Inside the Artist’s Studio: Dafni E. Barbageorgopoulou, Athens

With this post, we introduce a new bi-weekly monthly column to the Art21 Blog: Inside the Artist’s Studio, written by Athens-based artist and contributor Georgia Kotretsos. Here’s an overview, in her words:

…A haven, an office, a meeting place, a thinking space where the working hours spent by an artist may easily be considered illegal by outsiders. It’s the space where one composes oneself and tunes in with one’s surroundings, where the placing of one’s own paraphernalia is sacred but at other times simply allowed to rest in ordered chaos. The space where light-footed apprentices gracefully serve the creative process. A place where the scent of art and habits of an artist pierce one’s senses. A space where an artist collects his/her thoughts and then scatters them around freely to be cast into artworks.

Can this really be true? Do we still latch onto romantic notions of what a studio is or can be? Or have they involved over the years along with artists themselves?

For this reason, I am setting out to meet with two one artist a month to discuss their studio practice, whether that is in the streets, at a computer, in their living space, etc. Inside the Artist’s Studio will introduce you to a number of artists’ work. Together we’ll discover where some of today’s art is made.

Artist Dafni E. Barbageorgopoulou at her studio in Keramikos, Athens, Greece

At Dafni E. Barbageorgopoulou’s studio, art is in the making. Right on Athens’s Keramikou Street, the nest of her creative energy previously served as an Asian restaurant. To this day, evidence of this is found in the dried-up noodles stuck on the tiles on the back wall, apparently there to stay.

There is a boyish, fresh quality in Barbageorgopoulou’s work. Her tapestries are generous gestures of art and her personality reflects this very liberty by drawing from a wide range of influences, such as from Cycladic to Mexican art, science fiction to dreams, geometry to poetry, origami to monumental architecture. A fusion of eclectic ideas, disciplines, and genres make up the profile of her work.

Dafni holds a BFA in sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in London (2006). As we speak, she is off to the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien International Studio Program in Berlin for a year.

I visited her studio several times—working with her on this post was a pure joy. She is one authentic lady and I’m very please to have her kick off the “Inside the Artist’s Studio” column on this site.

Georgia Kotretsos: Take us through the development of your practice over the past few years and then talk to us a little bit about how these three tapestries (Mother, 2006; P, 2008; Space Kraft, 2009) came to be?

"P," 2008. 350 x 400 x 250 cm

Dafni E. Barbageorgopoulou: My practice focuses on the mapping of bodily experiences, which are then transferred into two-dimensional forms (patterns, collages). These maps/motifs (as in the case of Mother) are consequently being transferred as objects/installations into space (as with P).

At the center of this process is the way in which the body tunes into creative flow. A sense of energy and repetitive movement conducts new rhythms. I am interested in how the final object or situation preserves the levels of energy released during the process of making. This release creates a certain void around the work activating the field around it. The end result becomes lighter, shifts scale, and engages with new materials. Each project is an integral part of a bigger synthesis.
Continue reading »

A Live Feed: Art21 Tweets Mark Bradford

Art21 is presenting at the National Art Education Association’s convention in Minneapolis. We are working with Mark Bradford at this year’s convention on a couple presentations as well as shooting a new Art21 Exclusive video. We will be bringing the conference to you via a live Twitter feed, tweeting key ideas, reflections, and meditations on art and art education as well as behind the scenes of our film shoot. Please follow us this weekend and let us know what you think!

Top Billing at the Guggenheim

I’ve been reading a few reviews of the Guggenheim’s anyspacewhatsoever exhibition recently, including Merrily Kerr’s insightful take a few days ago. Coupled with the launch of Flash Points and its first-column focus on “controversial art,” I wanted to extend the conversation and chime in.

Last week I took in the show and was particularly excited to see Philippe Parreno’s light whirling, blank Marquee installed outside the museum entrance. Expectations met, as it is easily the best work in the show. With heavenly fluorescent lights and ethereal glowing chains, the sculpture is a minimal and decadent take on Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. If Marquee is Dante’s inverted heaven at the museum’s entrance, then the rest of the works inside the Guggenheim represent circles of the Inferno, where the usual suspects have apparently been consigned to several levels.

From the banality of Douglas Gordon and Liam Gillick’s signage systems to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s glorified rainstick, the exhibition inside could have used a dosage of less conscientious humor and more serious introspection. Moving past the third ramp-circle of hell, Angela Bulloch’s infinite color audio piece lacked in scale what Jorge Pardo’s abused (did they both shop at U-line for this show?). At the bottom of the ramp—now we are in Purgatory, I suppose— even the usually dependable Maurizio Cattelan’s drowned Pinocchio appeared a bit flat, buoyed (literally) by the name on the marquee alone.

A fifty-foot King Kong (or Zwang Huan’s sitting Giant) standing asleep in the Guggenheim rotunda chained to the permanent collection is what I would have preferred to see. Well, there’s always Netflix.

Relational Aesthetics, that favorite branch of contemporary art, doesn’t make a bold case for itself here in theanyspacewhatever. Slated as a show of artists who contend with the exhibition itself as work of art, the majority of these works and artists, who have all collaborated with each other inonewayoranother (couldn’t help it) in the past, seems misplaced contextually.

Unless one has uncanny aim, the handle of Relational Aesthetics can be very problematic. By definition, Relational Art is concerned with the social context of the artwork, whereby social activity and collective experience replace the singular viewer/object dynamic. Thus the work itself can be the act of creating a social environment in which people come together as opposed to forming imaginary and utopian realities.

The fallacy in this is the fact that, as Baudelaire observed, “even in the crowd, especially in the crowd, we are alone.” The viewer/object relationship then is never truly abolished. Rather, the audience outside one’s self becomes part of the object, temporarily or not, within an exhibition or not. To isolate the social experience and call it art, yet confine that activity inside a museum space, defeats the purpose of Relational Art’s desire to take the object’s social context outside of an independent and private space. As a result, any redeeming quality of newness of experience and subjective risk-taking attributed to the work are immediately thwarted. Relational Art, while it may bemuse the viewer, doesn’t appear capable of maintaining its conceptual integrity inside the architectural cloister that is the museum.

Much as the recent Whitney Biennial erred with its selections of artists who underwhelmed the already overwhelming Armory space, the heavily text-based works in theanyspacewhatever miss the point of the museum as having a unique context. (It couldn’t have hurt to include the work of Fred Wilson (Season 3), whose omission is a bit perplexing in my opinion, to amp up and rework the museum’s wall labels for this one.)

For example, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s and Carsten Höller’s works suffer from the art world’s greatest unseen conceptual virus, “killer context.” While these gift economy-type works are intended to possess an underlining of edge and controversy, they suffer the fate of their own enclosure within what is essentially a protective white cube space. That is to say, they are the right works in the wrong place.

Museum-goers do not need to be given Tiravanija’s free cappuccinos or bean-bag chairs for comfort (though of course I partook), nor do they need to be spending one night alone at the museum as part of Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room. Both of these works could have been, pardon the pun, better served had they been located outside the Guggenheim in the real world.

Homeless people need hot coffee and a place to rest more so than the well-off who can afford to even attend a museum show, let alone fork out $700/night to be alone inside one. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper and easier to employ them as a security officer for the night, alone but pretending the crowd is all around?

Unfortunately for these art world insiders, what other critics have called “mundane” and “devoid of ideas,” does indeed fit the bill outside.

Josiah McElheny Talk and Performance Tonight at Princeton

If you are in the Princeton area tonight, Josiah McElheny gives a performance and talk about his work at the Betts Auditorium. The Season 3 artist’s installations, which frequently incorporate glass-blowing, are concerned with issues of “reflection, infinity, purity and utopia, museological displays and one’s attempts to derive inferences about historical peoples from their household possessions and objects.”

6pm. Free… For more information please reference the Princeton University website.