Jenny Marketou and Philip Tsiaras are two diaspora artists who scrutinize the world from two different perspectives–Marketou from the outside looking in and Tsiaras from the inside looking out. Stefanie Bailey met with both, one in Athens and one in New York, to discuss their work and through it explore how each views the world from where they stand.
As artists, Jenny Marketou and Philip Tsiaras have two things in common. Firstly, within their extensive careers, they have both produced photographs documenting–although very differently–the life of Greek Americans in the United States. Marketou documented the lives of New York City’s Greek community in Astoria after having arrived in New York in 1984 to undergo her M.F.A. at Pratt Institute after having studied photography first at the Corcoran School of Art and then the George Washington University, both in Washington D.C. Tsiaras, on the other hand, documented himself and his family in New Hampshire over the space of a decade, in a project titled Family Album, often regarded as one of Tsiaras’s seminal works, where the influence of mentor Lucas Samaras is most apparent.
Secondly, they are both Greek, albeit Marketou is Greek-born and raised, while Tsiaras is a child of the diaspora. In this sense it is interesting that I meet New Hampshire-native Tsiaras in Athens and Athens-born Marketou in New York. Discussing Family Album with Tsiaras amongst other things, there is a feeling of an artist who is inside looking out, the result of years traversing the lines between both cultural ‘homes’ to which he asserts his belonging, sometimes with humor and irreverence that somehow destroys the divisions that so often separate the Greeks born inside Greece, and those born outside. Marketou reveals an artist existing on the periphery in a very different way–outside looking in–as an artist with an interest in bridging gaps, rather than challenging them.
And where do they meet in the middle? Perhaps in their passion for life, for art, for culture and history, and all those other complex things that make us such complex beings. Indeed, these are artists who celebrate the heterogeneity of life as wanderers, as scribes to the times, and as mediators of life.
Outside Looking In: Jenny Marketou
For Jenny Marketou, participation is key. She makes a note of this when describing a group project staged in Philadelphia in 2008, Odor’s Limits, curated by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher. Marketou created a semi-fictional, semi-factual map of the city along with a color index for smells and invited participants to map the city according to the scents they experienced within it. “Most of my work always has a component that requires some kind of participation or involvement,” Marketou explains. “It’s not interactive but it is somehow participatory and always requires a kind of performance. In Philadelphia, these people had to perform: they had to do something that goes beyond watching. This combination of studio work, the outside, and the community is a good example of how I approach my work.”
Marketou’s practice explores how life can become art, and in turn, how art can communicate an experience of life. One recent project shown at the Kumu Art Museum, Estonia, in 2011, was a variation of Red Eyed Sky Walkers, first shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST) in 2007. At Kumu, Marketou presented a grouping of large, helium-inflated weather balloons outside the museum space, while an indoor video featured real time video streaming from surveillance cameras attached to the balloons interwoven with archival images that document public spaces from around the world obtained from the Internet.
“The video piece for the Kumu installation was nine-channel projection,” says Marketou. “I wanted to work with current events and all these revolutions taking place in the Arab world. I was thinking of this idea of the public square as the place where we express our anger and ideas…In the end what I was focusing on the most in this work was making transparent what all these revolutions have in common: how they are connected, and what makes them happen. What is between the revolution and the square, and the police, the controls and the system?”
Good question, especially when looking at the increasingly brutal events taking place in Greece as a result of the economic crisis that erupted in 2009. It also connects to the wave of protests against the financial system and its political impacts taking place globally for the past few years, most recently the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Talking to Marketou, she explains how the public square has been central to these events, as the platform upon which protests are staged and streamed worldwide via telephones, digital cameras, computers and televisions; “The apparatus” as Marketou calls them.
The conversation extends to the idea of the mediated identity, as represented by social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter, instrumental in the development of the so-called Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. “These modes of communication work both ways. Of course, they allow people to communicate what is happening all over the world: this is wonderful. And yet people can also see everything: they know exactly who you are, where you are; what are your likes and dislikes.” In the end, “Everybody creates their own square; and you realize how transparent this personal square is…I find now the square has become another space in time, and also it suggests a kind of urban disturbance.”
Talking about the vast amount of information available on the web, Marketou notes: “I’m working with these amazing data images, from so many sources, and I find one supports the other, and at the same time they create another meaning, and then a new meaning. Then you project your own meaning. This relates to New York, too, in the sense of this continuous juxtaposition of meaning, people, and events. In New York, everything exists together at the same time and this parallel existence and fluidity is very interesting. There is this nervousness, which you can find in my work, too.”
Marketou draw parallels to a work shown in group show, Polyglossia, at the Onassis Cultural Center, Athens, in 2011, which presented the work of Greek artists either born abroad or currently living abroad. Produced during Marketou’s artist residency at CCA in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2009, Levels of Disturbance, a single channel video, is made up of images collected flying over Los Alamos, obstructed by a red circle that gradually enlarges to engulf the entire screen. Talking about the work, Marketou connects the idea of the square to the circle; a metaphor for how oftentimes, the mediated reality we see on news broadcasts often acts as an obstruction to true reality, touching on the concepts of the void of over-information, the absence of memory and cultural amnesia.
“Nowadays, this idea of memory and amnesia is very important,” explains Marketou. “Talking about this virtual space, everything is saved as a memory (or data) and archived, metaphorically and actually. We could lose it anytime. My work is about seeing into this hole, or void.” When it comes to the city, she notes: “The city itself negates this kind of memory. In a way, New York reinvents itself continuously because it’s not nostalgic: it’s looking to the future, and so everyone living here has a tendency to look forward, too. But I think this is how you experience life…Most artists share this experience or challenge when they go to work in another country because the mechanisms are so different, there is no time to look back.”
In contrast, Marketou observes that Greece is quite the opposite, focused more on its past than its future, something that Marketou indirectly notices when talking about her rewarding experience documenting Astoria and its community of first generation Greek immigrants while working as a journalist in the area during the 1980s. She recalls: “They didn’t come from an urban background, so we had a lot of differences in our memories and what we brought with us. They kept what they brought with them and never moved forward. It was like a time capsule. It was quite interesting to see this happening, and then go to Manhattan, which was another world. A few train stops would take you from one place to another. This was an amazing experience of working and being an artist in New York.”
And yet, New York has not defined her entirely. Marketou remembers growing up in a politically-engaged family that encouraged independence from a young age. Marketou’s parents met at university and married at the start of the civil war, and regaled her with stories of resistance as she grew up, sending Marketou to the American College because it was the best place to be educated as a woman for that era. “My mum never engaged me with this stereotype of the woman, so now when people ask me about feminism, I can see the issues, but it was never my priority. There are other issues that are more important that I address in my work: immigration, identity, and subjectivity.”
As we continue our discussion, Marketou talks about a project she did in Mexico on the border between Tijuana and California. “I worked with the local people and their interaction with the border, not as an escape, but as a way to interact and communicate with one another…to see how they were attempting to reinvent that space.” The discussion of a communicative space brings back to mind public squares, the concept of the void, or the mediated image as obstruction. In a sense, the fragmentary nature of the present is not unlike, as Marketou noted earlier, the way we all live our lives.
“I think if you are aware, you can put these squares together somehow, accept some facts and try to make the best of what you have, then somehow you know how to exist within all of this. This is the whole idea. I think that also being able to create something is a privilege too, because it gives you this opportunity to voice something to say something; and I mean all kinds of creators – even a chef is a creator –people who are able to express themselves: to engage, visually and physically,” Marketou says. “I think that’s what we are all looking for; communicating, interacting. That’s part about being a human being.” Interesting. Most Greeks tell me that communicating and interacting are the lifeblood of any Greek. In Marketou’s case, this has manifested in an equally characteristic interest in the politics of being human.
Inside Looking Out: Philip Tsiaras
After having sampled Philip Tsiaras’s culinary skills at a gathering with his fellow Amherst College alumni on a summer’s evening near the Vouliagmeni coast, it is clear that here is a Renaissance man. Covering a wide range of media, from photography, glass, ceramic, and bronze, Tsiaras has staged some seventy-five solo exhibitions at institutions, galleries and art events all around the world since 1974, as well as having participated at the prestigious Venice Biennale three times, producing a ten foot bronze sculpture on the Grand Canal entitled, Social Climber, in 2009.
I had first met Tsiaras through a photographer who told me I must see Tsiaras’s photographic series, Family Album. “He’s an incredible artist,” he tells me enthusiastically. When we meet, I am confronted with a man exuding the elegance of the twentieth century; cultured, refined. Tsiaras so happens to have a black A4 folder to hand containing clips of his work; he pulls it out with a gesture so elegant one would have thought it was an iPad. Opening the pages, I am initiated into his material world of the glorious art object: sculpture, painting, and installation. It becomes clear there is more to the artist than Family Album.
Looking at Tsiaras’s paintings, it is not surprising he is an accomplished musician, who even won a scholarship to study music at the prestigious Juilliard School, New York, before becoming an artist. “I always wanted to do something in the arts. When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a painter but always felt that I couldn’t draw well enough. But that was because I was reared in a place in New England where traditional artistic practices continued. There was no free form; no thinking that it’s not about how well you draw something but how you draw something; how you personalize it; I didn’t learn those kinds of things in New Hampshire,” he remembers. “I went to college as a Music major and wrote music. At some point I thought I was going to be a composer.”
Thinking back to the exuberant compositions of Kandinsky, or even Mondrian’s attempts at expressing the jazz and energy of 1940s New York purely through raw line and color, the artist is totally present in Tsiaras’s paintings. The gesture is evident in every stroke, the mind in every color and every mark, as if painting was the documentation of some silent, improvised jazz composition playing in the artist’s head. This sense of freestyle expands into Tsiaras’s image of the artist. “In the West, they don’t have this idea that Renaissance artists had, that if you were creative, you basically did everything; you could do everything, because essentially what was needed was the imagination. It was about how you could actually imagine something, conceptualize it and actually do it. Amplify the idea.”
In this light, Tsiaras’s debt to Marcel Duchamp, and the notorious latrine he presented in 1917 to the Society of Independent Artists as sculpture, in which the artist separated object making to design and conceptualization, is obvious. Tsiaras does not make his objects; he leaves that to the best technicians he can source. “As a contemporary artist interested in many things, I don’t have a lifetime to make the perfect mould,” Tsiaras explains. Instead, he appropriates mechanical moulds and objects made to his instruction, treating, as it were, plain objects as canvases: a surface upon which to intervene.
From fluid forms of glass, treated bronze and glazed ceramics, Tsiaras is drawn to traditional materials that carry the weight of time and history in their very constitution. His references are a distinct mix of history and modernism, from the recurrent motifs including stilettos, the sea, and animals, expressing what Tsiaras refers to as a “dictionary of objects” that reveal a literary background: Tsiaras studied Comparative Literature at Amherst College, a prestigious institution where he was college-mates with George Papandreou and Antonis Samaras. Obviously, Tsiaras followed a different route to his esteemed college-contemporaries.
“When I finished university I came to Athens immediately on the Thomas Watson scholarship for one year of intellectual wanderlust [and translate Greek poetry into English]. I got my scholarship through photography and poetry because I had started doing quite a lot while I was at Amherst,” Tsiaras says. Within this period, he established himself as an artist, becoming quite the overnight sensation as he recalls, recounting the story of his solo show’s opening night at the Bernier Gallery, where artist Alekos Fassianos argued that Tsiaras’ work was not art.
But this issue has never been of concern for Tsiaras. “My work is all about me interpreting the ordinary. You see, the big pay off in art is understanding this immense creativity that exists right under your nose. When I returned to the States from Greece in the 1970s, I realized that my family, Greek Immigrants, was so much more profound than all these Athenians I had come across. And I thought my own parents, who had loved Greece, were more real. I realized that all my life it had been under my nose: my own family. They had great faces, an amazing attitude, and they had a little craziness. I thought: I could utilize that.”
And utilize he did. Family Album began, as Tsiaras recounts: “One day when I was at my aunt’s, my mother’s sister. They adore me because I spend a lot of time with them drinking coffee and telling them jokes. So at one point I started taking my clothes off and I had my camera so I started taking pictures. I get down to my underwear, and there’s a picture of my mother and her sister looking at the camera. I’m in my underwear in this big back yard, and their faces are amazing; they are laughing and embarrassed at the same time: there’s joy in their faces.”
He continues: “In the photo, what they are really looking at is the camera, sitting on a tripod with no person. It’s amazing because they know those photographs will be seen at some point. Though there is no photographer, they are looking at the world, showing their connection, their embarrassment, their love and their eroticism. I saw that this was the magic, so I continued the series and worked on it for ten years. I would come back to New Hampshire and reconstitute the house with various things: statues of David for instance, or Greek things–or things that we think are Greek but are Italian–and I would be in my underwear and everybody would be normal; and that’s what the whole book is about. The power is that every single person has a family album. Everyone can relate to that.”
Family Album extended on a series in which Tsiaras had already begun to explore the peformative through images of himself, naked, in the unlikeliest of situations, like climbing ancient temples at five o’clock in the morning, images he admits are his mother’s least favorite since she cannot show them to the priest. As a former protégé of artist Lucas Samaras, Tsiaras’s willingness to expose himself is an act of liberation that draws on the very subtle presence of desire in his work, which can be translated into sexual desire, to a desire to simply be, or become whatever, or whoever, one chooses to be.
“Of course, Lucas Samaras broke that territory very early on with a series called Polaroids where he photographs himself naked, and they are completely crazy. It’s normal that I was influenced, and I took it in another direction,” Tsiaras notes. He pauses for a moment. “Now you’re going to ask me, well why do that? Well, why not?” Funny. Yiati oxi; [why not?] was one of the first pieces of advice I was ever given when I moved to Greece in 2001. It speaks to that defiant self; an invitation to dive headfirst into whatever life has in store for you. As it were, an invitation to expose oneself, and celebrate it.