Art Athina review by Laura McLean-Ferris

Art Athina: Death, taxes and art fairs Posted by artreview.com on May 24, 2010 at 10:01am in First View View Reviews We may as well just get this out of the way. Having an art fair in Athens in the middle of the worst financial crisis that Greece (and by extension, Europe) has seen in decades might be tantamount to throwing a debauched party while Rome burns. Fairs and dealers do not often deign to comment on the economy when it comes to art fairs, preferring to steam ahead blindly through the recession with bravura. But the scale of the crisis in Greece is too great to be ignored, even by those most ostrichlike members of the artworld: hardcore austerity measures, four deaths, tear gas, ten years to recovery, dramatic public-sector pay cuts alongside tax hikes. The introduction to the fair catalogue announces that the consequences of the economic crisis are dire, for art, for everyone. And those consequences will obviously cut down many hopeful saplings, keeping in check the more dramatic hopes that sprung up as Athens appeared to be entering an exciting phase of burgeoning growth, after the 2nd Athens Biennial in 2009 and the success of the attendant Re-map project, a kind of biennial fringe in which artists and institutions took over buildings and spaces in a dodgy neighbourhood and used them for shows and events. As hoped, the area was invested with a new energy, and spaces began to be reclaimed. As Art Athina loomed in my calendar, and the crisis appeared to worsen, I approached the trip with a kind of gloom, imagining a depressed atmosphere or, worse, that the fair might become a target for anger and resentment, as the international collector-class, seemingly untouched by the catastrophe affecting everyone else, spent vast sums on baublelike art. Art Athina, however, is a very Greek fair, with the lion’s share of the participating galleries coming from Greece, a big chunk from Cyprus and only a smattering from elsewhere. This is not where Dakis Joannou buys his Koons sculptures. The opening felt, surprisingly, like business as usual. Women in enormous jewel-encrusted S/M shoes and throngs of people packing the aisles, noisy and excitable. Art Athina is an ‘everyone pitch in’ fair: edgy international galleries rub elbows with a few faintly embarrassing ones selling ‘sexy’ paintings of young nude women surrounded by flowers (or as in one example I saw, bleeding, a pert painted buttock pierced by an arrow) or satin fabric sculptures of luxury goods – cigars, silk ties and shoes. But let’s politely gloss over these, like they were some kind of drunken uncle at a wedding (which is basically what they are) and move on. Vlassis Caniaris, Composition, 1974, mixed media, 140x50x50 cm, Courtesy The Breeder, Athens The Breeder had undertaken to bring to light Vlassis Caniaris, an artist from an older generation, whose 1970s sculptures, such as one made from yellow tights stuffed with red flowers and wearing children’s shoes, have a Robert Gober-like quality, albeit more florid and also more ragtag. At Rebecca Camhi Gallery, one of Athens’s established contemporary spaces, was a neon by Angelo Plessas (who recently made several Project Space works for artreview.com) that reads ‘electricity comes from another planet’, which it may as well do, for all the abstracted machinations that bring it to us (glimpsed only occasionally, as when we see oil pumping its way into the Gulf of Mexico). Ben Jones, installation shot at AMP booth. Courtesy AMP, Athens Most galleries showed a selection of artists, though one of the few galleries with a solo booth was the Athens-based AMP, who exhibited a fluoro 1980s installation by West Coast American artist Ben Jones. Eirene Efstathiou, winner of the last Deste prize (a biennial award to a Greek artist), was exhibiting Cold War Episodes 2 (2009): small groups of pale, almost monochrome paintings that looked like images taken from news bulletins on old curving television sets at Eleni Koroneou. Orestis Lambrou, Untitled (Architectural Views: Neoptolemos Michaelides), 2010, C-Print, 40 x 48cm, Courtesy APOTHEKE Meanwhile, at Nicosia's Apotheke Orestis Lambrou’s photographs of modernist buildings designed by the Cypriot architect Neoptolemos Michaelides, their uses adapted over the years, some environments overgrown with life, some deadened, were interesting additions to a genre of architectural photography admittedly already bursting at the seams. Best booth in this writer’s opinion was Rodeo, from Istanbul, who exhibited the work of three artists that circuited around issues of narrative, photography as document and the act of looking. A diptych of monochrome images from Christodoulos Panayiotou entitled La Fauteuil de Sarah Bernhardt (2008) faced each other, one depicting Bernhardt’s favoured place to sit in the rocks by the sea in Normandy, a seat-shape marking a visible absence, and the other of the ocean view from that point. Haris Epaminonda, Untitled #04 k/g, 2008, framed found images, dimensions variable, unique, courtesy Rodeo Haris Epaminonda’s display of found images that appear to have been taken from old publications of magazines like National Geographic, featuring images that construct a strange ethnographic narrative, marrying a cactus and a naked (tribal?) woman with a bowl on her head as phallic objects. Opposite these were Eftihis Patsourakis’s Holding Series (2008), which consisted of the kind of protective paper that is sometimes used to cover photographs in albums. Now a covering for nothing, all we can bear witness to is the folds and wrinkles, and then some tiny little hands that the artist has traced over in pencil. A high point reached, it was time to make it (slowly) across town to the Metaxourgio area (the edgy, dodgy one), and a party for the opening of Kunsthalle Athena, a new space run by Marina Fokidis. I thought it might be too late to go (11.30pm), but whenever I said such a thing I was met with an eye-roll and the words: ‘This is Athens’. They were right. The space, when I did arrive, was the very opposite to the airy white halls that the name suggests – it was a decrepit old building of many tiny rooms, someone said it was an old brothel, but who knows? (Incidentally, there were an alarming number of very busy working brothels in the area.) The exhibition, if it was that, was called The Bar and fell somewhere between installation and rave. People were excited by the project and worried by the economy. Kunsthalle Athena ostensibly wants to bind people together in this time, to provide a place to meet and be, rather than a gallery. Paper dresses, balloons, music, streamers, a cocktail bar, beetroot soup, posters, lights and videoworks featured, but I felt a bit of a stick in the mud making notes at a rave, and so I didn’t, as the exhibition/disco/bar went on into the night. Perhaps a debauched party is the right response to crisis after all. Better than an art fair. It was still going strong when I left, a little before 4am. Last one out turn the projectors off?