Apostolis Artinos: Your recent work A Transfer, Maria, is dominated by the gesture of weaving. To me, weaving has always been a unique gesture, an arresting moment in time, a work that endures in time and exhausts it with its silence, its monotonous repetitiveness. And if in Kerameikos the reference is to the mantle of Athens, what came to me was the fabric of Penelope; Penelope weaving her awaiting, the secret silence of her yearning. The loom interweaves death with life, desire with its eager expectation, as the radical nature of death is transferred to the thread of life: rootings of the negative, all of these, that manifest desire...
This reception of tombstones, as you put it in your text, the mortal who comes out to meet the deceased, addressing the other and gesturing to the other, the Other of death that does not respond but stops at the silence of his name. While the mortal on these tombstones looks the deceased in the eyes, the deceased is looking away; this unlocking gaze of the dead in our dreams, as Lacan puts it. And weaving, the handiwork of this pain, the awaiting, a ceaseless task of mourning. The work of your two girls under the olive trees, with one weaving and the other unpicking the same fabric, the same life, both faced with this work, of death again, as you address the Other, the Outside, within time, within the patience of time and while this other is already elsewhere.
Maria Loizidou: The choice of this practice among others in my entire work was given to me as a gift by the curator of the exhibition, Syrago Tsiara. Each choice enables a freedom and, as she notes, each choice entails an arbitrariness. As such, it must resist the references that lead it away from its intentions. Penelope uses unpicking as a ruse to save her from making a choice. Her destiny links man to another condition, a mild form of violence that points to poor and makeshift mechanisms of dealing with it. This truth in the myth of Penelope, always associated with the vulnerable and oppressed side of humanity, and it is not an exclusively female trait, is something I detest. I am glad it has come up in our discussion, because it has a cathartic effect on me, too.
The gesture of weaving is directly associated with time and is mainly linked to life, to one's determination to survive. It has the attributes of an act with no beginning or end, a shift from the 'I' to the other so that we can connect to the world. The site of Kerameikos is dominated by absolute silence and the meaning of loss; loss as a truth that unites us. Our persistence for life sets conditions that defy toil and demythicize "creation" using as a means our allotted time. The material is thus replaced by toil in the manifestation of the act that keeps us alert towards life itself. The toil of the two persons (they are not always girls...) is addressed to the Other, to the Outside, within time, within the patience of time, and this Other is already elsewhere, as you say; is where you are led. You try to delay in every way you can what you have, and whose significance you suspect. Our gaze focuses on the Other, we are inevitably depending on him and we seek his attention to our signifying course from the past to the present, to a perspective that is his.
AA: You cited two concepts which, to me, characterise not only the human condition but also the truth of this work. You spoke of an act, an act of alertness which turns us towards the Other and constitutes our political horizon. Only such an act can be called an Act. An Act that awakens the Other and traces his outline in my field, makes him visible in his—always fantastic—manifestations. Yet it is an awakening that also asserts my responsible attitude, my responsibility towards the Other, this spectral being on which I inscribe the names of all my expectations. I said that the Other is traced in my horizon and I mean that he is inscribed on my soul as a trauma, a loss which sometimes becomes a loss of the self. The trace is always a trace of absence. You too referred to this loss as a truth that unites us. So what constitutes us is the loss of the Other, his trace - a term I like a lot, as you can see, but which also brings us back not only to Kerameikos, whose truth we can never evade, but to the very idea of the work, the artwork; it is a work without a referent, and precisely because of its non-referentiality it makes up its own lingual character. The language of Art shares something with the language of psychoanalysis: they cannot be named, articulated within the reality of speech, but can only be found in the reality of their loss. Lacan, a name that will keep recurring in our conversation, puts the language of psychoanalysis on the same level as that of Art because the "objects" of both are fantasies which try to heal a loss. I remember now those works with the little paper sculptures you made in order to have them photographed and then destroyed immediately. I understand this destruction as a unique gesture of generosity, for all the above reasons.
ML: You cannot remember the sculptures. As objects, they are long gone. You remember their images; images which, like ghosts, enable you to track down the Other. But if you do remember the sculptures, we shall be forced to resort to Jensen's Pompeian Gradiva and the interpretation of Freud. This series of Visages effacées were "busts" made with an economy of gesture and time, almost with a single stroke, so as to be given a minimum of reference and be ultimately imprinted as an image. They were executed on paper as quickly as possible for their minimised time to multiply their potential features whose condensed format annulled the clarity of the form. On the other hand, the way in which they were framed when they were photographed is what rendered them portraits of heroic figures of an otherwise major importance, for all their particularity. Besides, their minimal materiality offsets the intention of their posing. As objects they are no longer with us. Loss determines the character of their rendering. It comes as an act within the act. I erase something from what I am going to lose, anyway. Destruction refers to an extreme act that mainly maintains the violence. It dominates over the mood and imposes itself on the outcome. Withdrawal is a mild move that suggests, in this particular case, ceding space to what emerges and takes over the leading role. The act of erasing stimulates the memory and tries to restore the form. Erasing means liberating the Other so that he can reappear "more beautiful". So this delirium of erasing I used heavily in rendering the works in the Kerameikos Museum enables a new attempt at redefining the Other, but also an erasure which the Other mockingly appropriates to the extent that it enables also the act of his restoration. The loss as part of the process of making the work has a lot in common with the process of psychoanalysis. The hero I remember from the image is none other than the person on the couch who would rather lose a finger than utter what he cannot find the words for, anyway, but still wants to articulate them.
ΑΑ: This minimised time you mentioned is also the time of an instantaneous impression, of a mental record, of a minimal representation that has barely preserved the trace of the Other; it is also what was preserved by the photos of the Visages effacées. The relief is lost, but what the image has preserved of it is also what constitutes the image. The image is always a cryptonymy, a lingual memory. It is not a memory of the thing—and we must come back to discussing this notion of the Thing in your work—but of the language of the Thing. What the image preserves, if anything is preserved—and I do not mean just the image of the photograph but the artwork, more generally—is the erased trace exactly as you describe it: as an act of erasing and highlighting. The work is a silence, this silence of the world. Adorno spoke of the muteness of art, of the void at its core which only emits silence; but it is a cosmic silence, which contains all the noise of the stars. The minimal materiality of these works —which can be seen in some of your other series as well, as in the paper sculptures, the Cartographies or the Imaginary creatures— is what is left by the vertigo of this instantaneous conception: what can withstand it. Figures whose materiality, this fragile fineness and whiteness of paper, betrays the lingual dematerialisation they have undergone. Creatures that were tested by the language that shaped them and now acquire a presence through the loss of the language, their own loss, their own triumph, their own Nekyia. Mere memories of themselves. We are always astounded by this orphaned trace, this emaciated form; the remnant of the ultimate trial, all that's left, the minimum—and this minimum is already too much.
ML: Each process of understanding liberates us from the materiality of things. Understanding is mainly an occasion for abstracting, removing, deleting or suppressing. I do not always understand what I am doing and I do not always do what I understand. In a rush to convey the whole, afraid of losing it, I exhaust the potential of my material and I invest it with all my energy. For these paper sculptures that fascinate you I start working as a statue maker. I build them up with clay, then I make their mould in plaster, and finally I rebuild their form in plaster again; over this I place the paper in layers, adjusting the density of the material to suit the practical needs of the final layout of the work. The layering process is repeated several times for each piece. I can make ten, twenty or more layered surfaces, adjusting the density of the material, before going back and arranging all the layers for the final outcome. Just like an onion, whose weak and transparent outer layers are fixed around a centre, the layers of paper are set around a core. This is the meaning I ascribe to them: the activation of the core which they form and are formed around. The transparency of the material makes this space visible, and the fissures glorify it and allow it to take the leading role. Each layer has a catalytic effect on the trace, weakening its materiality while promoting its understanding, the understanding that develops between us through it until I am finally left alone to face the Other. The paradox of a rendering aimed at the minimum. How much is this minimum? And how crucially clinical can this minimising gesture be considered? A short time ago I saw AGLAE at the Louvre's labs: the instrument that tracks down the activated tension of an object. At the moment it is read and registered at a specific point of the object, the energy goes down to zero! This is how I understand the gesture of a maker of things. The imaginary beings and the entire series of Cartographies are renamed as works once they are understood by us; and this understanding minimises their materiality. The precision of the gesture is what registers the “muteness of art” and converges with understanding. A little less would nullify the work into an object; a little more would instantly make it garrulous.
ΑΑ: What you say is very interesting—this strange pattern, as you call it, of accumulation and minimisation. Understandability, as you describe it, rests on its layers; layers which track down and identify the trace of the Thing, not in its microscopic diagnosis, as Baudrillard would have it, but in the barely visible, the minimum of visibility, what is dimly perceptible under the layers of our own anxiety. So the form does not come to light but retires within its folds and their endless manifestations, into an imperceptibility that alludes to language instead of depicting it; this minimal trace which is barely visible in Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece. Things are not revealed but withdraw into language, they are tried, they invert their existence. We cannot break open the shell of things, but we can conceal them. Things look alike as they exit towards their transubstantiation; a reformatory moment that dictates them at the same time as it releases them. In psychoanalysis, as in Art, the object is always a fantasy, an object surrounded by the loss of the self. There remains only a mark, this crack that enlivens your relief, a found spot which is barely accessible to the gaze. I say 'gaze', not 'vision'. Materiality will always be the problem, this impenetrability of things, their granite-like character but also the field of their distortion, where the form becomes animated, where this trace emerges which all the layers of our understanding can never suppress. So something resists in these sculptures, something is dimly visible, and this something becomes the reason of their self. Just like these cracks in the unconscious, which outline also the trace of the Real. I understand the tension of this moment, the attraction of this encounter, the madness of your decision on where to channel this flow; the control of its tension, this unconscious dialogue with nothing, with the ever-elusive matter. I say I understand, but I would like your own testimony about the culmination of this decision about there the lingual tension in the work will lead. The objects of loss, these fragile forms of your works—how do they remain forms of loss instead of lost forms? The transparency of the material can also become its invisibility. I want the tension of this borderline, your analytical judgment.
ML: My own judgment is framed by the act, no matter how reflectively it unfolds. And the act itself begins to interest us as soon as it leaves traces of transparency, not out of smugness for its effect but because its significance starts immediately after that, with all it puts forward. Describing the understanding is to describe the construction. Indeed, this is where the language of art shares something with that of psychoanalysis: neither can be named, articulated within the reality of speech, but are only found in the reality of their loss, as you said. As I build I am living, and I can only be a witness to my own world. The world of the work is different—and we are all together in that world, perceiving it through our senses, through the act of translating a perceptible material. The trace lies between the uncertain vision and the final completion of the thing. If sometimes we fail to approach it, this is due exclusively to the trace. The first impression from the trace starts the interpretation and leads to imagination. And imagination liberates the human in us, for the collective experience of a social deposition of events—a practice referred to by Nicolas Bourriaud, which leads us to perceive the meaning of the work only through its relation to man. I do not attempt to become a witness to this process, which I might well miss, but to work for it to become a witness to the world. This is where the task of self-awareness, as defined by Foucault, begins, and we can examine it as such.
AA: It is precisely this identification with the act I had in mind, your integration into the process. An e-motion that channels you into the work, the motion of the work. This spectral environment between vision and the thing, as you say, that triggers also its spectral traces, its ambiguous materiality. A minimal, solely personal contribution from the spectrum of the script, when the text writes me as I compose it, this unfathomable and indomitable textualisation it has in store for me. We are within the symptom, which speaks through us. So we cannot have an objective view of the process save, perhaps, in the gaps of this process: in its repressions and in our resistances; in those parentheses which may not be inscribed in the work but may still constitute a test—a test of us and a test of the process itself. This is why, to put it differently, I say that while we are "making" we are witnesses to the work and to our self; we are part of the momentum of the work, of its trial, of the ineffable it imposes. The objectivity of the work, its collective use, is not the world of the work; the work belongs inescapably to its secret threshold, the unthinkable also triggered here by the prerogative of its maker. But then we may be saying the same thing with different words.
ML: I get that! I am only wondering whether we are witnesses of either the work or our self while we are "making". When I speak of the testimony of my own world I am referring to a parallel world, an everyday reality. The process of constructing is one without duration or measure, I dare say without reference. The maker's prerogative is none other than the tangibility, the visual recognition. The work is activated if it moves and stimulates. I am thinking of something similar to what people believed in the 19th century: activated by the viewer's gaze, the thing lights up to liberate its image. It is this kind of collective use I am talking about, the eternal relationship.
AA: We could exhaust ourselves talking about this for hours. Thinking aloud, it is my impression that language represents the dynamics of forms but also their humiliation, their frustration. Language only has hybrid forms, which dwindle almost as soon as they are born; morphs that manifest themselves as they are uttered and deposit their trace on the echo of their response. Just like our own utterances here are reflected in the other's language: mine in the horizon of your perception, yours in the field of my failing, and those of both of us in the horizon of that elusive other, our potential reader. What I am saying is that what salvages the forms—if they can be salvaged at all, amidst the devastation of language—is their lingual memory, their trace as it is faintly visible in the nascent work. The forms are not located in the present tense of their utterance but in the past tense of their future, i.e. in the promise of the gesture that spawned them, which will always be a gesture of loss and mourning. It's this loss of space that forces the mannequins in your work to climb up the wall of the old town of Nicosia and devote themselves to the horizon of their expectations. Indeed, your title, Landscape of the Other, a pun on Lacan's concept, exacerbates its lingual roots. I don't know if I am making myself clear, but what I am trying to say is that the forms in the works are coming from elsewhere, from the 'elsewhere' of a lingual failing which is the locus of our desires, our failed desires—and yes, this is the place of the Other.
ML:Landscape of the Other was created when Nicosia and the whole of Cyprus had no passages, no openings to the other side for anyone, with or without passports. The suspended structure with the mannequins and the ladders is awaiting the encounter with the other. The other, distant yet close enough to be heard, smelt or touched if you extend your hand, retreats to remain a trace even today, when you are physically closer to him. The forbidden appropriation of the familiar disorients us, and our negligible geographical distance from the other acquires multiple meanings, just as described by Lacan and elaborated by the more recent psychoanalytical thinking. I grew up with our parents' tales about how they could hear in Kerynia the roosters' cries from the seaside towns of Turkey. A sweet story, yet one associated with the fear of the other. And when I returned to Cyprus and had my first studio on the Green Line, I was maddened by the cats that were free to roam along the rooftops, to come and go in mysterious ways. So in that building, which enabled me occasionally to climb up between the two poles—of here and there, of this and the other, of south and north, as we say—the horizon projects also the place of our desire. The same horizon as that which defines the dreams and expectations of childhood, the marginal confines of our land which opens up unreservedly to the entire world. This horizon is the source of the forms of our desires, our dreams, our fears and our nightmare. The trauma significates the horizon and hinders the abstractive capacity of an eternal condition. It is this that Landscape of the Other is fighting against, awaiting to be redefined through the evolution of history at this moment, today, when fear re-determines our resilience.
AA: Between gods and demons then, Maria, in these oscillations of the soul and till the end. I thank you for the privilege of this discussion which, although not inconclusive, does entail a commitment. Lacan urges us to heed such commitments, such arresting durations and such persistent enquiries which do not lead to mutual understanding but push us deeper into our fundamental questions and anxieties. For the privilege, then, of this indomitable anxiety that now yearns for—what else?—the resumption of this conversation.
ML: I'll hold you to this promise, Apostolis, and conclude with your own words which I believe describe the experience of this discussion: what the two of us are doing here is talk not about the works but onthe works, which become our sole possibility to reflect...
NOTE: This is an excerpt from a long discussion between Apostolis Artinos and Maria Loizidou. The entire text can be accessed on http://leximata.blogspot.com/2015/12/blog-post.html
Translation: Tony Moser