική «σοβαρότητα» του εκθεσιακού χώρου γίνεται αντιληπτή σήμερα ως καρικατούρα μιας αναχρονιστικής αγωγής που θέλει να καταστείλει το γέλιο, τη στιγμή που το «κοινό» επιχειρεί να ανακτήσει το χαμένο αριστοφανικό έδαφος.
* Ο Κωστής Βελώνης είναι εικαστικός καλλιτέχνης, αναπληρωτής καθηγητής στην ΑΣΚΤ
1 Henri Bergson, Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, Paris: Alcan, 1900
2 Σε όσους αρέσουν οι αφηγήσεις χειραφέτησης θα απολάμβαναν την εξέγερση των πραγμάτων στην stop motion αντιναζιστική ταινία της Τσέχας σχεδιάστριας Hermina Tyrvola, όπου τα παιχνίδια συστρατεύονται και επιτίθενται σ’ έναν στρατιώτη της Gestapo που τα κακοποιεί χωρίς λόγο όταν εισβάλει στο εργαστήριο ενός κατασκευαστή παιχνιδιών στη διάρκεια του δευτέρου παγκοσμίου πολέμου και τελικά υπερισχύουν του εισβολέα τους (Vzpoura Hracek, Επανάσταση στη χώρα των παιχνιδιών, 1945).
3 Steven Jacobs and Hilde D'haeyere. “Frankfurter Slapstick: Benjamin, Kracauer, and Adorno on American Screen Comedy.” OCTOBER 160, 2017, 30-50.
https://www.avgi.gr/entheta/anagnoseis/391657_slapstick-kai-glyptiki
Sea Sculpture, Vietnam , 1725 Victoria & Albert Museum
Porcelain pieces fused together by fire with encrusted with shell and coral growths
#porcelain #wreck #corals #shells #seabed #fired #glazed #jingdezhen #qingdynasty #camau#camauwreck #ceramics #seasculpture
When items like umbrellas and leaf blowers are subverted into objects of resistance, they become very shareable.
A video frame captured in Hong Kong in August 2019 shows a group of pro-democracy protesters, smoke pluming toward them, racing to place an orange traffic cone over a tear-gas canister. A video taken nine months later and 7,000 miles away, at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis, shows another small group using the same maneuver. Two moments, two continents, two cone placers, their postures nearly identical.
Images of protest spread on social media reveal many other matching moments from opposite sides of the world, and they often feature everyday objects wielded ingeniously.
Leaf blowers are used to diffuse clouds of tear gas; hockey sticks and tennis rackets are brandished to bat canisters back toward authorities; high-power laser pointers are used to thwart surveillance cameras; and plywood, boogie boards, umbrellas and more have served as shields to protect protesters from projectiles and create barricades.
An Xiao Mina, an author, internet researcher and alumnus of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, has studied these echoes. In the summer of 2014, when the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States that followed the police killing of Michael Brown were taking place, she noted that the protesters spoke a common language, even sharing the same hand gesture characterized by the chant “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
July 31, 2020
By Tracy Ma,
With Natalie Shutler,Written by Jonah Engel Bromwich,Video by
