1st Athens Biennial

One way or another a lot of people felt vengeful towards Athens last summer. But while those Greek citizens decrying the authorities’ unhurried response to catastrophic forest fires were focused on the governmental seat of today, the curators of ‘Destroy Athens’ identified the city with the Western civilization it gave birth to some 2,500 years ago. Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio and Augustine Zenakos, who are based in the city, style themselves XYZ; the terminal conceit is apt. Their display, occupying the lightly converted former gas factory, the Technopolis, began by encircling the viewer with Julian Rosenfeldt and Piero Steinle’s archive footage of collapsing buildings (1996’s Detonation Deutschland, its booms and plumes peculiarly restful) and traced an almost uninterruptedly downward arc from there. Some 60 artists later, the show closed with The Lamb of God (2007), Eleni Mylonas’ despondent video – shot on the day the USA invaded Iraq – of a dead lamb bashing relentlessly against the island of Aegina’s rocky shore. Words such as ‘hell’ and ‘handcart’ sprang to mind.

XYZ are not the first to censure the city of Pericles, of course. Plenty have tarred Plato’s Republic for blueprinting totalitarianism, the Athenian ideal of bodily perfection has seen its share of misuse and a reasonably straight line can be drawn from the Grecian spirit of rationalist inquiry to WMDs. These arguments and more were lucidly laid out in Chris Marker and The Otolith Group’s Inner Time of Television (2007), the latter’s 13-monitor resurrection of the former’s extraordinary, little-seen 1989 television series The Owl’s Legacy, which deconstructed the heritage of the ancient Greeks through round-tables and interviews with myriad intellectuals. If this was the grand backdrop, however, what concerned the curators elsewhere were the diverse, subjectivity-moulding constraints within the socio-political orders that sprang, broadly, from Greece – of which ‘Destroy Athens’, divided into six ‘Days’ as titles, felt like a necessarily broad and partial whistle-stop tour.

The intention, it would appear, was not simply to rack up these examples of pressuring influence in order to deliver the audience into some kind of speciously therapeutic mental breakthrough. Instead, resisting the idea that art works should be pawns in a grand narrative imposed by the curators of a biennial, ‘Destroy Athens’ seemed for substantial stretches to be more concerned with engineering a dynamic between constriction and freedom on the level of reception. The show ‘tells a story’, wrote the curators, and the display was arranged in linear fashion so that one couldn’t choose one’s route; but the structure was voluminous enough for unrehearsed connotations to proliferate. In this sense the tenor was philosophical, aimed less at forwarding an argument than at creating the conditions for thought. (In particular, XYZ’s repeated invocation, in their catalogue text, of the notion of ‘rupture’ to characterize the interface between authority and autonomy suggested they’d been reading Alain Badiou.) If there was politics here, it lay in the organizers’ active strategizing so as not to turn their platform into more of a method of manufacturing consent.

The ‘Days’ more closely resembled ambiences, acquiescent to heterodoxy. The ‘Second Day’, for instance, implied various hangovers of irrationalism, at one point assembling John Kleckner’s pellucid watercolours of lesser-known and often brutal Greek myths, Folkert de Jong’s big, algae-toned historical sculptural tableau Seht der Mensch (The Shooting Lesson, 2007), of a boy being taught bow-and-arrow skills amid melancholy harlequins and dead-eyed elders, and Jannis Varelas’ large-scale, corps exquis-like drawings, which rifle through a grab-bag of exhausted occult signifiers. The ‘Third Day’ (subtitled ‘Daddy, Daddy, You Bastard, I’m Through’ and described by XYZ as ‘both a refuge and a hell’) rapidly shape-shifted notions of home, departure and estrangement. Olaf Breuning’s oafish, pampered middle-class backpacker in Home 2 (2007), seemingly spinning visualized fantasies of communing with rural Africans from the safety of a hotel room, gave way to Gregor Schneider’s Weisse Folter (White Torture, 2005–7), a relentless filmic glide through his recent sculptural counterfeiting of an internment centre specializing in sensory deprivation. Yet the home is no refuge, as was suggested by Lotte Konow Lund’s videotaped musings on harming herself with domestic objects, and it can be elusive. At one point in Kajsa Dahlberg’s predominantly imageless video monologue by a lesbian maker of porn films, the speaker – her voice edged with suppressed emotion – talked of looking for ‘furtive spaces’ to operate in and pursuing ‘the illusion of being self-appointed’. It was one of precious few chinks of speculative light in ‘Destroy Athens’, and still fairly muted.
There followed a brief, semi-sylvan interlude. Characteristically lingering on model-pretty girls fooling around in the countryside, languishing on swings and dancing in clogs, Torbjørn Rødland’s vertical-format video ♥ All This & Dogg (2004) was laced with a mood of urbanite disconnect that, at this stage in the artist’s career, sailed close to self-parody. ‘Something is missing but I don’t know what’, one girl graffitied on a tree. This and the distressed carnivalesque of assume vivid astro focus’ outdoor party site (scuffed bootlegged posters, bruised bunting, muddied towels) seemed positioned to contrast with the final two ‘Days’ – in which the hammer came down repeatedly and the show slipped into a grand-finale mode that threatened to undo all that had come before.

While an eight-bar loop of thrash metal blared from another Breuning video, we were ushered into a lengthy evocation of violence in myriad forms, realized as something resembling an avant-garde ghost train. Faceted art works surged past on a tide of mayhem: Aidas Bareikis’ troupe of spavined skeletons in scorched monochromatic attire; Rotterdam-based collective Kimberly Clark’s rubbish-heap-cum-pyre, simulacra of sportswear-clad youths crowning it like human sacrifices; Narve Hovdenakk’s video of himself pretending to be a policeman, masturbating into a car window; Terence Koh’s prone sculpted body with genitals ripped out; John Bock’s videoed slasher parody featuring himself inventively torturing a defaulting debtor while seemingly under the orders of a little girl. In the central panel of Vassilis Patmios Karouk’s triptych of rawly expressive black and white acrylic paintings the Owl of Minerva looks indifferently on, flanked by the martyrdom of St Paul and a riot scene. One doubts that this sequence of works was intended purely as a body count, but that’s what it felt like.

And after the hammer, the coffin lid. The phrase ‘plan for victory’, inscribed in purple aerosol on a snowy slope, vanished under a landslide in an untitled video from 2006 by Elodie Pong. The self was resurrected for a purgatorial interregnum via Temporary Services’ installation of prisoners’ inventions (polythene-bag condoms, toothpaste-packet paintbrush cases, etc.) – a definition that, the show’s tenor implied, might apply to all art works. Then we were dead again, sent towards the drowned lamb via Peter Dreher’s 588 time-marking paintings of empty water glasses, Christian Marclay’s floor-bound field of sculpted white telephone receivers (Boneyard, 1990) and Derek Jarman’s scrawled text painting Fuck Me Blind (1993). Again, whatever lithe dynamics had previously persisted with regard to the show’s contents were here flattened by blaring Gothic spectacle, the storyline’s death spasms annexing every inch of sovereign airspace.

Out in soured sunlight one headed for the offsite group exhibitions in derelict buildings: the Tom Morton-curated ‘How to Endure’ and Neil Mulholland’s ‘Young Athenians’ respectively offered qualified hopefulness and grit-infested levity. The former show’s offerings were frequently spell-like, their ambiguities landing sunny-side up in tribute to mortal indefatigability. In Allen Ginsberg’s photograph from 1985 Harry Smith was seen ‘transforming milk into milk’ as he pours it from carton to jar. On video Matthew Day Jackson’s mother performed a ritual asking the heavens to bestow success on her son’s art. And even further offsite, soiling one of the spotlights illuminating the Parthenon after nightfall, was, allegedly, an ineffectual smear of Roger Hiorns’ semen.

Meanwhile, ‘Young Athenians’ superficially gravitated towards ironic comparisons between the host city’s former glories and the scruffier side of contemporary Scottish life: for example, Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth’s videos of friends larking in togas; Keith Farquhar’s cardboard cut-out of a bent-over girl placed, as though vomiting, before a toilet; and Darius Jones’ surreptitious videotaping of a nocturnal street scene (boy meets girl, boy curses girl inventively, girl slumps and sobs). But the title’s tag, coined some time ago by Mulholland with regard to Edinburgh’s art scene, also encompassed less knockabout entries such as Craig Coulthard’s hour-long video of a canoe trip downriver. With the artist acting as tour guide to a cluster of friends – pausing regularly to put up handmade signs on the riverbank, sing lachrymose songs and recount notable local deaths – the general structure functioned as flypaper for unpredictable incidents, paying off in admixtures of bathos and sincerity.

These compact shows, their thematics draped loosely over comfortable coteries, were necessary counterbalances to the main event. XYZ admittedly hit their marks repeatedly: for much of their show’s stretch the narrative thread seemed like a smart move (particularly when it was treated almost derisorily) and the viewer felt valued. ‘Destroy Athens’ was tightly presented, solicitously scaled, engaged with its locality and its country’s artists but quite indifferent to the tourist board, light on outright substandard work and underplaying numerous nimble conjunctions. What is apparently more difficult, and particularly so in the city where they were minted, is to purge those great Greek innovations, theatre and rhetoric.