I was in Athens last week, listening to a curator from Los Angeles as he attempted to tease out some apparent similarities between Salt Lake City, Utah, and the former East Germany. The occasion for such a creative comparison, courtesy of Paul Schimmel, was the opening of “In Between,” a joint exhibition of work by Georg Baselitz and Paul McCarthy, held at the George Economou Collection. (It’s the first time the two artists have been shown together in such a way.) Upstairs, one could see Utah-born McCarthy’s “Alpine Man,” a kinetic sculpture from 1992 depicting a man, pants around his ankles, tirelessly humping a large barrel. Downstairs, the artist’s “SC, ECK,” 2014, loomed — a mixed-media painting showing two nude figures hanging by nooses, one of whom has an erect penis built from a stuffed animal of Rafiki from “The Lion King.” Penises were everywhere, in fact: Baselitz had his own version in “P.D. Stengel,” 1963, in which the phallus looks more like a bent-necked, bashful swan. All of these erections were countered by procreation’s opposite number, Death: a life-sized, hyper-realistic self-portrait by McCarthy, showing him lying, in a moment of rare beardlessness, on a table, as if on a mortuary slab; some skulls and a seemingly expired eagle from Baselitz. To make matters weirder, Baselitz and McCarthy were at the Collection’s public exhibition space for their artists’ talk — a sort of cheery, mutual love-fest, albeit an enlightening one — in the midst of Greece’s continuing financial meltdown.The week I was there, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras hinted at a debt deal, then said it was a no-go, finally putting the terms to a public referendum to be held in early July. Days after I returned to New York banks were abruptly closed, with strict limits put on daily withdrawals. Tsipras railed against the terms imposed on Greece, which would have affected everything from the retirement age to taxes on the nation’s islands; more recently, his government suggested they’d be willing to accede to those terms in return for an additional bailout, referendum or not. Germany’s Angela Merkel has flatly rejected that notion, insisting on learning the results of the public referendum before any further negotiations with Greece. (If you’re interested in reading more, start here, or here, or with any number of commentators better versed than I am on all of this.)Greeks certainly have a lot more pressing things to worry about right now than, say, the new Kim Gordon show at the Benaki Museum in Athens, but hey: Political and economic chaos aside, and as superfluous as it may seem in the current climate, there’s a surprising amount of art to see in the city right now, as well as on the nearby island of Hydra. (I’ll play the Thomas Friedman card here and share that I spoke with at least one bartender who seemed unconcerned about the crisis, and assured me that, regardless of what happens, Greeks know how to party). Besides “In Between” at the Economou Collection, sited in the suburbs outside of the city center, there is an array of other exhibitions, a good number of them supported by the Deste Foundation, launched by Dakis Joannou in 1983.Let’s start with the best of the bunch: “Ametria,” organized by Deste but hosted at the Benaki Museum’s outpost on Pireos Street. It includes dozens of artists from wildly different eras, and was supposedly born from “an idea” by Roberto Cuoghi. I would love to see what that napkin sketch looked like, because I can’t recall a more wonderfully deranged and overloaded show, one that pushes exhibition design to its logical (and illogical) extremes. A gallery attendant offered me a map when I entered, along with a gentle warning that “Ametria” is organized “like a labryinth.” The map in question made the schematic to Christopher Williams’s MoMA show look intuitive. Artworks are hung on monolithic black plinths suspended from the ceiling. The lights are down waaaaaay low. “Ametria” starts with a confounding slew of Athenian maps, all tiny notations and perfectionist draftsmanship, and then moves into a suite of work that puts a similar kind of cramped, minute detail to more aesthetic use: violent phantasmagorias by Ralf Ziervogel; intricate collages by Elliot Hundley; proudly abrasive, political drawings by Dominic McGill. Just as things start to settle, you round the corner and there’s a wall of maritime-themed works from the early 19th century, as well as a selection of 18th- and 19th-century Grecian textiles (with a much more recent offering by Issey Miyake slipped in).From there, the juxtapositions get more strikingly free-form, as if the curators were given open access to niche collections owned by a dozen very disparate eccentrics. A vitrine holds an elegant metal collar with a chain attached to it, exuding a vague bondage vibe; it turns out to be a “traditional 19th century ex voto for the cure of mental illness.” Above it there’s a contemporary drawing by Fredrich Kunath, depicting a floral spray above hand-drawn text: “My love for you is 98% pure. But the 2% that remains has fried the circuits in my brain.” I hear you, Fredrich! How else but fried to feel when confronted by a Brian Chippendale painting of cartoon freaks running away from a burning house, which stares at a bloody 1794 depiction of the “Last Judgment”? Or an 18th-century marble fountain head from the Cycladic Islands that hangs near a bulky 2002 installation by Gregor Schneider — a sort of non-descript structure with a door that you’re probably not allowed to open, but who knows, and in any case there aren’t any guards to stop you from doing so, or maybe the guards have gotten lost somewhere else in the labyrinth weeks ago. My favorite touch, and one that exemplifies this exhibition’s aggressively off-centered attitude: A large drawing of a woman’s face by Jim Shaw, which is hung on a wall, mostly obscured by the aforementioned black-plinths-hung-from-the-ceiling. (You can walk behind the plinths if you squish a bit, but then you’re so close to the Shaw that it’s basically impossible to look at.) “Ametria” is uneven and a bit infuriating, but in an ultimately productive way. From now on, any exhibition that doesn’t manage to include both towering chocolate sculptures by Terence Koh and pilgrim tokens from the 6th century is going to seem positively vanilla.Over at the Benaki Museum’s main building there’s another Deste-organized show that’s pretty much the opposite in terms of inventiveness and eclecticism. Kim Gordon’s “Design Office: Noise Name Paintings And Sculptures Of Rock Bands That Are Broken Up” is a useless experience, except as further evidence that Gordon should stick to what she’s great at (making music) rather than the embarrassing alternative (painterly dilettantism that here essentially comes down to band names — Hair Police, Sickness — written in sloppy black letters on spare white surfaces, as predictable as if Adobe Creative Suite suddenly offered a “splattery crustpunk” font). In addition to the paintings there are “sculptures,” which are similar canvases crumpled up and solidified with Aqua-Resin, left to lie on the floor like drawing-board ideas that Gordon should have rejected entirely. One of these, dedicated to the late Syd Barrett, is randomly placed on the second floor of the museum, in a room otherwise occupied by religious paintings, a sad shadow of the interdisciplinary fervor that animates “Ametria.” Thankfully, there’s another show a short walk away that’s good enough to wash the proverbial aftertaste of this junk out of your mouth. “Terrapolis,” an exhibition of mostly outdoor sculpture (and some videos) in the gardens of the French School at Athens, is supported by NEON, a non-profit initiated by collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos. The show is co-curated by Iwona Blazwick of Whitechapel Gallery in London; it’s a wide-ranging group effort that purports to “explore myth, drama, metamorphoses, and bioethics.” One of the most striking, and timely, pieces is Allora & Calzadilla’s “Hope Hippo,” an enormous sleeping animal composed of polystyrene, mud, plaster, and other materials, upon which a volunteer sits, casually reading the newspaper. (Whenever the reader chances upon a story about “social injustice,” they let loose with a piercing bleat on a whistle.) The public sculpture here ranges from the absurd and whimsical — a 21-foot-tall inflatable depicting ’80s British rapper Betty Boo, by Anthea Hamilton and Nicolas Byrne — to the spare and conceptual (a text-piece by Richard Long derived from a South African walk). Greek artist Athanasios Argianas, now based in London, has a handful of wonderfully spare sculptures that achieve real magic with minimal materials: brass railings, mussel shells, copper wires, cast-bronze hats. Another stunner is Estonian artist Katia Novitskova’s fantastic, tucked-away “Approximation (Toucan),” 2014, a supersized digital print-on-aluminum of the head of the titular exotic bird, which seems literally Photoshopped into the physical garden landscape. From Athens I took a two-hour ferry ride to the island of Hydra. The boat was called the Flyingcat, appropriate considering that Hydra is essentially a floating feline dictatorship, with legions of quasi-domesticated street cats stalking its alleyways. The long arm of Deste reaches here as well: The foundation runs an off-site project space in a former slaughterhouse a short walk from the main port. This year’s commission is with New York artist Paul Chan. It’s essentially a reprise of his Huge Boss Prize exhibition at the Guggenheim last year — an installation of cement-filled shoes connected to enigmatic powercords, a fan-powered sculpture on the roof that admittedly is much more stirring against an impossibly blue Grecian backdrop than it is in a white cube context. The former exhibition had a publishing project at its heart (“New Lovers,” a series of erotic novellas written by women), and the Hydra show involves a new translation of Plato’s “Hippias Minor,” which toys with the semantic gap between the words “lying” and “cunning.” The show launched about a week before I arrived on the island. Chan evidently had the ambition of turning the opening night dinner into a modern-day Greek symposium. An attendant at the slaughterhouse informed me that it didn’t quite get off the ground: No one, surprisingly, was drunk enough.A slightly scrappier, and arguably more interesting, exhibition is also on view in Hydra, staged in a former schoolhouse under the curation of Dmitris Antonitsis. (You reach the space by ascending a steep road colloquially known as Donkey Shit Alley, for obvious reasons.) Antonitsis has been hosting a yearly group show here for the past 16 years; he’s also a working artist, with pieces currently on view in a pop-up iteration of the Family Business gallery at the Benaki Museum’s Pireos Street location. This year’s theme is “Genuine Fake,” and the exhibition includes work by everyone from Dash Snow to Robert Gober, Gabriel Orozco, Eric Doeringer, Jane Kaplowitz, and others, all of it prodding at the line between reality and artificiality. Chatting over a portside drink at the Pirate Bar, Antonitsis explained the genesis of his Hydra School Project: “It’s a bubble here,” he said, “both an island-bubble and an art-bubble... and I’m very happy to be in it.” His annual exhibition was previously underwritten by Bang & Olufsen; it’s now supported by NEON. Antonitsis’s own visual arts career was given a significant bump in 1998 by Dakis Joannou, who acquired works and included him in a survey alongside the likes of Matthew Barney and Pipilotti Rist. He reflected on the heady Grecian climate of over a decade ago — “there was an optimism among artists that something could happen,” he said, between the Deste Foundation and the opening of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. “Right now [with the crisis], it’s exactly the opposite from the year 2000,” he admitted. “The government has curbed a lot of funding — most of the money of the Ministry of Culture goes toward antiquities. So it’s a struggle. Artists who are Athens-based have a very difficult time making ends meet. A lot of very promising, cool galleries closed in the past five years —and at the same time the price of production materials have gone up. But you should go on doing what you do: a form of resistance to whatever’s happening.” Ultimately, despite the crisis, Antonitsis seemed hopeful. “It’s really interesting that right now a tourist in Greece can see all of these shows,” he said. “We’re in the news for this terrible socio-economic and political situation, but at the same time you see little cactus flowers blossoming around.”
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