No
More Hybrids, Long Live the Clones: Greek Art Changing
Thanasis Moutsopoulos
For us today, the main issue under discussion
appears to be the degree of penetration of influences of
the Metropolis into
the Periphery. Furthermore, it is not difficult to trace
such influences if one observes trends in television, cinema,
popular music, or even in the visual arts of many countries
in Asia,
Africa or Latin America. In other words, the Periphery of
the planet — along with the rest of the planet for
that matter — demonstrates a continuously increasing
consumption of Western products, from ready-made food and
clothing outfits
to restaurant chains and Hollywood movies, music videos,
and (mostly white, Western) pop stars. Contemporary art does
not,
naturally, constitute an exception to such rule. Why should
it? Within the prevailing import process of culture (and
more) from the West, the Periphery makes up — or used
to, for a time, at least — a kind of home business
or light industry where metropolitan influences amalgamate
with local
features
and local singularities to form entities which we might call
hybrids. In places like Latin America however, Hybridity
carries with it not only its cultural sense, but frequently
also a
racial one, with the implication of mingling between European
immigrants and descendants of African slaves or natives.
Furthermore we rarely consider that, despite its claims to
the contrary,
it often functioned as an obstacle to egalitarianism between
the cultures.
Up to the very present, modernity has remained
essentially Western, a product of the French Enlightenment.
To the natives
of America, Modernism can be nothing more than the culture
of the white man. As far as they are concerned, the notion
of modernistic internationalism is merely another aspect
of imperialistic culture. For these people, Western Modernity
and its entire civilization seem decadent.
Was there ever
any hope for local cultures of the periphery to maintain
their 'purity' or rather, their complexity
and particularity? As late as the 1930s in Greece, figures
like architect Dimitris Pikionis or artist Nikos Hadzikiriakos-Gikas
tried to identify and then preserve samples of local culture
in the face of the oncoming charge of Western values.
Anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss just managed, chronologically,
to study some entirely 'virgin' or 'primitive' cultures.
There are a small number of such cultures possibly still
extant in isolated areas of Borneo, Irian Jaya or the Amazon.
Still,
the question remains: Is there anything that can stop the
homogenization imposed by the steadily increasing Diktat of
the one and only metropolitan culture over the entire world?
To cite 'America's
sovereignty' is today rather inadequate as an explanation.
Japanese colossi own a number of Hollywood studios, firms
like Sony or Toyota and cultural products like Pokémon
sweep both the international and American markets. Yet no
one speaks
of 'Japan's domination over us,' except perhaps
Americans when they begin to feel 'threatened.'
Is pop culture
'American'? The answer is definitely not an easy one. Nowadays,
there are many cultural products
which in the past would have seemed an oxymoron, like Indian
comics, Arabic soap operas or Indonesian rap. The pictorial
production of the periphery is often similarly hybridic.
Filipino painter Manuel Ocampo, celebrated in Western art
circles, mixes
his peculiar Hispanic Catholic culture and the religious
obsessions of his homeland with sub-products of the West,
ranging from
Superman to Tide detergent powder. He insists on drawing
his themes from the intolerance of religious fundamentalism,
a
clearly urgent question today, the drollery of ecclesiastic
power, and the absolute abandonment of reason proposed by
racist organizations like neo-Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan.
Ocampo's
works resemble an absolute panorama of post-colonial structure
in the peripheries, not local miniatures: racial stereotypes,
the trauma of colonialism, the loss of native culture, the
society of abundance (one which involves minorities only,
however) the taboo of sin, scatology, as well as a vision
of Doomsday
mixed with memories from Nazi concentration camps and the
commonplaces and clichés of religious iconography.
Cheri
Samba from Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo)
is another example of a 'Third World' artist who
came to the fore through the historic exhibition Magiciens
de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth) organized
by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris
in 1989.(1) This
exhibition marked an entirely new phase in the policy of
contemporary art. For the first time in a metropolitan centre
of the West, 'Third
World' artists exhibited their works as peers alongside
renowned Western art-stars. Thus artists like Nuche Kaji
Bajaracharia from Nepal, Sunday Jack Akpan and Dossu Amidou
from Nigeria,
the Eskimo pictorial artist Paulosee Kuniliusee or Australian
aborigine Jimmy Wullile exhibited beside the well-known and
recognized John Baldessari, Hans Haacke or Nam Jun Paik (who
though Korean, moved early on to the West). The issues posed
by the that exhibition constitute some of the most important
for art today: Modernism or locality, the First World against
the Third, Hybridity and Multi-culture, nationality and identity,
all in a age that saw the collapse of an entire series of
certainties (and long before this evolved into a trend in
the recent British
art). This work was influenced by a range of Western sub-cultural
products like graffiti and French comics (bandes dessinées)
in particular. If Picasso, Braque and the modernists were
inspired by African sculpture, Cheri Samba reverses the situation
by
using Western culture to comment on it. The artists I have
mentioned produced a mixture or hybrid of influences from
the metropolitan language of the West and localities of national
standing. (There are a number of Greek artists like Marios
Spiliopoulos, Panos Charalambous, Zafos Xagoraris, Tasos
Pavlopoulos,
or Angelos Papadimitriou, who have sought analogous results.
Though Greece has now gone into first gear, Periphery exists
there as well.
As does the Third World, still. Each and every
metropolis is also a center: Bangkok, Lagos, Mexico City,
and Bombay
(now
Mumbai)… The Macdonaldization (but also Donaldization)
of the planet, as we usually call this form of globalization,
is now conquering every corner of the Earth. The situation
today is thare there is literally no village or isolated
spot on the planet where Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut or Pokémon
are not familiar; the mass-produced super-products of the
West (which now now naturally includes Japan) have come to
dominate
evrywhere. Clement Greenberg has written that these mass
products of western industrialization circulate triumphantly
all over
the world, beating out and distorting local cultures from
one colonialized country to the next, and thus now tend to
be a
kind of ecumenical culture, the first truly ecumenical culture
the world has ever seen.
An inhabitant of China, no less than
his South American, Indian or Polynesian peer, now ignores
the products of his
own national
culture and prefers Western magazine covers, pin-up calendars
and posters. Local cinemas in Asia, Africa or Latin America
are now dominated by recent Hollywood blockbusters, newsstands
by D. C. Publications and Marvel Comics, and television program
by series like Baywatch or Dynasty. What we experience in
the periphery today is mainly hybrids which copy (or attempt
to)
the products of the West by projecting onto them local particularities
as well as an overwhelming lack of seriousness. Subsequently,
when they shoot the Sixth Sense sibling in India, they present
the characters singing and dancing, while the Blair Witch
Project in Hong Kong will definitely include kung fu. Such
products
are far from 'authentic' or folklore; they situate
themselves at the edge. What may happen in the future is
that they will be replaced by identical clones of Western
products
or, to a much more serious extent, the very same metropolitan
products. We are possibly experiencing the last period of
hybrids. The future is foregone, incredibly clear, perfect
and expensive.
One easy conclusion to be drawn from this quick tour around
the world is that all over and in every art, mutations and
hybrids of indigenous dialects and the metropolitan language
are taking place. But are these dialects of any interest
to the metropolis? Are the cultures that brought about the
'vaccination' willing to reintroduce their illegal offspring?
Are these any more
or less 'exotic' than what Western consumers
of every sort might desire them to be? In the period between
the
wars, Michel Leiris spoke of a form of ethnographic Surrealism,
explaining that he used the term in a decidedly broad sense,
to describe an aesthetic which aims to stimulate manifestations
of an extraordinary reality that seeks its roots in the area
of the erotic, the exotic and the subconscious.(2)
We are
possibly the last generation on this planet to whom the phenomenon
of globalization and the cultural hybrids
produced thereby will seem strange. Today Amazonian Indian
drinking
Coca Cola or a group of children of the Dani of Irian Jaya
eating at Pizza Hut may seem a preposterous and contradictory
spectacle to other populations on Earth. Tomorrow however,
the fact that there is even a single human on the planet,
even of the most isolated distant race, who does not dine
daily
at MacDonald's or does not kill time playing Nintendo
might be considered paradoxical. This may be the only possible
reaction against the developments we are witnessing, the
only way to observe and enjoy this transitional situation.
It is
probably the last.
The phenomenon of globalization seems to
have borne the greatest influence on the metropolis of the
periphery, and Athens,
the capital of Greece is no exception, Independently of the
fact
whether it belongs to the periphery or not. Robert D. Kaplan
begins his book The Coming Anarchy with our realization
that from the tropical forests of Congo to the skyscrapers
of
Shanghai, from the old city of Belgrade to California's
Silicon Valley, the world is changing. The conclusion to
be drawn from
the study of such different cases is that the powers of change
are modernizing even the remotest corners of the planet,
sweeping away traditional ways of life as they pass.(3) In
The Clash of
Civilizations, Samuel P. Huntington maintains that mutual
influences among different cultures are increasing, and in
Orientalism,
Edward Said sought to vitiate the obsession with valuation
the Orient suffers from the West, namely that every European
travelling to or resident in the Orient has found him- or
herself in the position of having to protect themselves from
disturbing
influences, adding that it was sex that most embarrassed
the 19th-century Europeans. There were also threats other
than
sex, all of which disposed of European tact and reasoning,
of space, time, or personal identity.(4)
In the case of the Athens,
for the first time in its history as the capital of the modern
Greek state, it simultaneously
faces, on one hand, the influence of the metropolitan culture
of Western Europe, and on the other, the influx of economic
immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. A series
of upheavals in the very structure of the city has naturally
resulted.
Today Athens is onced again a cosmopolitan city, an original
experience. Tourism had brought it into contact with visitors
from all over the world for decades, but since its selection
as the capital of the new Greek state it had generally remained
a city with a homogeneous population. The situation is rapidly
changing today, recalling the multi-linguistic and multi-racial
reality of the Western metropolis. During the post-war period
Athens was inhabited by immigrants from the interior, peasants.
For a long time, the majority of the inhabitants of the Greek
metropolis did not share a metropolitan culture, but rather
a form of village culture, inhumanly suppressed and distorted
by the press of anonymity, crowds, density of construction
and automobile exhaust. The hospitable peasant was transformed
into the alienated and often aggressive resident of the capital.
By the late '80s, a new majority of native first-generation
Athenians came to maturity, with an obvious cultural impact
on the city's image. A few years from now, this homogeneity
will once again disappear, owing to the arrival of new immigrants,
this time from abroad.(5)
A love of ancestry, encouraged by the
influence of the Bavarian prince named first monarch of the
modern Greek state, undoubtedly
still haunts an great portion of contemporary Greek society,
even the younger generations. Important political events
like tensions in the Balkan Peninsula during the early '90s,
the warlike nature of relations to neighboring countries,
or even the campaign, and later preparations, for the Olympic
Games, have contributed to the recycling of ancient values,
however vague. The first generation of Greek visual artists
to negotiate post-Duchampian artistic creation appear in
the '60s,
multiply in the following decade, mainly around the experimental
gallery Desmos, then and disappear in the decade after. Today
it is safe to say that that tradition is particularly active
among younger artists, while older, more formalistic frameworks
and complex conceptual approaches allow a space for often
commonplace issues of privateness.
Alongside this, emphasis
is frequently put on urban themes, issues of gender and its
excesses, anthropological approaches,
and comments on mass culture or another role for the body.
Despite the obvious and banal historical connection of Greek
culture with the human body or drama, there are few cases
of performance or body art expressions to be found in Greek
visual
art. Perhaps for the same reason, few Greek artists have
chosen to deal with or even comment on sexual issues, feminist
politics,
or homosexuality, even less to adopt strategies of shock.
In a country where the overwhelming majority of the population
is Greek Orthodox, another possible taboo is religion. So
far,
very few Greek artists have chosen to move in this (dangerous)
direction, or even to or indirectly comment on the subject.
Despite the general secularization of social life and the
abstention the majority from religious practice, the population
still
experiences a form of awe with respect to the institutions
of the Orthodox Church. Of course, both religious feeling
and a spiritual atmosphere are inscribed into a great many
artworks.
Similarly perhaps, ancient Greek references are extremely
rare, whether literally or as humorous comment. However,
the public
interventions by the former Mayor of Athens, along with the
interior decoration of the vast majority of houses in Greece,
are characterized by neoclassical style.
Yet, both ancient
Greek tradition as well as modern Greek folk culture were
deeply involved in satirical expression.
From
Aristophanes to karagiozis, the folk shadow-theatre, from
Yorgos Souris, the most influential satirical writer of the
late 19th-century,
to the post-war cartoonist Bost, and finally, with a number
of contemporary visual artists, the element of humour and
criticism are intensely engaged. The generations of visual
artists of
the '70s and '80s were essentially the first — and
ultimately the last — to defend the demand for a native
modernism, that is, a hybridic creation which would combine
elements of metropolitan pioneers mixed with local ones,
whether dealing with Greek folklore or the political events
of the
time.
During the same period, Greek youth was besieged and
conquered almost absolutely by Anglo-Saxon mass cinema and
the culture
of rock and pop music. The early '90s found Greek visual
creativity in stagnant waters, possibly at its lowest point
of communication with society. This was probably the reason
that shortly thereafter, the only two large-circulation pictorial
magazines closed down. Exhibitions at the DESTE Foundation
of collector Dakis Ioannou (Artificial Nature, Post
Human)
and the extensive presentation of his collection at the School
of Fine Arts in Athens (Everything That's Interesting
Is New), in particular, marked a turning point. These
events generated reflexive responses on the part of defenders
of
Greece's
national standing, who spoke of the dangers of 'cultural
imperialism' and described the new, mostly American,
conceptions as an 'ephemeral fashion.'
The phenomenon of globalization
described above has had a particular impact on the evolution
of artistic developments
in Athens.
There has been a form of artistic nomadism created internationally
in recent years, intensifying uniformity. Today, art people
move between the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Museum or Documenta
in Kassel. One gets the feeling the same people see the same
people and identical, metropolitan, artistic tendencies are
recycled all over the planet. During the same period, younger
generations of both art critics and artists arrived, no longer
from Paris (which had been dominant in previous decades)
but from London and other British cities. As they came, they
brought
with them new trends of so-called 'New British Art,' which
slowly but steadily came to dominate the recent scene. A
radical change was to take place in the means of expression.
Painting
and installations, which prevailed in previous years, now
gave way to photography, video, the digital images and pop
painting.
The (relatively) new media of photography and video, until
recently excluded from Athenian galleries, now tend to dominate
completely, although the artists being hosted have educational
backgrounds in painting rather than photography. Most of
the new technologies like Internet Art are still something
of a
rarity in Greece, but are perhaps destined to explode in
coming years. Representational painting, although banned
from most
institutional venues, is another quite powerful tradition,
particularly nourished by the structure of the two fine-arts
schools in the country. The community of Greek artists still
seems to suffer from a division between those who have adopted
an over-all metropolitan language and those fighting for
a recognizable national identity for artistic work. To a
great
extent, this
obviously has to do with an antithesis between generations,
since younger visual artists increasingly turn toward the
former direction, particularly towards New British Art. The
data point
to an general adoption of metropolitan language that will
mark the end of hybrids. From all appearances Greek art will
follow
the same route, with no particularities. When this process
is complete, perhaps nothing will remain outside its sphere
of influence. In this respect, the global village of which
Marshall McLuhan spoke will have become a visible reality.
Artistic
issues aside, modern Greek society appears hesitant as to
whether it must tie itself unreservedly to the chariot
of Western civilization. Today, in Greek art, and thus in
Greek culture, it would be difficult to detect a native identity
clearly
distinct from Western culture. The same could apply to a
series of countries of (almost) analogous size and geopolitical
position.
A reasonable and real question to Greek artists might then
be: What exactly is it that makes contemporary Greek art
(particularly) interesting to metropolitan audiences? How
can we promote Greek
art abroad? In Greece today, as a result of ancestor worship,
the prevailing notion seems to be that it is for the planet
to discover what is happening here. But this is not happening,
at least, not to the degree expected. There is no doubt international
conditions favor the presence of artists from countries of
the periphery, as has been apparent in the recent editions
of Documenta and the Venice Biennale. Still, the innate problem
of Greek art is that it is neither as 'exotic' as
Chinese or Nigerian art, nor as metropolitan as that of western
European countries or Japan and the United States.
Alvin Toffler
describes the human society of the future as distinct from
both 1984 and Brave New World. Both these
great books
and hundreds of science-fiction novels present the future
as based on extremely concentrated, bureaucratic and standardized
societies where individual differences will have been eliminated.
But we are moving in the completely opposite direction.(6)
Toffler seems to be prophesying a multi-cultural and polymorphic
society
similar to the one created by director Ridley Scott in Blade
Runner.(7)
But is Toffler right? Where is the culture of the
periphery heading? Towards a copy of dominant Western culture
or, even
after coming into contact with the latter, towards a formation
of singularities? Will the future be the multinational hybrid
presented by Scott, or the impersonal, homogenized and developed
modernistic ensemble shown in almost every other future-foretelling
movie (like many filmed in the '70s, to be more precise)?
We would wish for the former. Hybrids enrich our world; clones
make it similar and boring. Still, the phenomenon of globalization
urges things in the latter direction. There are thinkers
who support neither. Jean Baudrillard maintains that some
sections
of the periphery will survive almost intact and untouched
by metropolitan culture, and that such irreconcilable power
is
active in all cultures, even in the relations of the Third
World to the West, and those of Europe to America — particularly
in the core of those cultures, in the singularities that
in the end bring it about. Europe will never fill in the
trench of modernity which separates it from America. Cosmopolitan
evolutionism is an illusion and shimmers everywhere as such.
1. The approach in Partage d’Exotismes, the
5th Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, catalogue exhibition,
ed.
Jean-Hubert Martin, Thierry Prat, and Thierry Raspail (Paris:
Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000) was analogous.
2. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Harvard, 1988).
3. Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering The Dreams Of The Post
Cold
War (Vintage, 2001).
4. See Edward Said, Orientalism: The Western Conception Of The Orient (Penguin,
2003) and David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Ether, Ambient Sound and Imaginary
Worlds (Serpent's Tail, 1995).
5. See Thanasis Moutsopoulos, 'Housing beyond Control,' in Athens
2002:
Absolute Realism, exhibition catalogue for the Greek Pavilion, 8th International
Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2002, commissioners Takis Koubis, Thanasis
Moutsopoulos, Richard Scoffier.
6. See Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (Bantam, 1989).
7. Philip K. Dick, author of the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
on
which
the film was based, does not describe future society in this way. Its multi-cultural
form comes from director Ridley Scott. |