ART NOISE: Nomadic artists: Nostos* for the "bare - life"?

Nikos Charalambidis, Rietveld's Red Blue Chair blocked in a traditional loom, 2006

By Vassilika Sarilaki
What’s the role of cultural nomadism nowadays? How the artistic residencies influence contemporary artists? Do nomadic artists have a desire to experience the “otherness” and “bare-life” in any cost in order to find the truth for themselves and their artwork? What’s the result of comparing different cultures and having cross-cultural experiences? How valuable can be the concept of a nomadic art evaluation in everyday life? Do we still believe in postmodern values or something different is about to rise? We looked upon the nomadic experiences and artworks of four Greek artists who answered our questions and helped us to enlight the topic..

 

Displacement has always played an important role in 20th century art, starting from impressionism till nowadays. It is known that even some art movements were influenced by this. Artists known as fauves, -Gauguin, Matisse, e. t. c -were constantly travelling abroad to get some artistic experiences and inspirations. European people have always been migrating to USA for economical or other reasons and at the dawn of the 20th century (between 1850 and 1914) as Glynn, (2011) states “over 50 million Europeans migrated to North and South America. Ireland, Italy and Sweden contributed, over 15 million of these emigrants”.
Artists’ emigration to America continued all along the Modernist period. In a way, we can claim that the New York’s abstraction movement was based on foreign artists. Moreover, the New Bauhaus was established in Chicago after the Nazi’s attack to Weimar. Fluxus was also a multinational movement expanded all over the world. Artists always travelled a lot and worked in different places. 

                           Alexandros Georgiou, Group of Forgotten Gods, Mixed media processed photograph, National Museum of Contemporary Art 

It  is common knowledge among art historians that the avant garde in Modernism was built upon a number of artists, the great majority of whom, lived in the metropolises of Europe, the USA and Russia. Artists moved from poor countries to richer ones in order to have a carrier. Those days, however, travelling, staying abroad or moving to cities, such as New York or Paris, was a personal choice but not an indispensable move in order to become famous.
Today, we live in a more globalized world. For that reason, artists who want to become really eminent are obliged to travel continually to different countries in order to establish an international carrier. They should also participate in certain artistic residencies, several biennials or other big expositions and symposia. 

Ptak, (2011), refers to residencies and says that “the basic goals of residency programmes is individual artistic development and the pursuit of experimentation. Nowadays, residencies are often incorporated into the core of artistic practice which allows geographical imbalances to be redressed, signalling an end to artistic discourses based on one-way traffic”. 

As Denson (2012) also states “It's now over two decades since some of us--critics, theorists, artists--called for a nomadic valuation and criticism of art--a valuation and criticism encouraging us to diversify the cultural terrain with the contributions of indigenous artists the world over. If there is a nomadic enterprise today, it is no doubt that of the consumption of culture; and if there is a nomadic profession, it surely must be that of the globally-attuned artist.”
Additionally to this, from some years and on we are attesting a new phenomenon. Some artists choose to leave their rich home countries and move in emerging and developing countries for creative purposes. And after a long period of time they return home and present their work as being witnesses of another culture. 

As Palomino, (2010) states “At the actual flow of globalized commodities, interchanges, transportation, technology, global financial investments, communicational networks, international migrations movements, tourism etc the figure of the artist has become a witness and an actor of his time.” This is the case of four following Greek artists we are going to present, Alexandros Georgiou, Georges Drivas, Nikos Charalambides and Dimitris Alithinos.. There are, certainly, some other important artists... 

 

Alexandros Georgiou, 42 years old, was well known as a young artist in Greece, even from the time he was still a student in the Greek Athens School of Fine Arts, from the series of photos (of an intimate existential character) appearing in the “Spring Collection” exhibition of the “Deste Foundation” of the famous collector Dakis Ioannou. After graduating the School of Fine Arts he went to New York, he prepared a MSc at the School of Visual Arts of New York and participated in various international exhibitions.

Why did I choose to present him among others? The reason is because he is different. His difference from other similar nomadic artists is that he is not photographing neither exotic images nor melodramas or atrocities addressed to the Western eyes and international market. He is not creating photos of misery that humiliate Eastern people. He just collects relics, memories and embers of a culture that leans sinking to the West and sensitizes us about the real meaning of life. Another difference is perhaps the most important: whatever he lives, he lives it locally, from within and from his own for years now. 

                                              Alexandros Georgiou, Persepolis, Mixed media processed photo, Courtesy of the artist and Eleni Koroneou gallery

Alexandros, seeking for reality beyond media lies and the prejudice regarding life and art of the East, escaped from an atmosphere of the market and marketing of New York to a new, strong emancipation of his artistic representation by living and creating with entirely new materials from those of the West. In 2005 he decided to go to India and other Eastern countries and live there for a long time, till 2013. Returning he exhibited his artworks at the National Museum of Modern Art. Some questions emerge.
What really made Alexandros Georgiou to abandon his 7 year long stay in New York- the dream of every young artist of the “periphery”- and depart for his long term journey to India, Iran and Pakistan ?
Which was the path of his artistic quest up until then and what was his differentiation regarding the “reading of the world and art”? 

 

                                     Alexandros Georgiou, Without My Own Vehicle India – Kids Wearing MacDonalds Clown Masks 2006-07, digital print on paper

His images – fragments and the comments that he sent to a number of selected participants in Greece- are coloured by the immediacy of a painful everyday reality of poverty, by a hybrid mist that bonds the sacred with the commercial, by personal poetic images, by colourful visions of deities that are erased by advertisements but still remain alive in the soul as the last sign of hope and faith. These images of spirituality emerge as in communion with life and pain and are presented as pure, experiential, honest and immediate revealing their own aesthetic, that of solitary transience that leaves, however, a permanent mark of longing. They are the exact paradigm of what Agamben was describing with the term “bare life”. By this term Agamben,  (1998), characterizes the made of life of many “excluded” and poor population, some kind of the “luben proletariat” in Marxist terms. . Alexandros is someone who familiarizes us with the “otherness” of the “bare life”. More in the following video… 

 http://theartnoise.blogspot.gr/2015/01/nomadic-artists-nostos-for-bare-life.html