Stathis Tsavalias, known as Insane 51, has recently been characterizing the streets of Bristol (England) with a delicate practice of double-exposure. His formal education in the Athens School of Fine Art has led him towards the street canvas where he has successfully experimented with the large-scale plane. Overlaying faces give the illusion of depth, and at once shows the skull and the living face. They are not the discreet faces one may pass with a side-glance; the whole wall is transformed by the play between two worlds: the purely physical and the emotional.
Urban art was once found by chance. Chance walks in the conurbation, down stretches of alleyways, or, now not as much, in the process of being scrubbed out. It is physical and immediate; it is no longer only a brick wall, or a corridor of garages, but an un-housed canvas, a statement of place. Away from the gallery, urban art acquires successive intervals of freedom the further it stands from the institution; it jokes with the street-walker, cries with the indignant, embraces an anonymity reflected in the shuffle of daily footsteps.
Any urban surface can be a canvas, and the practice of urban art manifests as a kind of reclamation of an urban space. What graffiti tags do, or scrawls of complaint, is induce interaction. It is there to be seen by everyone. Although it is nominally true that any surface can be a canvas, we are all aware that not all surfaces have the same meaning; you will still find certain surfaces being re-painted after being tagged, and there are ‘off-limit’ places where art would quickly run the risk of being termed ‘defacement’: a statement of subversion.
That is where urban art, in the past and as of now, gathered impetus and power: in subversion. Taking note of mass-advertising, it stands starkly on the wall for all to see. It is a silent protest that echoes into the walls of the city street; a refusal to leave the slate clean. It confronts culture, turning the one-way traffic into a dialogue.
The street speaks back. The development of urban art has become a mainstay of expression in the 21st century city. Whole areas are now dedicated to this freedom to adorn. It is yet another thread in the web of city living that conjures up the experience of the city. It marks an area from the rest. It has also transformed a style of art that is dependent on the street as a site of execution. The street-artists have an entirely different material to work with, a different spatial plane to confront. It is defiantly placed, unable to be loaned to another city-space; it must merge with the concrete environment, characterize it, transform it.
Insane 51’s work is exemplary of the power that urban art can invoke in our cities. Its immediacy tells us first of reclamation, signaling an acceptance for an art to confront us in our streets. His is an art, perhaps indirectly born from subversion, that now stands to represent an effort to unify the environment in an interesting manner. It signals a kind of freedom to enjoy the pleasures of art, to remind the viewer that the city space is for the person.
Artists work in many mediums – paint, wood, marble, words, music, dance, film. But there are some that journey beyond the traditional into radio signals, actual consciousness, neuroscience, dreams and outer space.
Meet Daniela de Paulis, an artist whose trajectory began with dance and traditional media who now focuses on the exploration of space itself, in its widest sense. She is a licensed radio and radio telescope operator, whose projects bridge the artistic and the scientific.
Daniela de Paulis
One of her projects is “Cogito in Space,” which examines the idea of exploring the universe with our minds. In this project, people’s brain waves are electronically captured by neuroscientists, converted into sound, and then transmitted into space in a symbolic departure from an Earth-centric to a Cosmos-centered perspective.
Another project is “Mare Incognito,” which looks at the gradual dissipation of consciousness during the act of going to sleep. Here, Daniela explores falling asleep, when awareness appears to dissolve, and our sense of self slowly shifts from an ongoing conscious life to a new dreamlike state. This project records Daniela’s brain activity as she falls asleep and then transmits it into space using one of the antennas at the Mullard Radio Observatory in Cambridge, England.
And yet another work is “The Dream Of Scipio,” named after the Roman general mentioned in Cicero’s book The Dream of Scipio, who described a dream in which he saw the Earth from the perspective of high above in space and how small the entire Roman empire seemed, just one small point on the planetary surface. Inspired by Scipio’s commentary, Daniela created an experimental artwork in which every day she displayed a modified image captured from a Russian weather satellite, with ever-changing geography and swirls of color, inviting viewers to think of their location as seen from 832 kilometers above, and trying perhaps to capture that feeling reported by so many astronauts of feeling more interconnected to Earth – environmentally, socially, politically – after seeing the planet from space.
Image from the installation The Dream of Scipio
A full list of Daniela’s extensive projects are on her website.
On July 7, 2022, Daniela will join Bettina Forget, Director of the SETI Institute’s “Artist in Residence” program to talk about Daniela’s recent works including Cogito in Space and a project called OPTIKS. The conversation can be viewed live on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exeTaAtBRA4
We encourage everyone to tune in to what should be a fascinating discussion.
Before her face was associated with one of the most evocative works of art of all time, even before becoming the symbol of an incredible legal affair, Adele Bloch-Bauer was simply a beautiful woman. Born in 1881 in Vienna, Adele had grown up in the cultured and refined environment of the Austrian city. The beloved daughter of a wealthy businessman, Maurice Bauer, she married at eighteen years old Ferdinand Bloch, seventeen years older than her, and heir to a baron who had become rich in the sugar industry.
Adele Bloch-Bauer
Worried with the limits that the rigid environment of the Viennese aristocracy imposed on her and tormented by the impossibility of having children, the young aristocrat developed a melancholy and complex nature that added attraction and mystery to her person. Those who knew her remembered her fragile, nervous nature, the habit of smoking, her ease with migraines and sadness, all characteristics that, taken together, gave the feeling that she was deeply unhappy.
Preparatory sketch of Adele’s Portrait
In the photographs of the time, her features have the timeless beauty often associated with Jewish women: large dark and deep eyes, a noble nose, pale skin, and a sensual and expressive mouth. Also, Adele associated an uncommon charm with the gift of brilliant intelligence that led her to learn French and English by herself, to become passionate about the study of music, philosophy, and classical culture, and to dream — unfortunately in vain — to attend university courses, which at the time were closed to women. Together with her husband, she then decided to devote herself to an intense activity of patronage that led her to come into contact with the most famous intellectuals of the period.
An interesting face and personality could hardly have escaped the aesthetic sensibility of a lover of beauty, such as Klimt, the painter whom contemporaries jokingly called Frauenversteher — a connoisseur of women. Gustav Klimt, a famous figure of the Viennese secession period, had a particular predilection for female subjects, which were central to his works, and often did not disdain to make his models also his lovers.
His best-known works are those of the golden period in which, following the suggestions derived from a trip in Ravenna and the inspiration coming from the goldsmith tradition of his family, Gustav devoted himself to great compositions rich in symbolic details in which a strongly two-dimensional design and the use of gold leaf closely resembled Byzantine icons.
Empress Theodora with her court, Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, VI century
Although however, the artist already knew the woman from having met her in several of the parties that the Bloch-Bauer family hosted regularly, the idea to portray her was from her husband Ferdinand who, in 1903, commissioned a full-length painting from Klimt having as the subject Adele, and which should have been a gift for her parents.
The Viennese artist did not limit himself to simply carrying out the commission, but developed a real passion for the subject, coming to portray her more than once: this is an unusual choice for this painter and, precisely for this reason, he often speaks of Bloch-Bauer as the muse of the Viennese secessionist. It has even been hypothesized that the two were lovers, although in the painter’s letters there are no traces of a relationship with the woman.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
It took Klimt three years to complete the first portrait of the beautiful aristocrat who, at the time, was just twenty-one: it is a perfectly square canvas (138 × 138 cm) which features the artist’s typical gold leaf processing, the female figure is portrayed standing while giving the observer an enigmatic glance that has earned her the nickname Mona Lisa of Austria. The Egyptian symbol of the Eye of Horus is obsessively repeated on the dress against the background of Byzantine-inspired decorations, transforming the silhouette into a sort of pagan idol. The model’s hands have a sensual and at the same time unusual pose.
One of the girl’s fingers showed a slight deformity that she tried in every way to hide, and the peculiar position likely derives from the desire to mask the small physical defect. The painting was completed in 1907 and the first was followed by a second, completed in 1912, in which Ferdinand’s wife is surrounded by soft colored fabrics that enhance her delicate complexion and refined figure against a background dominated by red and gloom. Adele Bloch-Bauer also appears in the famous painting of Judith, to which she lends a very intense face shaded by long melancholy lashes and of which, in addition to the face, only the nervous and elegant hands and part of the torso are visible. It is also assumed that she is always the model portrayed in the artist’s most famous painting: The Kiss.
The Kiss, Klimt’s most famous painting
Ferdinand Bloch, deeply impressed by the work, decided to purchase not only the two portraits of his wife but also other paintings, to support Klimt and his art. His wife, however, did not yet have much to live: on January 24, 1925, when she was still young, struck by a violent form of meningitis, she died in a few days leaving Ferdinand a widower. In her last wishes, the woman asks her husband to donate all of Klimt’s works, including the portrait, to the Belvedere Gallery.
But in 1938 the painting is one of the artistic treasures stolen by the Nazis from rich families in Vienna: the work changes its title and takes the name of Woman In Gold to hide the Jewish origin of the subject which would have been evident from the surname. Ferdinand Bloch is forced to flee to Switzerland and other family members must, instead, take refuge in America. Upon his death in 1945, the man left all his possessions to his heirs, including the famous portrait of his wife.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II
The painting seemed destined to end up on the list of expropriations made in wartime but, at the end of the 1990s, Austria passed a law that provides for the return of works of art stolen from the Reich: Maria Altman, niece and direct heir by Adele Bloch-Bauer, who had been forced to flee to America to escape the racial laws, will fight for a long time to have her right to the portrait of the ancestor recognized, who, in the meantime, had ended up in the Belvedere museum. Since it is practically one of the most famous works of art in Vienna, the legitimate heir, now elderly, will be forced to drag her country of origin into a lawsuit in the American judicial system.
After the final victory in the trial, in 2006 the painting was sold at auction at Christie’s by its rightful owner for 135 million dollars and was purchased by Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York, where it is exhibited under a glass case.
The two canvases that portray her, however, are not the only memory that has survived to this day of the beautiful Adele: on her death, Ferdinand donated one of the most beautiful jewels that belonged to his wife to his niece Helen Marie Stutzova and she left it to, in turn, inherited from his daughter Charlotte Meyer. This is the famous Toi et Moi ring that went from descendant to descendant until it was sold at the Sotheby’s auction house for more than forty thousand pounds in December 2018.
The ring has a simple and elegant shape with two diamonds, one light, and one dark, of about two carats each and still today, seeing it, it is easy to imagine it in the beautiful hands of Adele, the famous woman in gold.
Close to the border of Netherlands, the small German town of Goch lies, hugged by the Rhine that cuts through North Rhine-Westphalia. Since 2018, the grounds of Graefenthal Abbey in Goch have hosted the Monastery festival, made possible by the support of The Gardens of Babylon family. The family have welcomed strangers from all over the world to enter their dreamscape-like festivals for a reason that remains ancient and integral to human experience.
The seeking of ambition and the doldrums of worries come to a close in the gardens of Babylon. It is not a ‘break’ from everyday existence, but more of a consolidation, a reminder of the limits of experience. The beginning of this ritual is marked by the collective call for inwardness, a meditation that sets the intention, sets a new rhythm to time. It is now the richness of the individual that enters the space, finding a like-minded background in the ancient abbey grounds.
The music begins. Musicians have been invited from across the globe to interpret the space. For four days, when summer is in full force of life, the sounds echo. Scattered throughout the festival space are zones dedicated to forms of creation; meditative practices, markets of curiosities, and places for nothing but to enjoy and remember the pleasures of idleness. The festival wants to remind its goers about curiosity, and the ability of this curiosity to enable connection with others, to their surroundings, and with themselves.
The musicians attract the crowd; there is no doubt. The real meaning of the place will slowly permeate them throughout their stay. Each musician is invited personally by the family, who work to concert a disparate but conducive soundscape for the viewer to tune in and out of throughout the day. The main acts, however, are the non-stop line-up of DJs which carry the festival from open to close.
This year, Miami based Ella Romand will be headlining the Monastery festival, bringing her mixture of deep house blended with the influence of her roots in Brazilian music. A trained classical pianist who made the shift to electronic music with its focus on moving melody lines and tensions of release. Her unique sound has made her resident DJ in several clubs around south Florida. A seasoned performer, as well as traveler, having spun across the Americas.
Ella Romand
It is acts like these which number amongst the DJs brought forth by the Gardens of Babylon family. They seek to uplift and bring together by sound, sounds perhaps foreign, but none the less masterful. It is with novelty that the monastery festival addresses the ear, lays quiet the outside world, and releases the inward eye.
============== This year’s Monastery Festival takes place between 28 July 2022 – 1 August 2022 at Kloster Graefenthal in the town of Goch, directly on the border of the Netherlands and Germany.
The Greek composer and musician Evangelos Papathanassiou passed away in Paris recently. Better known as Vangelis, the award-winning musician and beloved film-score composer. Obituaries and the programs of his life abounded against the fact. A career of over fifty years, and not one that could be characterized easily; Vangelis floated through genres, as he roamed from place to place, picking up and discarding forms in the search for the sound he is now remembered for.
Papathanassiou began his musical career in his home country, forming the band Forminx in the early 60s. A rock-n-roll band that was through by the mid 60’s. With the political turmoil of the 1967 Greek Coup, Papathanassiou debarked to Paris in search of the new, and he found it in the Prog-rock band Aphrodite’s Child. Finding success with the band would ultimately lead to its dissolution as Papathanassiou began to abhor the structured program of show business, admitting that “you have to do something like that in the beginning for showbiz, but after you start doing the same thing everyday you can’t continue.” Now having solidified what music meant to him, an adventure, a kind of freedom to create, Papathanassiou settled into an apartment in Marble Arch, London, where he would emerge as Vangelis, creator of the poetic synth albums at his own expense.
Vangelis
In 1980, Vangelis was approached by Hugh Hudson to make the film-score of the movie Chariots of Fire. This, in Vangelis’ words, ‘very humble, low-budget film’ won him an academy award, and set a precedent in film-scoring. The incongruous synth in a movie set in 1924 – Ridley Scott’s comment: “It was off the mark, but worked like a son of a bitch.” It was this film that earned Vangelis the score for Scott’s Blade Runner, another perfect encapsulation, but this time of a Philip K. Dick inspired dystopia. It would have appeared that Vangelis had found his alcove, and the Hollywood scene would be waiting for his arrival; he did not take the bait. Vangelis only scored several films following his success, and again, the same reason which had resolved Aphrodite’s Child directed his actions: the stifling formula of success.
“I think music is much more interesting, and much more rich than to lock yourself in one kind of area”, said Vangelis, and this is the true sentiment that spans his long, adventurous career. Running after awards, or pandering to expectation, could not dwell amicably with Vangelis. The balance between ‘true’ creativity and success is a precarious thing, and one that often means disabling the former for the latter. Vangelis is an example of the opposite. He sat comfortably with music for music’s sake, and this extended from something intrinsic in his beliefs. Not a man to talk openly about his personal life, he rather aimed discourse towards music with a capital M. Music, for Vangelis, existed before humanity existed. In conjunction with humanity, music was a complex of the universe, of humanity’s metaphysical duration; obscure, infinite and absorbing.
It is no wonder that Vangelis’ sound echoes these very feelings; hints and suggestions of something large, something otherworldly. Music as remembrance, our channel to this metaphysical plane. Whether willingly or not, Vangelis’ life seemed to follow this kind of unsettled suggestiveness. He roamed, and possibly felt most at home in the roaming, rather than the stability of one place and one time, just as his music rhymed the disparate, way-ward, realms of the inner mind with the cosmic stuff that shapes the universe.
Hidden from the great palaces of Corso Sicilia, Italy, in the heart of the historic center of Catania stands the San Berillo district, a neighborhood that has been wounded, emptied, rebuilt, never completed. We discovered it by chance, my boyfriend and I, wandering around the city of Catania and immersing ourselves in its most hidden arteries, we found ourselves in a crossroads of flowery streets, colored walls, inventive sculptures, but above all construction sites and buildings barred and decrepit. When I first saw it, I thought of an African jungle that blooms on the ruins, flowers that are born from reinforced concrete.
The San Berillo district is the shelter of the marginalized of Catania, of those who find neither a home nor a sign of belonging in the good life and are reduced to looking for a bed where they find it, to earn money as best they can. Here, since the early fifties — following the unfinished evisceration, if not in the scandal — prostitutes, homeless people, and migrants live and work.
San Berillo is a historic district, born from the ashes of the Valdinoto earthquake of 1693, but it is also a failure of urban planning, the result of which has been the persistence and worsening of marginalization, collapses, banishments, and of new occupations.
Yet San Berillo, in the second half of the 19th century, was one of the most populous districts of Catania. The port laborers, the station workers, the sulfur miners of the factories lived there; even, between the two wars, it expanded, even more, hosting shops, theaters, and meeting houses. But life in the streets of San Berillo has never known urban planning regulations, and that is why the typical smell of the neighborhood, for years, has been that of open-air sewers.
In the fifties, the Catania city council launched an urban plan whose intent was to provide the city with a single artery, formed by Corso Sicilia and Corso Martiri Della Libertà, which should have led from the station to the center. This plan, certainly innovative, involved the almost total elimination of the neighborhood. Thus, the 30,000 “deportees of San Berillo” were transferred to the western suburbs, that is, to the residential area of the city then under construction, San Leone, which the inhabitants still call “New San Berillo”.
The task of urban regeneration, considered necessary and urgent, was entrusted to ISTICA, a private company in which the Christian Democrats, the Banco di Sicilia, small local economic powers, and the General Real Estate Company of the Vatican pushed. It began in 1957, and was soon defined as “the largest speculative-financial operation ever carried out in Catania”, the works were interrupted ten years later, amid scandals and rumors. In the same years, we witness a further social phenomenon, the birth of the suburbs: the expropriated owners are transferred to Nesima, about 20 minutes from the historic center, and go to live in neat and airy houses.
Since then, almost nothing has changed. There are four streets left of the Old San Berillo, a few gutted buildings, prostitutes, transsexuals, and migrants. For years, Catanian and Senegalese, Catholics and Muslims, Nigerian and Colombian prostitutes have lived side by side, near a school of the Koran, a bicycle workshop run by the village boys. There lives Flavia, the “crazy flower girl”, who filled the streets with flowers, hung them from hanging cables like laundry, we also find them among the nets of the walls. There lives Francesco Grasso, just over 60 years old, known by all as “Franchina”, one of the most sensitive and active souls in the area. A trans woman who has been walking these streets in high heels since she was twenty-three. It is Franchina who gives one of the most poetic definitions to this neighborhood: “If it were a state it would be anarchist, if it had a flag it would be the one with the rainbow if it were a factory it would churn out sins, if it were a district it would be called San Berillo”.
Franchina, Ambra, and Ornella are just some of the women who indulge themselves in the neighborhood, and whom Angelo Scandurra, a poet from Catania, defines as “fairies”. A large component of the prostitutes working in San Berillo is made up of transvestites and transsexuals, often coming from uncomfortable situations such as homophobia in the family, discrimination in the workplace, the need to earn a living. Over time, the neighborhood has become a reference point for those who decide to undertake the change of sex, often too easily able to obtain hormones and other substances that can lead to even serious psychophysical imbalances.
This year, Franchina wrote an open letter to the Municipality of Catania: “We are people like everyone else and you cannot cancel us from this space because it belongs to us and we belong to it, even if we do not we are always the rightful owners. Over the long years, these houses and their walls have been modeled, modified, and matured together with us. ” Franchina writes, with an open heart. “You can also raze the houses and buildings in the neighborhood but this would not be regeneration. You will find us in your condominiums, under the house, on the streets of the cities, creating more unrest and poverty. We are willing, if you cooperate, to give us shared rules for peaceful coexistence with all the inhabitants, those already present and those who will arrive in the future. “
Francesco “Franchina” Grasso in San Berillo
The presence of foreigners in the neighborhood is often considered one of the major obstacles to the redevelopment of the district. In San Berillo live mainly Senegalese migrants and their children, many have been here for three generations. They are among the few who have decided to live in dilapidated houses, together with those who have not found accommodation elsewhere, with those who do not have a fixed salary.
There are not a few artists who have been interested in San Berillo, who have told the truth that lies behind their stories. What do they have in common? Perhaps the sense of emptiness that leaves the neighborhood, which sails into the depths of Catania like a wreck that no one wants to remember, inhabited by people no one wants to have near. Perhaps the desire to restore life and dignity to those forgotten streets, to people who are not recognized as people, and to show the beauty of the naked and raw truth to make it appreciated even by those who have never known a life of hardship.
There is Turi Zinna, a playwright from Catania, who tells the story of the evisceration, in his “Ballad for San Berillo”. There is Goliarda Sapienza, a writer born and raised in the old neighborhood, who tells her story in “The art of joy”, her book. There is Salvatore Di Gregorio, a Sicilian photographer, who created the project “Taliami e te fazzu petra” (which in Sicilian dialect means “look at me and I will turn you into stone”) in the arteries of San Berillo, and intends to narrate, through the faces of the inhabitants of the district, their authenticity, their reality, their truth. “I had in mind the myth of the Medusa, a symbol of the Sicilian Trinacria. The intensity of the gazes of the people of San Berillo connected me to the one who transforms you to stone with a single glance. And here comes Taliami e te fazzu petra, which in Sicilian means just that: look at me and I will turn you into stone. ” Di Gregorio told Vice.
“Taliami e te fazzu pietra”, photographic project by Salvatore Di Gregorio
I ended up there by chance, among the flowers of San Berillo, and its vitality caught me almost unprepared, it hit me, it marked me. Walking through the paths, I felt the load that the district has gone through, it exuded from its walls. This neighborhood, which has built itself, has welcomed anyone who has looked at the world and realized they didn’t look like it at all. The story that remains engraved on the colored stones cannot be wiped out by a simple redevelopment of the neighborhood: it is in its inhabitants, who have become its protagonists, who have modeled themselves and continue to shape its appearance, who have filled its streets with life, with love, with beauty. San Berillo is a different neighborhood, of course, it is a neighborhood that is not easy to digest, and for many it is often better to remain hidden, but it couldn’t be more authentic than it is.
It is positively clear that art sustains and nourishes something deep in our minds. It is such an obvious statement that it may appear as a platitude, or, perhaps even worse, appear as a given fact that one need not bother about; art will be there housed in museums and quaint galleries, we need not bother about wondering why it is so preciously preserved. If we get the chance, then we may light on something we like, what the eye likes, and that is a pleasurable moment. It is not certain that the pleasurable moment extends any further than the gallery; perhaps a name, a year, and if there are plaques of explanation, an art movement lingers in the mind.
Is this aesthetic pleasure the thing that nourished the mind? This is a defining feature for some, and no doubt a fine feature; an aesthetic compass is perhaps linked to that something which is being nourished. However, active participation in art, in creating and feeling, draws closer to that something. As the recent development in Art therapy seems to indicate, you do not have to create to a gallery standard. In the therapeutic sense, there is something restorative about expression, a visible and delicate expression of the self which art enables.
Art opens up the means for expression. The countless movements and periods in art history tell us something about representation, about the expressive means of making sense of the world around ourselves. Unfortunately, many do not have access to, or the means to acquire, a dynamic and engaging understanding of art. During the pandemic, with galleries and museums forced to close, many homes were likewise forced to neglect the study of art as more pressing matters needed attending to.
‘Comic Kids’ is a non-profit organization helping to teach at-risk youths about art. It was set up in Miami right as the pandemic was coming to fruition in 2020. The brains behind the idea, husband and wife, Reed and Kat Barrow-Horth, had already established and maintained themselves in the area with their art dealing company, Robin Rile Fine Art. The duo talks about ‘sending the elevator back down’; or, giving back to the community which has enabled them to pursue their passion of art; a rare and wonderful thing that would not have been possible if not for the receptivity of the area.
Comic Kids. Source: comickids.org
The idea was not induced by the pandemic, but the pandemic did lead Comic Kids to become versatile with its program, namely, it had to, as so many schools and institutes had to, become virtual. This, in fact, has given them a much farther reach. How they have gone about introducing complex art concepts to the youth is proving to be a commendable kind of pedagogy. It was never ‘from above’, that is to say, the children’s aesthetic sense was not imposed upon, rather it started from a position that they could relate to, something they had a positive association with: cartoon and comic book characters.
Learning how to draw a cartoon character, sometimes a few simple steps of the right lines in the right place, has a transformative effect: it inculcates an attention to how art works; makes the learner perceptive to the range of potentiality in the drawn line, and promotes a confidence in front of the blank canvas. These rudiments in place, the children were now in the position to understand difference in style and expression.
Next came the creation of a class called ‘Art History + Cartoons’. The form of the cartoon was applied to the various art figures and movements of history. This subtle shift gives an immediate understanding into the history of art; far better a method in understanding Cubism than seeing a room full of abstraction. By seeing the difference, they see what representative issues are being raised; seeing difference also makes the eye susceptible to expressive cues.
And an understanding of this kind does not end in the classroom. It extends into the appreciation of the everyday, into the architecture of space and color that surrounds our lives, and into the expression and understanding of the protean emotion that exists within. The “Comic Kids” initiative promotes this humanitarian education which is a difficult language to become intimate with, especially for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The promise that learning art keeps is the ability to act, and think, creatively in the world. A foundational knowledge in the way artists throughout the generations have reacted to their experience of the world teaches that there are always multiple and overlapping ways of viewing experience; it is an analogy that can be comprehended when once rendered visible through the history of, say, the representation of a wine-jug; or, drawing, and recognizing, your favorite cartoon character in a multitude of guises.
On January 8, 2022 the Deutschlandfunk Kultur hyperlink – radio program invited our artist friend Yury Kharchenko to discuss the cost of art, both from a material and figurative perspective. The program was hosted by Michael Köhler and translated from German to English by Carl Kruse, who is responsible for any errors or omissions.
What Does Art Cost?
Michael Köhler (00:00) Today we present the German-Russian painter Yury Kharchenko. He completed his studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 2008 and since then has been painting large-format oil paintings and has a studio in Berlin, with another in the Ruhr area, in Oberhausen (Germany). After figurative works on personalities such as Borges, Kafka and even Rimbaud, his most recent group of works deals with images of commemorative culture, with characters from the comic world like Scrooge McDuck, Spiderman or American cartoon series, such as characters from the 90’s like Beavis and Butthead. These pose in bright colors, partly decorated with pornography, in front of scenery reminiscent of concentration camps. In addition, Kharchenko has been experimenting with groups of colored Star of David-like wallpaper patterns. These paintings, rich in impertinence, deal with Jewish identity and the endangerment of memory in a shrill spectacle world. In our series “What Does Art Cost?” I first ask the artist quite directly about his costs.
Michael Kohler
Kharchenko (01:06) So normally the costs for the studio are of course material, these are always the running costs and many trips to exhibitions or to visit curators. These are costs apart from the normal cost of living, so that you can function physically as an artist.
Michael Köhler (01:28) What is the artist’s income?
Kharchenko (01:31) Now that’s a question! There are artists who are just starting out and maybe they’ll earn something, I don’t know. 12,000 euros per year? Maybe less. And then there are very different segments of the market. There are artists who earn what do I know, 40,000 a year. And then there are artists who make 100 and more than millions a year. It’s a broad spectrum. But most of them are probably more in the 12 to 20,000 euro per year range.
Michael Köhler (02:04) But unlike some, they don’t have a teaching assignment or curatorial activity on the side, or that they’re at an academy or give courses. So you have ancillary income like that?
Kharchenko (02:17) I have no extra income. I’ve been doing this alone for a long time through art.
Yury Kharchenko
Michael Köhler (02:23) You are a visual artist and studied at the Düsseldorf Academy. It is no secret. You were also in Markus Lüpertz’s class. Now that sounds good, but then you have to get by in life. How do you do that? Basically, you have to sell if you make a living from it.
Kharchenko (02:44) It’s quite normal that after the academy, which was almost 14 years ago for me, you somehow start to get into the art business. In the beginning it is difficult and then over the years the contacts accumulate and the prices rise. And at some point you just make a good living from it. Well, unless you somehow made it through your own work and through the contacts you have.
Michael Köhler (03:17) We made an appointment in Cologne. You are in transit from Berlin via Dortmund. You also have a studio in the Ruhr area. You travel on to a collector. In a preliminary talk, you told me that Corona wasn’t actually such a bad year for you, but perhaps it was not a good year for your collectors. Is that right?
Kharchenko (03:36) No, that’s not quite right. For me personally, Corona was not a bad year. That’s right. But I haven’t noticed that something has changed for the collectors. So maybe they were even more interested and didn’t tell me that they suffered any disadvantages from Corona. So they didn’t feel any change perhaps.
Michael Köhler (04:05) I would like to move on to the figurative meaning in the second part of our conversation, because what costs something has to do not only with the material cost, but with what it is worth to you, what makes it precious. As a painter, as a neo-expressive painter, I would say, you also have sensitive issues. I hear you were born in Moscow in the mid 1980s and you are of Jewish origin. Jewish themes play a big role for you. How much does art cost? Do you stay true to your theme or do you follow the wind? What I mean to say is, is it sometimes difficult to stay true to one’s subject, or has that never been a question for you?
Kharchenko (04:50) It’s a tough question and not that easy to answer. Many say they stay true to their theme. But in the end it’s not so easy to judge, because you’re always in a context. And even if you think you are 100% loyal, you are in a context of society. And one can only say that there are people who completely submit to the market. Then there are people who do contradictory, controversial issues that are more elusive to the market today because the market is more decorative. And there are the people for me who are more true to themselves, who don’t paint decorative pictures, who always paint the same pictures for decades, just to stamp themselves with the market. And of course all of us humans are tied to financial things. But for me, the more I worked on my topics, the more demand there was. And I was lucky that I didn’t bump into the people that collectors came across because of my work.
Kharchenko (06:05) But yes, I also switch from one style to another as is my mood or mind. My current atmosphere, my interests. The collectors follow, so to speak, and find it interesting. What do I do next year without subjecting a certain trend to a style and stamping that for years?
Michael Köhler (06:33) You’re on the road with a big role right now. Your most recent pictures deal with the difficult relationship between the culture of remembrance in Germany. It’s a lot about Jewish issues. It’s also about what I think you call the market for culture of remembrance and commemoration. That means you have found your topic and are staying true to it.
Kharchenko (06:58) That’s not really my 100% issue. Yes, let’s put it this way, if you calculate mathematically, then it’s maybe 25 percent of my work to date. I have this topic about persistence. Because it has something to do with me, with the history of the people, the Jews. And I now feel that I have reached a certain point, that this topic will also gradually be abandoned, because other things are also of interest to me at the moment. For example, the question of hope or the question of the good in humanity. Especially now that we have had so much corona problems, so much destruction in society that I want to move away from these issues like Holocaust processing and so on to the issues of the beauty of the good man. What role does the good in people play? This is also a very interesting topic, which is just beginning to concern me.
Michael Köhler (08:09) Perhaps one last time on the tiresome topic, but you say that you are not trained to do cost control during your studies. Life has to teach you that, so to speak. Has there ever been a moment when you said it’s all too much for me, I’ll abolish my studio or maybe even vice versa, that you say I could imagine founding a third one. Or maybe not a studio at all, but an apartment in Paris or something.
Kharchenko (08:33) Well, at the very beginning, after graduation, of course, every aspiring artist probably has problems when trying to support themselves. And of course there is constant stress with the financial situation. How do I do this? Just like a maybe pubescent teenager who projects life and asks himself is he worth enough to get this and that? And so is an artist. And of course there are the doubts that accompany it. But of course, if you’re stubbornly stubborn about your work for years, then you end up thinking should I get a second or third studio or whatever, or live and work somewhere else. Those were thoughts. I’m more or less focused on two locations and try to work regularly in these two locations.
Michael Köhler (09:33) The visual artist, the painter Yury Kharchenko in our series What does art cost? Some of his paintings are exhibited in German museums and this year there will also be a solo exhibition of his in Niebüll.
END TRANSCRIPT
About Deutschlandfunk Kultur – A part of the public Deutschland Radio family in Germany. Its main focus is on culture, arts, science and is renown for its plays on air and documentaries. Its home is at the former Radio in American Sector (RIAS) in the Schöneberg section of Berlin (Germany).
=========== The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com Other blog articles on Yury Kharchenko are here and also here, and over here. Carl Kruse is also active on the TOR literary network.
I arrive in the room. Other students are milling around, some stretching in the blinding winter light stretching in from the tall windows on the far side of the room, others laughing in little clusters, some silently penning down notes in blank-paged cahiers.
We are still new to one another. We do not yet know each other’s gaits or humor. Regardless – the mood is high and we greet one another jovially and warmly, like old friends.
A woman arrives a few minutes after myself. Her face is obscured by a thin blue surgical mask, and she has a mustard yellow bobble hat on. All I can see are her eyes. She takes off her coat and places it tenderly over the back of a chair, then beckons us all over to her. She has a gentle Spanish accent, and her tone itself is soft. The students and I come to sit in a semi-circle around her, and the woman begins speaking. We listen, and smile beneath our masks, but we do not yet know what is to come.
The woman, whom we discover is Isabel Sanchez, introduces the term Viewpoints into the room. We toy with the word, placing our own pre-learned attributes and meanings to it, then let it drop as Isabel continues to speak. At one point, Isabel suddenly points at a line on the floor before her. The line is one of wear and tear, likely created by the sliding foot of a dancer or actor. Isabel lies down and begins caressing the line, speaking of its beauty and wonder, of how fascinating and unseen this line previously was, of how she could not believe she had never noticed such a line before. We laugh at this spectacle, at once befuddled and intrigued by Isabel’s attentive and overt curiosity.
Isabel brings herself back to sitting, then gasps and points at Giulio, one of the other students. She remarks on the extraordinary form that has been produced by the creases on his jumper, and by the complexity and magnificence of the shape that his body has produced by sitting as he is, with his legs outstretched in front of him. Isabel jumps up and goes over to Giulio, then asks him how he managed to create such a beautiful thing so effortlessly, and inquires as to whether he was indeed trained at Harvard, so astonishing was his shape. We laugh at Isabel, and at Giulio’s shy charm.
This was our introduction to Viewpoints, a postmodern theory that we engaged with for four weeks. That is to say, we trained with Isabel in Viewpoints for four weeks, but, at least for myself, this training lives on, for it is itself infinite.
Mary Overlie, the founder of the Six Viewpoints (often known simply as ‘Viewpoints’), was a deconstructing postmodern theater practitioner who lived from January 15th 1946 until June 5th 2020. She was the woman who taught our teacher Isabel Sanchez. Mary was not known in the sense of fame or celebrity; she was unafraid of obscurity in her work. She preferred to let her work shine above herself, as this enabled her greater creativity in her practice. I marvel at this humility, especially considering the conflict that Mary encountered when Anne Bogart initially took the title ‘Viewpoints’ and attributed it to her own work. Isabel told us, during those too-short four weeks, that this was the one thing that really upset Mary during their time working together. It was a relief when Anne finally released the name Viewpoints from her work and acknowledged Mary’s precedent in the Viewpoints practice.
Mary Overlie
“Observe the ingredients, the materials of performance, contemplate the particles.
Once you find them, train yourself to listen, allow them to become your teachers,
embrace them as profound partners. Allow them to create.”
For many years, Mary attempted to simplify and fully encompass Viewpoints as a complete practice, a practice that could hold and feed actor, audience, and the materials simultaneously. In 1998, a national Viewpoints conference was held in New York, where Mary succeeded in articulating a basic and highly functional postmodern art training. Her Viewpoints, though they can indeed be employed as a methodology in dance, are predominantly centred around theatre.
Mary was born in Terry, Montana. She spent much of her youth with her neighbors: Robert and Gennie Deweese, who were notable modernist painters in the Montana contemporary arts community. Mary would fall asleep listening to conversations about innovations in the art world, and, somehow, these words landed so deeply within Mary that they inspired a profound interest in the materials of performance and art that would eventually lead to her working in such establishments as The Whitney Museum, Mabou Mines Theater Company, and The Experimental Theater Wing of the Tisch School of the Arts. Instrumental in Mary’s ultimate creation of the Six Viewpoints was Yvonne Rainer, an American experimental artist especially prominent in the field of dance. Yvonne herself was inspired by the procedures of chance illustrated in the work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham (whom she trained with for eight years in the 1960s). Yvonne’s work was, in simple terms (as I have not the space with which to articulate the sheer breadth and honesty of her work in this article), a blend of quotidian pedestrian movement, such as walking and standing, with aspects of classical dance. Mary was besotted by Yvonne and followed her work until the end of her life. To more concisely describe the nature of Yvonne’s work, one might look to her ‘No Manifesto’:
NO to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.
As you will see, these rejections of the expected nature of performance have some similarities with the doctrine of the Viewpoints (though I hesitate to use such a dogmatic term to describe the Viewpoints approach).
According to The Six Viewpoints website, Viewpoints is:
‘a study that establishes and expands the base of performance by inquiring into the vocabulary of the basic materials that are found in the creation of all art. The Viewpoints theory involves three intertwined sections:
The SSTEMS, an interrogation of the materials; Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story.
The Bridge, a set of nine philosophical interrogations into the nature of performance.
The Practice Manual, a set of practical exercises that lead the artist into a dialogue with their work process.’
Using these approaches, the artist can exponentially expand their creative processes from a deeply horizontal standpoint which rejects the hierarchical structure of Classical and Modernist art forms. Most notably, Viewpoints work aims to destruct the ‘creator/originator’ of preceding methods of art creation in favor of the ‘observer/participant’ which the artist is ultimately aiming for in their practice of Viewpoints. The Viewpoints do not wish to erase the history of art, nor to condemn other art forms for their hierarchical nature, but the Viewpoints do wish to shift the perspective of the performer by starting from a point of careful and respectful deconstruction (separating the whole (theatre) into its essential parts/materials) with the eventual objective of reifying these materials with greater clarity. This, the Viewpoints proposes, is truly postmodern.
Students at the Alvaro Prats Bertomeu studio in Spain, practice Viewpoints theory
I think that, at least for myself, the term ‘postmodern’ has been so carelessly abused throughout the 21st Century that it almost lost its meaning. Isabel herself told us of a show she went to see which dubbed itself ‘postmodern’, but which was inherently hierarchical in its artistic proposal; there were bright lights and booming music coupled with an obvious ‘protagonist’ situated center stage for the majority of the performance. Even I have been known to throw around the term ‘postmodern’ when referring to the evolution of advertising, or in relation to various cultural phenomenon that I have been exposed to, such as the platform of TikTok and its enabling of fast fashion. These things are not postmodern, I now realize. Postmodernism is a wholly specific term which refers to a disparate method of artistic practice which is a great departure from anything we have yet seen in the world of art. It is inclusive, non-hierarchical (with regard to those that practice it, those who observe it, and the materials which feed it), and fundamentally anarchical. This does not mean that the work is within discipline and strict guidelines; freedom does not mean that one can do what one wants without thinking. The Six Viewpoints website suggests that:
‘this work does not have a pre-existing idea of what theater is, how it should be created, what it should say or how it should say it. In entering this work the artist finds that they take possession of the stage and are anchored in its realities free of the opinions of others about how to make theater.
[…]
The simplicity of The Six Viewpoints is based on one on one contact with the basic materials. This approach aligns itself with the eastern practices that rely on the student to find their own truth as part of the understanding encompassing all of life. In this work there is no teacher, no authority to pronounce achievement or failure beyond understanding that any part is a part of the whole.’
It was oftentimes difficult to engage with this practice during my time with Isabel. Some days, I would come into class and find myself unable to focus fully on the SSTEMS and what they were saying to me. It is difficult to let go of oneself, of one’s ego, of ones ‘creator/originator’ when these are the sole elements of theatre that one is initially ordered to create with. The SSTEMS, to clarify, are the materials that the Viewpoints artist has a dialogue with in their practice. These are: Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story (or Logic). There are many separate aspects of these SSTEMS, for example Space can be deconstructed into Architecture, Direction, Location, Trajectory. This is a minimalist, conceptual art, wherein all performers are particles making up the whole. These particles are interdependent and co-dependent, but not independent. These is no ego in the postmodern practice of Viewpoints. This is perhaps due to the influence of Transcendental Meditation and Buddhism on Mary throughout her life. In the practice, the performer does not have the aim of CREATING a product. The performer may be writing a dance in space, but their work is improvisational in nature and rejects the self in order to achieve the truth of the essential nature of things. The practice is one of experiencing and perceiving which ultimately leads to a higher level of consciousness. In Viewpoints, the act of waiting can CREATE art. The performer does NOT create art, it lands on them and they experience it.
It is difficult to write about Viewpoints, for writing about this practice cannot possibly convey the experience of finally noticing the material of Time when standing in a room facing another particle on the other side of that room. How can I articulate the true nature of Time with words? How can I communicate the feeling of the material Space TELLING me where and how to move? How can I express the gentleness of the materials, how they hold and care for me as a performer, how they lead me to places I never even conceived of? In writing this article, I fear that I am intellectualising Viewpoints beyond recognition, when this is not at all my aim. I fear even that, upon reading my article, Isabel might point out errors in my terminology, in my interpretation of the Viewpoints, in the unsubtlety with which I have written about this beautiful and indescribable practice. I will be forever grateful to Isabel for bringing Viewpoints into my life. It has certainly been a transformative journey, and one which I will continue to pursue for the rest of my days.
From March 25 through May 1, 2022, the Kunstverein Krefeld in Germany will hold a retrospective of the works of Russian-German artist (and friend of our blog) Yury Kharchenko. This solo exhibit will focus on two phases of Kharchenko’s work: the first on his so-called Auschwitz paintings, which see superhero figures, such as Superman and Wonder Woman at the gates of Auschwitz; the second on his series of house and flower paintings.
Kharchenko was born in Moscow in 1986 and emigrated with his Jewish family in 1998 to the Dortmund Ruhr region of Germany. For the last 12 years he has made Berlin his home.
Kharchenko explores his Jewish identity with paintings reflecting his family history and the anti-semitism experienced in Germany. He has painted images of his relative Herschel Grynszpan, portraits of Jewish personalities with some association to Germany (and which he feels a connection), such as Freud, Einstein, Kafka and Alfred Flechtheim, as well as other more recent personalities, like Amy Winehouse.
All of this culminates in his most recent Auschwitz paintings, where Disney characters such as Scrooge McDuck and Goofy, action heros like Superman and Batman, characters from cartoon series such as Beavis and Butthead are pictured in front of the Auschwitz gates and the infamous sign — “Arbeit Macht Frei.” In doing so, Kharchenko wrestles with the issue of the utopia of heroism (why didn’t any super hero stop the holocaust?) and at the same time points to the current decline of the culture of holocaust remembrance.
Scrooge McDuck defends his stash of money in front of Auschwitz
Kharchenko’s most recent paintings are those of flowers, depicting large portraits of sunken plants, stems with buds, and unfurled roses. The theme of flowers has become a new cycle for Kharchenko, where he sees a connection to nature and the plasticity, metamorphosis, sensitivity and urge hidden within it to live and unfold, and also to pass away and to revive. His focus on flower buds brings to mind a life not yet unfolded, but perhaps about to unfold.
The Rose, oil on canvas, by Yury Kharchenko, January 2022
While his Auschwitz paintings are an existential confrontation with the processing of the horror of the 20th century, his latest images speak of the urge to live and the unfolding of life in the shadow of the world’s omnipresent abyss.
The side by side exhibition of Kharchenko’s Auschwitz paintings juxtaposed with his flower images might inspire some thought with viewers.
I will be at the opening of the exhibition on March 25, 2022 if anyone would like to say hello. Meet Yury as well.
================== The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com Other blog articles on Yury Kharchenko are here and also here. The blog’s last article was on Metropolis. Also find Carl Kruse on Vator.
