Fast-burning fuels
Field notes on the cultural production in Athens

What has changed since that time 21 years ago when, as I wrote, Athens had a hype and dynamic galleries and collectors; public funding was completely absent; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, had just opened and was introducing us to what was happening abroad11 but in many areas it operated as the one-woman show of its director, Anna Kafetsi; the Athens School of Fine Arts remained isolated and under the influence of personal preferences and interests; the curators followed a management logic carefully designed to lead to the next step, namely an exhibition in an institutional body or the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale; and the artists were in danger of falling into the trap of ‘economism’, operating in a field where the evaluative criteria were set exclusively by the galleries and collectors’ institutions with a specific agenda like DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art? How can our request, made twenty years ago, for a network of mutual support for the work of artists and curators, and for a practice localised to the conditions of art production in Greece, and more aware of them, be formulated today?

Certainly, much – but also little – has changed in these twenty years. It began with the euphoria (or discomfort, depending on the perspective) of Athens during the Olympic Games, but also of Yannis Economides’ Matchbox; with a new generation of artists, curators, galleries, and initiatives, a defining example of which was the Athens Biennale, the most ambitious extroversion project to date; which sought to “put Athens on the map” without institutional support and a strategy from above; but also with performative pedestrian projects that claimed public space in a city in transition. And it reaches Athens’ current crypto-colony of tourism and real estate, where artists are called upon to reinvent themselves each time to adapt to the funding requests of each institution or to make art only for hotels, archaeological sites, and events on the islands.

While speaking with a well-known artist of my generation, she shared with me the value her handmade portfolio had for her when she was starting out, as she didn’t have many copies and they were expensive: “I called a gallery after a few months of not getting a response, asking if I could take it back!” At that time, artists would usually first create the work, then photograph it, and finally look for a space to present it. Today, they are asked to envision a work on paper and describe it in detail for the purpose of an open call, often reaching the point where the creation of the work, once funding is eventually approved, takes on an almost transactional or not as urgent a character as it was at the time of its conception.

This change in concept, production conditions, and temporality that the creation of a work entails, and the new type of pressure exerted by funding applications from private institutions on artists, is visible in the responses of those who participated in the research by the visual artist Chara Stergiou that formed the raw material for the performance Apply!.12 “What identity should I invent now?” asks one of the participants, presenting the process that anyone who makes such an application enters, in which compliance with the agenda of each institution and the themes often defined at a European or international level emerges as a basic skill of the artistic subject.

At the same time, the antagonisms and the personality-driven nature of key private and public institutions, in a small art scene like ours, often undermine the transparency and credibility of specific choices or result in artists, who have been rewarded by one institution with frequent participation in exhibitions, facing closed doors at another institution or museum. We have witnessed the way in which heads of private institutions publicly declare that they collaborate with those with whom they fit, or that much-publicised collaborations between institutions and precarious but influential institutions collapse overnight. It is no coincidence that the most powerful institutions do not have curatorial positions but facilitators who have rarely been trained in the increasingly complex and multi-layered parameters of curation, art theory, and cultural management, which are becoming increasingly critical given the dimensions that the cultural industry is taking on in the global economy. Often, indeed, initiatives funded by institutions are far from a fair logic of resource distribution, with exhibitions that include dozens of unpaid artists, while the budget goes, for instance, to the publication of a catalogue or the opening ceremony, raising questions about how such funding ultimately affects the scene. Is a quick-burning fuel enough to continue production with small exhibitions that give us energy, which is quickly depleted, and generate symbolic capital and diffusion for the institution and its recognition, or is it time to demand more substantial and long-term support for ‘young’ professionals and small and medium-scale structures that are essential for the economy and the art ecosystem?24

Any support provided by local authorities and small public museums to contemporary art and its professionals is weak and fragmented, if at all. There are dozens of regional archaeological, folklore, and modern collections, as well as municipal and public cultural spaces that could benefit from collaborating with curators and artists. On the contrary, we see that even the largest municipalities in the country are unable to secure enough funding to pay artists who exhibit in their spaces, often resorting to the same institutions that finance small-scale curatorial and artistic projects, thereby competing with them. While programmes that bring art and archaeology into dialogue are encouraged by producing summer activities in the periphery, there is no corresponding support for the creation of more stable foundations that are not limited to a tourist experience, and young curators who have managed to hold exhibitions in public archaeological museums are claiming the self-evident, paving the way and producing know-how at personal cost that is not certain to continue (or rather, it is almost certain that it will not find any). On the other hand, monuments are commissioned as showcases for national pride in ministries and public spaces, with no strategy, transparency in the commissioning procedures, nor participation of experts from the artistic and scientific communities in the decisions of what, where, and how will be presented in the public space.

Moreover, even curators who are selected to take on the seemingly enviable positions related to public representations and biennials are forced to communicate with institutions through their lawyers, with the relevant examples increasing alarmingly, and the behaviours of institutions (or the lack of structures) showing that it is now considered a prerequisite to have legal support in order to produce curatorial and artistic work for larger-scale public events. It is generally accepted that in this way it is almost impossible for curators who choose to live in Greece to secure sustainable employment, let alone build a background to claim future positions.25 Perhaps the only exception here, too, is EMST’s open invitation to emergent curators, as well as the Museum’s active public programme and Octopus magazine, which involves professionals in the field on equally professional terms.

However, the need for substantial funding for national representations at biennials further obscures the selection process, given that private institutions are involved in producing works that tend to have a higher chance of being preferred. Thus, even when a proposal is selected by a committee of experts on the basis of evaluative criteria, speculation about the artist or curator who is in cahoots with such-and-such public figure with access to government structures to secure funding cannot be avoided.

Vassilis Noulas, visual artist and stage director, has summarised in a key and empathetic way the parallel and usually briefly intersecting worlds of those involved in the field of contemporary art in Greece and state authorities, recounting three encounters between artists and cultural officials, with the Mavili Collective as its central core and later the “EIGHT, space for research and artistic practice”, with an equal number of Ministers of Culture, of different political parties.26 The first meeting, in 2011, was with Pavlos Geroulanos (PASOK), when he drafted the “White Paper” on the reform of cultural management. The second meeting, and the more episodic one, was with Panos Panagiotopoulos (New Democracy) in 2014, when artists burst into laughter at the conference “Funding Creativity” at the Megaron – Athens Concert Hall, where no artist had been invited to speak on the panel.27 The third meeting was with Myrsini Zorba (SYRIZA) at “EIGHT”, in 2019, after the fruitless competition for the artistic directorship of ΕΜΣΤ, and shortly before the minister finally opened up grants to other artistic fields beyond theatre (it was a movement that, given the situation of COVID-19, would be expanded by the next government, responding to a long-standing request from the field). It is worth noting here that the funding for research provided by the Ministry of Culture under Deputy Minister Nikolas Giatromanolakis was not repeated despite the large participation, or perhaps because of it, as has been argued, since it is difficult to support an evaluation and control mechanism, and it is also problematic that the requested subjects are often asked to create non-profit companies while no way has yet been found for an artist who has been invited to an international biennial to apply for funding for his travel expenses!28

It is clear that behind many of the systemic failures of artmaking in Greece lies the lack of a policy for contemporary culture, with micromanagement replacing strategy. As early as the 1990s, following Myrsini Zorba’s analysis, culture was perceived under the umbrella of tourism, preventing autonomous cultural planning, while at the same time, there was no vision for “a cultural policy with specific goals that extend to the economy and meet the needs of tourism. Exactly the opposite was chosen, the adaptation of cultural elements to the promotion of tourism.”29 As we entered a period of ongoing crisis and government failings, the practices produced by the “emerging popular culture […] as biopolitics and governance of everyday life”, including self-managed artistic ventures, attracted, according to Zorba, the interest of certain private foundations as “projects” with a civilising mission. This gave them the opportunity to influence the cultural field as a whole and to intervene as producers of new subjectivities. With the anointing of quality and creativity that they reserved for dozens of artistic groups, the foundations became critical hubs and regulators of the cultural field. The question of how we can claim a “state of cultural reconstruction” is, within this context, urgent.30

Given the current landscape, it is crucial to advocate for strong, well-funded public institutions that are attentive to the needs of the field.31 Equally important is strengthening art criticism and art history as a space that “can offer the framework that will allow curators, critics, and scholars of contemporary art to work, independently of the system that favours and promotes image, form, and spectacle over politically and critically oriented positions, in order to influence such present and future change”.32

“We are like a mega-institution, all of us together”, said the co-founder of the Tavros art space, Maria-Thalia Carras,33 summarising, along with other members of notable independent art spaces and initiatives in the city, the volume and influence of the work they have done and how decisive it has been in shaping the art scene and the city, which often emerges as a hot artistic destination, attracting foreign visitors, many of whom have purchased properties here. Unfortunately, the survival of independent initiatives of different goals and scale, such as, for example, State of Concept Athens, Tavros art space, Neo Cosmos, and even the Athens Biennale, which have been, in different ways, influential for us, have hosted us, and have brought us into contact with important works and creators from scenes around the world with whom we share things, is not a given. Some of them ‘press pause’ and their founders move to another country or career. Others always seek different sponsorship schemes and alliances – constituting case studies of institutions in progress, for some, or personal whims based on volunteer work, for others. Some of them focus elsewhere. Others persist, chasing new funding consistently, maintaining the economy of the projects, supporting artists and curators, attracting the admiration of young foreign residents of the city (most recently from the Middle East) who express their enthusiasm for the energy of the art scene, leaving us at a loss as to how to respond to them and providing us with multiple déjà vu moments.34 Adding a little more fuel to the engine each time.

While looking at a photo of the statue in honour of Greek small- and medium-sized tradesmen and entrepreneurs, recently erected in Pedion tou Areos park, among the professions listed, I can make out the painter and the photographer. I don’t know if the sculptor, the curator, or the gallery owner is also hiding somewhere behind this ‘Prometheus’-like figure. “Today’s small and medium-sized entrepreneurs keep their own ‘fire’ alive in society”, said the president of the Athens Chamber of Tradesmen, Ioannis Chatzitheodosiou, at the unveiling ceremony. “They work not only for themselves, but for the common good. And for this, they deserve recognition, support, and policies that will allow them to progress.”35

I think of Eva Giannakopoulou’s ambiguous ‘Proposal for a Women* Labour Monument (a bipolar tribute to the Albanian proletariat)’, which drew from her personal experiences working seasons alongside Albanian female workers and representations of women from the history of the labour movement.36

I think of the sculptures made by Anastasia Douka, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Dora Economou, Aliki Panagiotopoulou, Rallou Panagiotou, Kostas Roussakis, and Kostas Tzimoulis, who, within the framework of the exhibition Statues that don’t move, don’t speak, don’t laugh, curated by Galini Notti, attempted more or less determined encounters with passers-by in Kato Patisia.

I think of Vassilis Noulas reading the poem “From the side of the park (XIX-XXIV)”, recalling the cruising practice in Pedion tou Areos on a poetic walk in the National Garden that invited us to open our eyes upside down.37 I also think of Yorgos Sapountzis intervening with fleeting materials on the busts outside the Garden. The exhibitions that have been held in these two parks. The fleeting sculptures that the artistic project Para/site (curated by Εm-Kei) left in the public space in the early 2000s. The public sculptures of Theodoros and his correspondence with municipalities at a time when competitions and assignments were held.38

And I wonder who will claim a place for the sculptures of my generation in public space and in history, and who will advocate for the policies that will allow the modern small- and medium-sized artistic entity to progress and continue to support the local art economy (and us as well)?