Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures (cover by Peter Saville)

How many images can a music album have?

As many as the silences it has ever broken. My silence at my parent’s place, your silence in a car on a wet road, their silence in a lonely walk. We all have our private memories attached to it, which come up in the surface once we listen to it again. As time goes by, the soundtrack of our lives is slowly created: it consists of the music that has touched us, that marked important moments, that reminds us of places and people.

So as I was listening to “Unknown Pleasures” by Joy Division for the [f(x)=∞]th time I wondered what was my first image of this album. The cover. A black square with white wavy lines inside. I decided to find out more about this image, and I came up with an interesting story about how Peter Saville created the unique cover for this album.

Black, minimal, no titles on the surface (despite the fact that it was the band’s debut album, their name was missing!): unique.

In a parallel course with the album’s story -Ian Curtis’ life, Manchester of the 1970s, Joy Division and the New Order that followed, the punk rock scene- I started thinking about the visual part of the album and what it meant. Art, Music and Abstraction have followed intersecting courses from the early 20th century and onwards.

And this is how it all goes together:

Different colors, different shades: among the sounds and colors of Unknown Pleasures

is my article for this month’s Interartive.

This issue is really great! You can read
two more articles about music (punk rock and ethnic),
two articles about a very strong social subject aroused by Anibal Parada,
notes on the beginning of animation,
a virtual gallery about an intervention in Sao Paolo by Eduardo Srur
and an exclusive interview with street artist Adam McLevey.

Now, let me print it and take it with me to the beach!

I have a photographic memory.

Seeing a face once is enough to remember it for a long time… seeing an artwork once is enough to store it in my memory, relate it with other artworks, recall it when I see something similar. Having studied Archeology for 5 years and Art History for just as many, means that in my brain I have stored thousands of art images, from prehistoric times until contemporary artworks. But…

All the words are gone. Sometimes it’s impossible to remember names and details.

That kind of memory is the worst kind you can have in our days. Because if you remember the name, you can look up for the image in Google. But you cannot enter the image that you have in mind in a search engine in order to get the missing details.

When technology fails, there’s only one thing you can do: ask for help! Like today, that I described to my sister the exact place where I had seen an image (book, chapter, page) about 5 years ago, so that she could find the book and give me the details. And these are the words that were missing from my memory: Allegro by Ciurlionis.

Hopefully it will turn out to be useful for the text I have in mind

P.S. I got my title from an album by Trypes, “A head full of Gold”, because this is how I feel sometimes: that my education has given me a head full of gold -images of the artistic production of many cultures and centuries- that I often feel unable to use…

“Have you ever wanted to kill somebody?”

I had only known him for about 20 minutes when he asked me that question… I stayed speechless, maybe because I didn’t expect the question, maybe because I was scanning my mind to make sure that the “no” was 100% honest. He was amused with my silence; he smiled and recommended a book, “The Intimate Diary of A Killer” by Alexander de Querzen. After all, he had only made the question to start talking about Simon, a serial killer living within the hypertext pages of this virtual book…

I read the book and although I am not a fan of violence -either portrayed in films or in books- I got to like it. Maybe because I enjoyed the contrasts: raw violence against hidden sensitivity, descriptive scenes against purely poetic ones, slang language against verbal eloquence. Maybe because I liked the innovations: a non-linear narration, chapters changing order every time you refresh the homepage, “censored” parts that get revealed if you move your cursor above them, a constantly changing design, chapters added from time to time.

That was 2 years ago. I ever since have twisted and turned around my studies (and my life, but that’s a different issue) till I have got myself investigating upon aspects of immateriality in contemporary art.

The issues of immateriality, art and technology have driven me towards virtual worlds. Digital art, hypertext theory. And there, as I was reading the ideas of Bush about how the mind works through association and the ideas of Barthes about the ideal text, I remembered Simon (yes, the mind works through association, after all). And I decided it was time to write about him, among other matters.

In my latest article on Interartive, “Beyond Materiality: A digital revolution in life, art and logos” (article in English and Greek) I write about how digital technology has moved aspects of life, art and word towards immateriality. I start by exploring today’s virtual universes (chat, video games, mails), then I comment on the issue of immateriality in art, from the 1960s conceptual art until today’s Internet art. Lastly, I see how hypertext has evolved, from a pure idea in the texts of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Andries Van Dam and Roland Barthes to its materialization and its prevalence today.

This is a very special issue of Interartive: all articles (including the virtual gallery) are focused on Digital Art and we launch a new page about Internet Art, where we shall add links from net art works.

From Internet art to hypertext articles, from friends to virtual serial killers, you can come across pretty much anything in this virtual universe…

It was the previous summer, no, no, it was the summer before that…

I had summer twice this year (both in the nothern and the southern hemisphere), so I keep getting mixed up

Back in August, I and some friends set out on a daily excursion to Sani Resort, Chalkidiki, to visit Danae Stratou’s installation “Breathing Circle”.

As much as I study about art, living it is so much different. When you have been present in a performance or an art installation your thoughts, your studies and your knowledge become one with your personal experience. The sensation of rolling onto the grass (with our elegant clothes, oh, yes!), inhaling the sea air, watching our reflection on the letters, running around, carving the trea trunks, laughing gets mixed up with the impact of the installation and the thoughts I exchanged with Danae Stratou.

Experience and contemplation as a unity…

For this month’s Interartive, I recall these moments for my article: “A handful of earth and three breaths: Notes on Danae Stratou” – also commented on my post “Naturebreath – Danae Stratou”

Behind my words there’s my friends’ smiles.

And mine, as I remember them

Also, on this month’s Interartive: an exclusive interview with MCA director Mark Mangion, an article on Cildo Meireles, currently presented at an exhibition at the MACBA, comments on net art, Morimura’s art and the Rodrigo Pla’s “La Zona”. Check it out!

And some more good news about Interartive: if you type “contemporary art” in Greek (=σύγχρονη τέχνη) in Google, Interartive comes out number 21 out of 543.000 search results. THIS IS BIG!

Memories have a funny way of hiding and appearing out of the blue. A song, an image, a word, an object… and there you go traveling at the speed of light to other times and places.

A couple of weeks before my deadline: no text and out of ideas.

I decide to stay in denial and clean up my room instead of thinking. And there I find a little box, among books and papers. It slips my hands and breaks. A cloud of black glitter dust rises and covers up everything…

Stardust all over me.

Starpower over me.

As I am standing in the mess I have just created, my mind takes me elsewhere…
Teenage riot: Vinyl disks, cassettes and Sonic Youth vibrating the speakers.
Athens: Rock festival on the beach, mud all over me, Sonic Youth on stage.
Thessaloniki: a small club, a mystic atmosphere, here they come again – a shot of Sonic magic.
Barcelona: Iguapop Gallery. There she is, with her smooth voice and a glass of wine in hand, my teenage heroine Kim Gordon standing among her artworks.

I steal some magic: There’s a circle made of black glitter dust on the floor; I take some consciously -in that little box- and some unconsciously -all over my clothes and shoes.

After the exhibition I move from place to place in the city, leaving a glittery trail throughout Barcelona.
I sleep in a cloud of stardust; I wake up with strong guitars in my head. [A night to remember | A morning to forget]

…

Here’s something to write about!
As I begin my research, I come across John Cage and the impossibility of silence, Sonic Youth’s visual and musical experimentations, Kim Gordon’s colors and noises.

You can read my full article “A leading role for the audience: Kim Gordon’s sonic challenges and visual reflections” in this month’s Interartive.

I tried to strip my words of the fan’s admiration and dress them up with sober knowledge.
But I decided to keep the passion!

Photo: Me sitting inside a Kim Gordon installation, Iguapop Gallery, Barcelona, November 2007

I also suggest that you take a look at this month’s Interartive, where you’ll find some very interesting reflections on art and politics, internet art and film and football. You can also take a look at Interartive’s first curatorial project, the presentation of Anibal Parada’s video art in Thessaloniki.

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When we are children, we are being told that the world is so much larger than our neighborhood or our city. They show us a map and tell us that this is it, these lines and these words imprinted on paper are the world. As we begin to grow older and start traveling, this abstract image begins to take shape and make sense. We dress it up with out memories and our experience.

I still remember when during geography class they first showed me Brazil: I had to draw the outline of the country for homework and to me it looked like a smiling face.

Many years later -and just a few weeks ago- I remembered this geography class as the plane hovered above the coast of Brazil and I saw the sun set above its dark mountains and its red rivers.

A smiling face…

Like the ones I met as I was traveling – warm people willing to reach out to you, to make contact.

Like the one carved on the surface of the full moon when I was in Rio – I had never imagined that in the southern hemisphere you get to see a different face of the moon, as you see it from a different perspective.

And then came the time for Interartive… I was undecided about what to present on the Virtual Gallery. I met Leticia Cardoso in Florianopolis and she showed me her new video only a few minutes after she had finished it.

I instantly smiled – very rarely do I get to love an artwork from the very first moment and this is exactly what had happened. I could see my past and present experience turned into art: the sea, the sky, the wind blowing, an image from Antonioni’s “Red Desert” and…

…the map of my childhood years, of the geography class.

And once more, like the very first time, I saw it clearly:

A smiling face.

Click here to see the video and my text on this month’s Interartive Virtual Gallery.

Space_Reality/Virtuality

Space… how does it affect our internet-based lives? Internet is nowhere and everywhere at the same time – no-place and every-place.

My work with Interartive sometimes makes me think about the issues of space. Interartive is an international group of art historians that are sending contemporary art texts from all over the world -Spain, Greece, Brazil… and on the fourthcoming months U.S.A., Mexico, Italy- to my IP -whichever this is. Usually it’s somewhere in Barcelona, next month it will be somewhere in South Brasil and this month… Thessaloniki, Greece.

A city recovering from last week’s big riots, that took place all over Greece. Two opposite forces: the shop owners repairing broken vitrines and replacing burnt merchandise Vs. the people who are still on the streets demonstrating.

Material culture and immaterial values -political ideas, emotions of anger and oppression, hope for change- getting together at the narrow zone of the sidewalks.

Void_Materiality/Immateriality

Lately my quest into Breath and Art has diverged me towards immateriality as a subject in visual culture and as a reality in our virtual lives.

First stop: the Void

“What is the void? Usually we tend to identify it with the air that surrounds things, that contains nothing. But is it really empty?

In reality air contains messages -faraway fires, seas, hormones, decomposition, cracks; sometimes we’re aware of them and sometimes they enter our minds subconsciously, as danger signals or erotic callings. Today air is loaded with even more complex information: electromagnetic waves transferring phone calls, satellite images, internet data stream.

In other words, the void is full of meaning and information. But still, it’s hard to map it with our logic or to experience it with our body. So what’s left?

To feel it with art”…

(click to read the entire article on Interartive #5 in three languages, english, spanish or greek).

In the latest issue of Interartive I write an article about the meaning of the void in three Wim Wender’s movies “Wings of Desire” “Faraway, so close!” and “Million Dollar hotel”. Click on the following links to see parts of the films:

Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987) :

Wim Wenders’ “Faraway, So Close!” (In weiter ferne, so nah!, 1993)

Wim Wenders’ “Million Dollar Hotel” (2000)

I also make a research on Yves Klein, the “painter of the void” as he liked to call himself. You can check this 1960 video from Yves Klein’s Anthropometries:

Interartive#5_Read/Think

In the fifth issue of Interartive you can also
read about Ana Mendieta’s rock sculptures
see how Ayidin Aghdashloo’s work is related to Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical art
ponder on the craze of hordes of tourists visiting museums
get a philosophical view of the notion of space
commit seven deadly “artistic sins” and…
discover a “poetic of the possible” in Gerardo San Martin’s “restless look” in our virtual gallery.

Take a leap into virtual space!

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Interartive is back with its fourth issue. This month we deviate from our usual artistic path to discover the prevailing notions behind the culture of tourism with two articles. Then we go back to take a look at the subject of telepresence in art, we fall into a state of sleepiness in order to explore dreaming in art and literature; stand to watch shadow play theatre and see how it’s related to Nikos Kessanlis’ work; come across a new vision of the renaissance through the eyes of the Iranian artist Ayidin Aghdashloo and dive into the poetry of Greek artist Vasilis Sivvas. In our Virtual Gallery Laoura Rapti presents magnified images of fruit and vegetables that have a surprising resemblance to human organs. And what is more…

I publish my article Restaging Beckett: Hirst, Navridis and brothers Guimarães taking a “Breath”(in three languages, english, spanish and greek), where I explore how the four artists get inspired by Beckett’s work. My initial questioning on this subject was also the subject of my first post in this blog, where I only presented some of the material. My current article on Interartive focuses on how the four artists take the essence of Beckett’s Breath -breath, body, life and death- and use it as prime material in their visual approach.

And to add a more personal touch to this post…

There are times when working with art history seems like something elusive, leading you nowhere in specific -making you ask yourself “why bother”. But whenever I get together with the people who just like me are researching, wondering, thinking, creating to make something bigger, then it feels really good.

Interartive is one of these good moments for me, a place to get together with artists or historians who share the same inquietude, a place to communicate and create. Even when I’m in a time of personal troubles and despite the long hours of work and sleeplessness it takes, when I finally see it online…

…I crack a smile

What’s InterARTive?

More than just another website with information on art history, it is a meeting place for people who are interested in art: Art historians, artists, writers and others. The Interartive Team and collaborators come from different parts of the world (Greece, Italy, Spain, Brazil) and get together to talk, to act and to share – thoughts, knowledge and feelings.

In InterARTive you will find texts on contemporary art and also a virtual gallery, where each month we present a different artist. This month, Giannis Belibasakis‘ prints enter the gallery and put the meanings of love and hate under the microscope.

Other texts are about Wim Wenders, Godard, Bill Viola, Peter Witkin, Jordi Benito, Efi Andreadou-Piplikatsi’s collection, Osama Esid and…

…a text by me “Inhaling theory, exhaling art: From Antonin Artaud’s word to Marina Abramović’s action” (text in English with translation in Greek). There I explain my theory on how performance art resonates Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty – and the role of breath in Artaud.

Our texts are in English and/or Spanish, with some translations in Greek, Italian, French and Portuguese: Two common languages in order to reach a wide audience and more languages to support cultural diversity and affluence.

Interartive is an open platform. If you are an artist, art historian, writer (or…) and want to join us, you can look up information here.

See you in InterARTive!

P.S.: The new webdesign of interartive is based on WordPress. I’d like to thank the people that participate as writers, and also the ones who offered their help “behind the scenes”, with constant technical and moral support. Mille merci!

Maybe this is what Massive Attack’s Heat Miser [album: Protection, 1994] is about. Presence and absence. Substance and void.

The only lyrics: a repetitive breath that haunts the track.

|breathe in| |breathe out| |breathe in| |breathe out|

Incessant and unchanging, the breathing imposes itself on us. It makes us synchronize our own breath with it and thus alter our state of mind. Like meditation transformed into sound, it empties our mind from every thought and fills it up with music; an atmospheric music that brings along countless images and senses:

|rain| |isolation| |darkness| |reverie| |water| |stimulation| |memory| |…|

It holds something different for each person, each moment, each breath.

How can you put all this into words or into images?

Eric Fullerton, in his video clip of Heat Miser (2005) respected the ambiguous character of the song and tried to focus on the mystery it evokes. A woman alone, but not completely; someone is walking all around her, stalking and threatening her.

An unseen presence perceived only through his intense breathing.

Breath, the place of all presence and absence.

Massive Attack, Heat Miser. (Unofficial) video clip directed by Eric Fullerton, starring himself and Claire Larson.