THE EPHEMERAL IS ETERNAL | DIOHANDI – BEYOND REFORM AT THE GREEK PAVILION OF 54. VENICE BIENNALE

8.Greek Pavilion, Venezia 2011 (detail)

Diohandi
Beyond Reform
4 June – 27 November 2011
54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale

Download Greek text by Christopher Marinos Gr

The Ephemeral is Eternal

Ι. Crossing out the present

In September 1971 Diohandi travels to Paris to participate in the 7th Paris Biennale that is being held at the Parc de Floral.1 Once in the French capital she realizes, much to her surprise, that the organizers have failed to reserve a space for the Greek participation.2 Finally, thanks to the kind intervention of art critic Tony Spiteris, she is offered an improvised space that is clearly unsuitable as she finds herself having to fix her canvases to screens of fabric. After the exhibition’s opening, spent with fatigue and frustrated by the result, the artist withdraws to her room. She is inconsolable and lays awake feeling like climbing the walls. She picks up a piece of paper and starts drawing. Her rage is overwhelming.
In a linear tempera drawing she depicts how she should have presented her work in accordance with the space that was offered her: randomly stacked one on top of the other, some of them even torn, her canvases form a large heap. An oversized red X sign complements her iconoclastic composition: spread over the entire drawing it evokes, among other things, the artist’s agitated state of mind3 at the same time that it forms a functional component of this potential installation. The viewer, as can be surmised, is prohibited from entering the closed space that her fancy has conceived. ‘The “excluded visitor” is [thus] forced to contemplate not art, but the gallery.’4

This strange, largely unknown drawing has been in her study ever since, like a record kept there to remind her of a disagreeable and yet, in retrospect, especially constructive experience. And this because the lesson that experience taught her would eventually change the way she approached the space of the creative act and the creation of space. From then on her fundamental concerns would not be limited to producing creative work, but would also include articulating criticism, in perfect tune with the spirit of the times.5 Indeed, what else could that cancelling X sign have suggested if not a challenge to or repudiation of the very notion of the artist: in other words, both a self-critical approach of the artist’s work and a reevaluation of the way artists relate to institutions and to a specific aspect of the artwork’s function, which by the late 60s would be known as ‘institutional critique’.

Diohandi’s participation in the Paris Biennale almost overlapped with her participation in the group show Plastics in Art that was presented at the Hellenic American Union in Athens.6 This time her negative attitude is conspicuously more conscious and openly stated as such to the public. As one may observe browsing through the exhibition’s catalogue, the title of the three-dimensional work she presented at that show is revealing, though admittedly unusual: ‘Proposal: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’ (an X crossing out the word ‘today’). What can such repeated and–in this case–targeted repudiation imply? Why would an artist decide to turn her back to the present so blatantly? Is it an accident that ‘today’ is being struck out in the context of an exhibition that explores the possibilities an industrial material such as plastic may offer artists? Is it a reaction to industrialized society (given that plastic is basically considered a ‘superficial’ material, linked as much with consumer pop culture as with the idea of the new, the modern, the everyday?) Are we perhaps dealing with an implicit critique of the colonels’ regime? Or does this denial translate as a more general dismissal of the commercial object and of the era’s (or just any era’s for that matter) contemporary, present-day trends?

The sum of those two Xs, in other words a combined analysis of Diohandi’s critical attitude, can shed light–even at this belated date–on the unseen aspects of her diverse practice, read a new meaning into it and dispel what misconceptions have possibly surrounded it over the years. Diohandi like many of the Greek artists in her generation, including those who lived abroad, did not enjoy the privilege of having their work systematically analyzed by means of contemporary critical tools or from the perspective of the age’s dominant philosophical theories, such as phenomenology and poststructuralism. The same is true of movements and artists that either came before her or appeared and were active at around the same time as she. As a result our perception of Diohandi’s relationship to Postminimalism and Arte Povera, as well as the question of whether and to what extent elements from either one of those art movements seem to alternate in her works, remain rather cloudy. Is the fact that her painting installations seem to ‘put forth an image of stillness’ and that her treatment of geometric form and volume invariably relies on a use of only three colors (black, red and white) enough to place her–just generally so–in the ‘geometric realm’ of abstraction?7 Does the fact that she ‘seeks to achieve a poetic statement with the simplest of means’8 or that from a certain point onward she begins to incorporate ‘simple materials’ in her work, such as water, earth, stones, and light, necessarily mean that she is in dialogue with Arte Povera representatives?9
Irrespective of whether Diohandi’s disinterest in the present at once also comprises a critique of the present, the most important point one should stress (especially in view of her work at the Greek Pavilion in Venice) is that there is a remarkable cohesion to her installations, as if these were visual equations readjusted each time to fit the architectural and historical character of specific exhibition spaces though preserving their fundamental components intact. Actually, in disowning the present and by extent reality itself, a stance she first adopts in 1971 to lead her eventually into developing site-specific works (of which no more is ultimately left than their documentation), lies the quintessence, the very definition of the avant-garde work.10 And one of the most important characteristics of that work is its relationship to the Sublime.

ΙΙ. Screening a ‘life’s work’

On entering the seventh and final building housing Diohandi’s Eleusina installation in September 2010 viewers came across a large rectangular frame placed high overhead and illuminated, recalling a movie screen. The blinding white light it emitted suggested that the screening (of some unknown, imaginary film perhaps?) had just come to an end. After wandering across a sepulchral landscape, amidst signs of the artist’s intervention on the ruins of an old oil press, visitors eventually reached the ‘exit point’: apparently, the end of their itinerary. What impressions they culled from the experience that site-specific work offered would now be stored in memory until they gradually faded away. They would never again have the opportunity to experience first-hand the images Diohandi had created there.

If we now supposed that the film presented on that screen was about Diohandi’s entire work to date, what ‘scenes’ should one single out to describe the deeper significance of her labor? The answer to that cannot of course be anything but a matter of personal opinion as it depends for the most part on each viewer’s particular perspective. In my view, some of the ideas that feature most prominently throughout that ‘life’s work’ and are worth listing here are the following:

• The titles Diohandi used in her first solo shows (in monochromatic works such as A Moment… Desperation; Variation on a Geometric Theme; Reflections; Momenti di foglia… pace) suggest that her version of Postminimalism was laden with personal references and autobiographical elements.11
As she claims today, painting compositions from that period–which covered parts of the walls, floor and ceiling in the exhibition space–contained specific codes. In the first environment she creates, titled Voi, Tu, Io (You, You, I) presented in December 1970 at the Galleria AL2 in Rome, the solitary red circle corresponds to the ‘self’, or the ‘I’. Undoubtedly then her Paris Biennale participation was–as her drawing quite bluntly shows–a very strong blow to her ego. One might perhaps claim that that drawing is an image directly from the future of her work (ruins, destruction, closure).

• At the Paris Biennale Diohandi ‘confronted’ space on unequal terms and that unsuitable-for-herwork space prevailed. More to the point, there is nothing random about the language she now uses to describe her approach of a given space. In discussing the work she is preparing to present at the Greek Pavilion in the context of the 54th Venice Biennale, she notes: ‘But space requires you to pay particular attention, to reflect, to focus. So I had to measure and study it. And then there’s its history –major Greek artists have confronted it to date.’12

• In a 1978 group show presented in Venice and curated by Efi Strousa13 Diohandi attempts her first ‘real opening toward space’: a three-dimensional composition of black metal frames. Realizing that the work is finite–that it will eventually cease to exist–creates the need of documentation. She begins filming on super-8 both her work and the exhibitions in which this features.14 Filming space would reveal to her, in addition to other things, the significance of the viewer’s movement-itinerary through and around a sculptural installation. By now she perceives her work as a form of drama. At the same time, the archive of images she compiles tells of her disillusionment with the present and of the hopes she pins on the future and past.

• Her collaboration with curators Efi Strousa, at first, and René Denisot and Achille Bonito Oliva later on must not go unnoticed, as it would prove to have played a crucial part in gradually shifting the focus of her work from the white cube to landscape.
-Starting with her participation in the 1983 exhibition at the Gate of Famagusta15 where she presents her first outdoor installation, her work gradually seems to take on an elegiac tone. ‘In the natural death of a building there is no ugliness, only sorrow. The most simple [sic] and therefore accessible for everyone.
The ruins… one can look at them endlessly. And this undoubtedly cures one of arrogance. The architectural setting is a box to hold light and shade, bright sunrays and grey winter twilight,’ remarks director Alexander Sokurov as he peruses the works of French painter Hubert Robert.16

• In his essay ‘Diohandi’s transculture’, included in the catalogue that accompanied Anelixis (upward spiral), the artist’s 1986 solo exhibition at the Dracos Art Center, Achille Bonito Oliva observes that ‘the Greek artist always interconnects round her work points of pleasure and wastelands of grim sensibility’.
Two years earlier the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard had elucidated this contradictory emotion: ‘pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression’ –a mixture typical of the Sublime.17 In Modern Greek, ‘harmolype’ [a compound of the words meaning joy and sadness] is the ideal term to describe this feeling that is often an ingredient of Diohandi’s works.

• In Anelixis colors (black, red and white) symbolize among other things the unknown, passion, and purity respectively. The white monolith at the end of the installation invites the viewer on to a new beginning. Many of Diohandi’s installations since (in the two group shows curated by Achille Bonito Oliva in Italy, at Eleusina and now in Venice) would end in white, be it a white mass or a source of light.

• In many of her site-specific works representation seems to take precedence over the real. Installation shots of Anelixis, for example, vividly recall James Casebere’s photography, the difference being that Diohandi’s spaces cannot be described as simulacra. Perhaps the fact that she begins by creating scale models of her installations, which allow her control over all elements of space, is what lends the photographs that document them an otherworldly, dream-like quality.

• Germano Celant’s famous manifesto states that Arte Povera concerns itself with the present among other things. Moreover, the fact that artists in this movement excluded photography from the media they employed and that they showed no interest whatsoever in the monumental is proof of the distance between themselves and Diohandi. As the installation at Eleusina demonstrates Diohandi’s relationship to the earth and to nature resembles that of the archeologist who seeks among the ruins for evidence, the traces left by a given time in history.

• Although Diohandi’s monumental works include references to funerary architecture they are far from being lifeless themselves. On the contrary, their impermanent nature seems to be a source of life for them. In short, her site-specific installations are nothing like ‘leftovers from another time’.

• Diohandi’s site-specific works are ‘potent’ precisely because they are short-lived. ‘The actual duration of the strong work is limited,’ writes Thomas Crow, ‘because its presence is in terminal contradiction to the nature of the space it occupies. Contradiction is the source of its articulateness.’18
-In Diohandi’s case, the hegemonic viewer of the site-specific work is dethroned by means of or, more to the point, because of the effect of illusion (and not, say, because the artist obstructs the viewer from seeing the work, as Thomas Crow remarks of Gordon Matta-Clark). With many of her installations and site-specific interventions (notably, the outdoor installation at the Gate of Famagusta, the large hewn stone blocks on the roof of the Dracos Art Center in 1985, the columns of the old oil press at Eleusina) it is hard to tell whether something has been constructed by the artist or found, while the three-dimensional may at times appear two-dimensional and vice versa.

• In the end what characterizes Diohandi’s practice is that she creates works that breed new works.
The installation she has designed for the Greek Pavilion at the Venice Biennale seems to bring together all the typical components of her work (the notion of the endless, of narrating, of the course and of alternation, of a rethinking of space, of at once shifting the real and the imaginary), which she herself has pointed out in the past.19 Today, in the floating city of Venice Antonio Canova’s monumental sculpture meets the stormy seascapes of Joseph Mallord William Turner.

ΙΙΙ. What is there after the light?
How did the concept for the work in Venice originate?
‘My geometric works have always taken the form of a composition that develops across space. Geometry itself–for I have always worked with it in relation to space–was what enabled me to get a sense of space, to understand it. And yet this is what my exhibitions were like from the start. I never randomly put a work here, another one there, but always placed them in a line. What I did back then–joining canvases together–would eventually develop into a space-based expressive practice. That was the case with the installation at Eleusina or the one I did at the Dracos Art Center, which was a single work beginning on the first floor and ending on the second. In a way this is how my works are conceived. Once a work is complete I move on to the next. Now, how one is almost extracted from the other, this sense of continuity that is, was something that Achille Bonito Oliva had remarked about my 1986 solo exhibition Anelixis.
This is how the concept for the work in Venice also originated: as the next step after the installation at Eleusina, which ended in white light… that’s where I pick up from.’

So, what is there after the light?
‘A well-known Cypriot architect, Takis Zembylas, actually asked me this question after seeing my solo show at Diaspro Art Center, in Nicosia. Upon reaching the exhibition’s concluding space, where there were pieces of marble and a white pillar, he leaned over and whispered in my ear: “What’s there after this?” “I don’t know,” I replied.’

What made you board up the Greek Pavilion?
‘It is not just the building’s interior that is important to me, but the building itself as a whole. It was boarded up on the outside so that it could be renovated, so that we could “focus”. That was the first step in thinking about the work. But the viewer can still see through the cracks, in the gaps between the boards, that the Pavilion is there; that our history, the byzantine element is there.’

Isn’t this boarding up of the Pavilion also a comment on what we as a country are presently experiencing?
‘Yes, it is. In many ways, we are being “boarded up” at this point. This may just sound a little too poetic and too lyrical, but I think that the Greek light will shine again. Actually, what I am setting up is an inner route toward the light. The work is absolutely in tune with contemporary circumstances in Greece and the world. It suggests possible ways out from the crisis.’

Is the light, then, to be seen as a symbol of hope?
‘Yes, you can sense there’s light, and that is hope.’20

Christopher Marinos
Art critic and curator

Installation in progress, Venezia 2011

Comunicato Stampa
54. Esposizione Internazionale d’ Arte – la Biennale di Venezia
Partecipazione greca
Beyond Reform
Artista: Diohandi
Curatrice: Maria Marangou

Diohandi presenta un’opera unica-impianto dal titolo Beyond Reform presso il padiglione greco ospitato nei Giardini della Biennale, nell’ambito della 54. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – la Biennale di Venezia, una produzione del Ministero della Cultura e del Turismo.

Avendo come spunto il tema generale della 54. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – la Biennale di Venezia, con il titolo ILLUMInations, Diohandi, esplorando lo spazio ed il tempo, ripropone l’ambiente del padiglione greco, creando un impianto di tipo site specific nello spazio esistente in questo determinato momento.
Attraverso il suo studio sull’architettura e la storia del padiglione greco e di Venezia, Diohandi crea un nuovo spazio, dove l’ambiente esterno si integra con quello interno, ideando un nuovo percorso in cui i materiali, la luce, il suono e l’acqua convivono.
La struttura territoriale della città di Venezia, le sue insite caratteristiche culturali, sociali e storiche, sono determinanti per l’idea fondamentale e la dinamica di questa opera – impianto.
Relativamente all’ ILLUMInations, Diohandi afferma: «… La mia ricerca si basa sul significato più profondo del tema. Partendo dallo spazio severamente razionale, il mio intervento vuole crearne un altro, con una struttura diversa e ricco di carica sentimentale, dove il dialogo tra l’opera-spazio e lo spettatore sia ambiguo ed intenso.
Ho realizzato una conformazione dell’immagine esterna ed interna del padiglione; il canale adiacente al padiglione, “si ritrova” anche nello spazio interno, la facciata si trasforma, le dimensioni variano, tutto il padiglione è conformato senza influenzare l’edificio esistente.
Oltre agli interventi da me realizzati in situ, valorizzando ed aggiungendo altri elementi edili o rimuovendo alcuni di quelli esistenti, il suono e la luce hanno un ruolo predominante nell’opera ….»
L’ideazione, la procedura, lo studio ed il risultato dell’impianto sono la stessa opera.
“Diohandi …” afferma la Curatrice Maria Marangou, “è un’artista che lavora esclusivamente opere in situ, con particolare interesse per lo spazio ed il tempo. Proprio questa sua dipendenza da un determinato spazio in un particolare momento, la porta ad utilizzare materiali che raccoglie sul luogo dove crea la sua opera.
Quest’opera-padiglione greco, esprime, secondo la visione di Diohandi, la situazione politica europea e soprattutto, la recessione esistente in Grecia, dalla ricostruzione fino all’unione con la luce. Nell’attuale congiuntura, in cui i valori sociali e le condizioni economiche mondiali sono messi alla prova, il padiglione greco partecipa, con la sua identità, ad un dialogo creativo con gli artisti e le nazioni che partecipano all’esposizione veneziana, illuminando questioni relative ai vari punti di vista dell’opera icastica contemporanea”.

Hanno collaborato all’opera:
Musica: Stefanos Barbalias
Sostegno audiovisivo: Antonis Gatzouyiannis, Makis Faros
Sostegno tecnico: art@gavrilos.gr
Riprese fotografiche: Panos Kokkinias
Ripresa video: Daniele Frison

Note biografiche
Diohandi
Diohandi è nata nel 1945 ad Atene. Ha studiato pittura e arte d’incisione presso l’Accademia di Belle Arti a Roma, nonché architettura, design del costume ed arti grafiche a Roma e a Londra. Dal 1967 ad oggi ha organizzato 14 mostre personali a Roma, ad Atene, Nicosia, Edimburgo, Eleusina ecc.. Ha partecipato a 119 mostre di gruppo in Grecia, a Cipro e in altri paesi così come alla VII Biennale di Parigi e alla XII Bienal de São Paulo. Ha collaborato con curatori storici dell’arte. Ha vinto il primo e il secondo premio internazionale in Italia, Germania, Irlanda e Norvegia, mentre le sue opere sono esposte in musei e collezioni private in Grecia, Italia, Polonia, New York, nonché al Parco Olympico di Seoul ecc.
Vive e lavora ad Atene.
Diohandi è rappresentata dalla Kalfayan Galleries, Atene, Salonicco.

Maria Marangou è giornalista – critica dell’arte e curatrice di mostre.
Ha la responsabilità della rubrica di critica artistica del quotidiano di Atene «Eleftherotipia» e dirige, negli ultimi 13 anni, il Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Creta. Ha organizzato più di 20 mostre individuali e collettive in luoghi gestiti dalle istituzioni ad Atene, Salonicco, Creta, Venezia e Sao Paulo.
È stata Commissaria Nazionale presso la Biennale di Sao Paulo [1991] e di Venezia [1995].
I suoi interessi principali sono l’organizzazione di mostre su temi relativi all’immigrazione, i gruppi sociali e le problematiche legate alle minoranze, insistendo sul ruolo attivistico dell’arte.
È membro della ΕSΗΕΑ (Associazione Greca dei Giornalisti) e presidente del reparto greco dell’Associazione Internazionale di Critici e Storici dell’Arte (AICA).
Commissario: Ministero della Cultura e del Turismo
Organizzazione: Direzione Arti Figurative – Reparto Promozione Arte Contemporanea,
Ministero della Cultura e del Turismo
Curatrice: Maria Marangou, mamara@otenet.gr
Assistente curatore: Stavros Kavallaris, stavros@panayides.gr
Supporto organizzativo: Maria Panayides, panayides@ath.forthnet.gr
Sito web ufficiale: http://greeceatvenice.culture.gr

Installation in progress, Venezia 2011

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