15.4-6.5.2010

Wunderkammer, Angelos Antonopoulos

Curator: Iris Criticou

Our memory would serve us not at all
were it entirely faithful.
Paul Valéry

Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley

The title Wunderkammer lends itself to the major works of the last few years by Angelos Antonopoulos presented at TAF – less in the form of a retrospective exhibition and more as a need to display the credentials of a particular progress; not so much a thematic umbrella as a conceptual shell: it functions as an ambiguous and interactive artistic environment, consisting of emblematic self-contained wall-hung and three-dimensional works from the past few years, which are displayed out for the viewer as a transcendental microcosm of multiple ideas, notes and experimentations where the artist’s own memories and experiences are inscribed in assiduous juxtaposition. The gaze wanders, seeking to investigate Antonopoulos’s individual literal and conceptual space, and mainly, to partake of the process that sees his own hand behind his conversion to a new self-containment.

The Room of Wonder, known also as Cabinet of Curiosities, Cabinet des Curiosités or Wunderkammer – a term which is enlisted here as the title of the exhibition, a “box” containing pansophia - all known wisdom, is identified with the secluded architectural entities of the Renaissance, such as the studiolo, guardaroba, tribuna and galeria, or most commonly as a Cabinet of curiosities and remembrances, as it was eloquently described by historians; crammed full of often fragmentary natural or artificial curiosities, a miscellany of objects conceived during the late Renaissance as the ideal visualisation of the concept of a “collection” and for preserving far-flung encyclopaedic knowledge, considered by its enthusiastic supporters as the continuation of philosophical thought as promulgated by renowned representatives of the Ancient Greek world, such as Aristotle or Pliny the Elder: the earliest components of a cognitive group, a collection based on a consolidated encyclopaedic view, were placed within a classically-influenced, tangible architectural frame, part alchemist’s chamber and part monument to didacticism, part utilitarian, public-benefit foundation and part den-like hideaway, allowing for a new form of reference, observation and experimentation. 1

In a Cabinet of Curiosities, the world was projected in concentrated and associated images, an ossuary, as the resting place for a motley miscellany transformed into a theatre of living existence and constituted a dominant component of the desire to gather treasures: crumbling shells from far-flung oceans; roots and coral branches; rare exotic plants and flowers; miniature busts and Chinese porcelain tea-pots; medals dulled by time and pottery shards; intaglios; masks and carved ivories, salamanders and heads of monkeys; taxidermically pickled monsters and human bones; rare editions and religious relics or vessels; eastern slippers with turned-up toes and Indian arrows, wax likenesses and multicultural detritus; all cacophonously chatted amongst themselves and with the spectator. According to many scholars, the initial purpose of all this collecting activity was an urge to understand nature, a motivation that propelled the endless classification and cataloguing of objects and natural finds. Sixteenth and seventeenth century collectors had different motivations and quandaries from those of our time; they depended to a very large extent on the philosophical precepts of their own age, and developed strategies that assisted them in systematically categorising the objects in their collections. In most instances, those objects were presented in an organised manner, even though the criteria for such order were mainly very subjective. Beyond their potential variations, these varying strategies adopted by collectors allowed them mainly to apply some sort of order to the outside natural world. Collectors such as the renowned John Tradescant (as witnessed by Georg Christoph Stirn, 1638), utilised as their main criterion for organisation the differentiation between miracles of nature (naturalia) and the works of man (artificialia). However, what remains particularly interesting for a modern historian is the fact that Tradescant showed in a succinct manner that, for the collector himself, the precise form of evidence, whether natural or artificial or imaginary, did not constitute a priority: within the framework of recorded knowledge, all sorts of data gained equivalent weight, seen as part of the sum of all knowledge, and the detailed catalogue of his collection bears witness that the boundaries of the desire to gain knowledge and tangible memory could be extended without limit, including objects from the sphere of reality as well as others from the sphere of myth. 2

A comparison of these private sanctums with treasure vaults, spontaneous microcosms and theatres of the absurd, was based on their particular relationship with the vision of the eccentric collector. Whoever has ever read a description of a Wunderkammer, will recognise the folly of locating the origin of the Museum here, and will sense the utter incompatibility of its selection of objects and its system of classification with that of a contemporary Museum: according to Douglas Crimp, “this late Renaissance type of collection, did not evolve into the modern museum. Rather it was dispersed; its sole relation to present-day collections is that certain of its “rarities” eventually found their way into our museums of natural history, of ethnography, of decorative arts, of arms and armor, of history … even in some cases our museums of art”. 3 However, the microcosms of these objects, which revolve around the visualizations of the Self, create the familiar web of a self-contained environment, “Whether in the shape of a Victorian winter garden, an electric train layout, or a mere three-inch plastic dome with snow softly settling inside”, according to David Gelernter, “They show you patterns and help you make discoveries that you’d never have come across otherwise” (David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds).

When we encounter the microcosms of the life of Angelos Antonopoulos, the concise Wunderkammer of his multi-year progresses (which in turn seeks the same fluidity between the mental and creative processing of reality and the verisimilitude of his unknown private myth), comprised of natural found objects and of invented objects constructed, in most instances, from humble materials, placed at specific points, which comprise stations along the wall-hung autobiographical charts that constitute the main body of the exhibition; the gaze recalls the memory of those objects, in a manner prescribed by the mediaeval philosopher Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141): “The philosopher knows only the significance of words, but the significance of things is far more excellent than that of words, because the latter was established by usage, but nature dictated the former. The latter is the voice of man, the former the voice of God speaking to man. The latter, once uttered, perishes; the former, once created, subsists.”

What is the nature of these tiny filings of existence that run through the oeuvre of Antonopoulos? The space is dominated with a floor plan of his family dinner table, already set. Memories are classified and protected in oversize boxes/display cases, containing family portraits and suffering saints; perishable, ephemeral heirlooms and their embossed version; familiar childhood toys, dismembered Barbie dolls and the ghosts of furniture; casts of the visible and the aura of the invisible, which gain different nuances through Angelopoulos’s “cartography”.

Following the progress of many years, the artist sought the energy symbols of the human existence (triangle, pyramid, snake, spiral, foot/funnel and so forth), in the anguished discourse of the perishable with the imperishable, focusing on the human unit perceived as a receptacle (collector, a donor and transporter of goods and emotions), suspended between the chthonic Earth and the transparent Universe, the works in the exhibition, mostly large in size, provide a late sanctum that permits visitors: the open cabinet of his private memories.

The dining table of 2001, where Antonopoulos’s four-member family is encountered at the instant of the painting process, introduces a new period, where family and home constitute a source of inspiration and energy for the artist, and simultaneously form a flexible protective cocoon from the outside world. In the remaining works in this group, Antonopoulos’s world develops at times in radiating lines, while, at other times, in protected fields / boxes, where objects are placed, while the concise narrative in each piece, where the linear element is quite strong, becomes easier to perceive through the use of industrial design and perspective. The precious element of home recurs frequently, conversing with contradictory paltry (cigarette packet foil) and fragile or flexible obvious materials (netting, plaster, metal constructions etc.). Certain of the later significant works by Antonopoulos occurred within that same concept of a box, and are shown in the exhibition, such as a piece dedicated to Penelope Delta (renowned Greek author) – a cabinet of remembrance that is a monument to her unread writings, and includes the artist’s first self-portrait - boxes derived from the Desmoiselles d’ Avignon, or an autobiographical diptych “Birthplace A and B”, where the charted landscapes of memory, in Athens and elsewhere, encounter and discourse with the emotional fields of an intimate private map. These are followed by a portrait for two (the artist and his wife), a portrait of N.P. and a grouping about the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, where Antonopoulos mainly deals with the suffering of a body through time, in a manner commensurate with that of his small portraits of dismembered women / toys, which, by discarding the title of model of beauty (objects which we are fond of, but which become repulsive), gain new nuances. The same world, from the piece – anatomy lesson schematic about the National Opera as the Big Sleep (an installation for the Municipal Art Gallery of Kalamata with the mould of an obviously absent armchair out of plaster) and the hybrid three-dimensional form made out of foam, or the small incendiary universe, where ideas and objects are expelled towards all sorts of different directions, lingers between reality and imagination, utilising shapes that refer to reality, while overcoming purely figurative elements, abandoning the realm of realism and seeking “the idea” of a magical object that will allow the work “to pass to another property”, where “the limits of the possible are enlarged and the real appears more bizarre than the imagined… the Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever …”. 4

Discussing collective memory, with commencing with a contemporary piece by Mark Dion, which also refers to the concepts of collection and classification, juxtaposing miscellaneous objects from the past and the present in curiosity cabinets and display bookcases, Colin Renfrew, Professor of Archaeology, noted that “certain particular objects that belonged to primitive societies were charged with the power of evocation. In the same way that these objects can narrate true stories, after they are correlated and exhibited, they gain a central role in the structure of the collective memory of their society. The same holds true for monuments: several archaeologists recently agreed”, continues Renfrew, “that the shape of a landscape is connected to marks of human activity, including monuments, which in one sense are none other than the resting places of collective memory”. 5

According to Susan Stewart, on the other hand (in On Longing, p. 151), in contrast to the desire to gain souvenirs, the reverential collection of memory offers “example rather than sample, metaphor rather than metonymy. The collection does not displace attention to the past; rather, the past is at the service of the collection, for whereas the souvenir lends authenticity to the past, the past lends authenticity to the collection. The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure, which is possible because of its ahistoricism. The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s world”.

The works of Angelos Antonopoulos, who still continues, as ever, as he stresses “to function as an incurable researcher and inventor”, formulate small-scale private landscapes based on autobiographical notes on human activity and constitute resting places both for the artist’s remembrances and for the spectator’s gaze. Passages of experience and time, proposed as enclosed three-dimensional self-sufficiencies, transformed into the present tense of an exhaustive testimony in the form of consecutive cabinets of unknown miracles and remembrances, where human, distressed perseverance replaces all things exotic. Antonopoulos’s Wunderkammer is a suspended saga of familiar everyday existence, a white Chamber of Miracles, boxed up in the Court of Miracles of a deconstructed Athens, and constitutes, in my opinion, our most mature insight into the artist’s self and the world that surrounds him.