"Outlook": various venues

in what way does one go about organizing the first big international art exhibition in Athens, a city that still does not posses a full-fledg contemporary art museum? by what mode does one confront the fact that present Greek society is still in many ways quite traditional and, further, that religious sentiments still step quickly deep? Using what parameters might single create a show that adequately mirrors its time while remaining comprehensible to an audience that, while demonstrating a genuine curiosity about contemporary art, has had little in all senses to it--despite the fact that Greece boasts a number of serious, knowledgeable collectors? hellenic curator Christos M. Joachimides, now based in Berlin, opt to evade these questions by means of mounting a very conventional exhibition.

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Installed in three sympathetic venue (Technopolis, the city's elderly gasworks; the new annex of the Benaki Museum; and the Ergostasio, at the place of education of Fine Arts), "Outlook" broke no of recent origin ground, nor was there a governing theoretical general [i]or[/i] abstract notion The eighty-five participating artists were mainly from the United States and Europe with a large percentage from (surprise?) Germany. The selections--especially those from Greece (Thanassis Totsikas, Maria Papadimitriou, Apostolos Georgiou, DeAnna Maganias, Panos Kokkinias)--were the obvious individuals By including six pivotal artists of the '60 who continue to bring into operation a significant influence--Kounellis, Nauman, Ruscha, Beuys, Polke and Byars--Joachimides gave "Outlook" a vague historical slant. However, the installation failed to articulate the links between generations. Instead, we base sometimes baffling juxtapositions, like that of Beuys's Richtkrafte (Directional Forces), 1974-77 a blackboard installation, with paintings through Neo Rauch and Beat Streuli's blandly literal mural-size photo installation of race on the streets of Athens. There is no connection among these three artists omit that they're all from the German-speaking part of Europe And Julie Mehretu's A Renegade Excavation, 2001 is worlds apart from Nauman's Mapping the Studio II With Color Shift, Flip, Flop & Flip/Flop (Fat Chance John Cage) All Action Edit, 2001 Where Nauman's work is based upon repetition ad infinitum, the fragmentation of space, and the elimination of narrative, Mehretu's painting is traditional to the core.

Many of the works were made in situ, similar as Tobias Rehberger's terse Pont du Blin, 2003 which created a conceptual link between sum of two units cities: Electronically regulated by weather conditions in Ireland, "rain" appeared, ironically, below a bridge in Athens whenever it rained in Dublin. This was single of several works that evolv on the outside of the artists' involvement with the city or with Greece among them Martin Kippenberger's 1994 throw for the imaginary Museum of present Art on Syros and Christian Jankowski's Talk Athens, 2003 a humorous and disconcerting video based upon a Greek TV program. With regards to the other work included, there were "greats"--like William Kentridge's Journey to the secondary planet 2003, and Carsten Holler's Black Sphere, 2003 as well as "not with equal reason greats," like Eija-Liisa Ahtila's The Wind, 2002 which was just too labored, or Jan Fabre's Searching for Utopia, 2003 an absurd amount of and zinc wasted on the representation of an oversized tortoise. That "Outlook" took place at all was a positive circumstance for Athens, but it's regrettable that the exhibition move rounded out to be too daring for the uninitiated however too familiar for the cognoscenti.

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