Installation “Seeking the Bubble Reputation”
“… Installation “Seeking the Bubble Reputation” is put together around a central axis, the sculpted wooden body; the body-eidolon. It operates as an index which objectifies, detractively representing the desired communication, fertile communication between “bodies”(beings and things) (a priori); but it also provides or will provide the cause for this fertile communication (a posteriori). In other words, I am constructing an index-work of genuine communication and this index will make communication possible…
…Beside, the index-work of communication is ignited by the communication it ignites –“circularity”. The object (work of art) becomes a “social agent” just as the “social agent” (artist-visitor) may respectively become an object . The object according to external theory remains “active” as a receptor in terms of its action vis-a-vis the others, independent of whether it actively responses or not (with movement or speech). Me- objects, toys-objects inseparable from the child’s self, are socially others but with “off stage” action. … Just as children or priests during rites of passage, I perform an activity, rubbing wooden-body with orbital finishing sander, aimed at causing “real physical interactions” between persons and things. It is not a symbolic action; it is real just as every rite or game with each idol or me-object. I withdraw from active action remaining a social agent off stage .
The work (finished or potential object) is not marked only in some “outside” or “inside”… it seeks movement between outside and inside, perhaps in a third space, the inside-out, Duchamp’s “Infra-slim”. The reduplication of external borders corresponds to internal reduplication. The “outermost” relevant boundary of the work, the exhibition area with its void and replete areas (persons, things, noises, sounds), follows the next boundary, that of the micro-workshop, with its empty and full fields (the smell of wood, dust and its “social skin” – me and visitor(s). All the while, it further approaches the center, the object-body-idol (with its continuities and gaps) there where imagination and emotion become activated to pursue the route beyond the visible boundary . ….The work suggests a route from the external to the internal form, and vice versa. As one literally and metaphorically goes through gaps and continuities, they participate in the ritual process that will bring them face to face with the essence and weight of their lost, embodied nature. Seeking the Bubble Reputation wishes to activate the long-forgotten human need for embodied communication, for coexistence and cohabitation. Avoiding the reproduction of ideas which refer solely to art (institutional critique, commercialization of art etc) it consciously endeavors to touch on existential ideas of a social undertone. Memory and history are two important tools for the ignition of dialogue. After all, memory offers “things” a second life. For memory to unfurl, to regain substance, it must borrow a body, a material body, and exist in space. Besides, direct communication of bodies undermines the spectacle, because of our amnesia and in-existence. The work opposes amnesia on multiple levels. It desires to engage the visitor on the level of memory and unchain him/her from narcissistic self-centeredness and self-consumption. The work-body borrows elements from Classicism, ancient civilization (void-continuity) and minimalism (cube, detraction, clarity, emphasis on the material ) akin to a “knight’s movement” . Through the archetypal and the collective , it attempts to touch the essence of things, life’s big and important things . Seeking the Bubble Reputation is an anxious attempt to articulate a space wherein bodies (material, immaterial, replete-empty, past-present) may converse, cooperate, coexist unmediated, in a new real (moral) code .”
Efi Spyrou
(Translation Despina Pirketti)