Stephen J. Williams

Month: December 2006

  • The risk-free ‘art’ of Kon Dimopoulos

    The general flavour of reporting about the failure of Konstantin Dimopoulos’s tree-painting project in Melbourne was sympathetic. The Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt took at a swipe at the waste of public monies. Aside from that, it was Victorian politician Mary Delahunty who took most of the ‘blame’ dished out in public over the failed plan.

    Dimopoulos came to Australia from New Zealand in 2004, and calls himself a “public artist”. This is the kind of heroic claim that should immediately make our ears prick up. I think, considering what is at stake, we might be entitled to a definition of what a “public artist” is. Most of Dimopoulos’s work in the past has been, in type and character, distinctly ordinary: paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, and a few pieces that have been placed in spaces that, on the face of it, appear to be accessible to the ‘public’.

    The language that Dimopoulos gathers around his project assures us that ‘Sacred Grove’ is no mere work of art: it is an “art action”. Other kinds of art—painting canvases, writing books, composing music, and so on—are the inactive arts: the arts that do nothing, do not get up out of their armchairs and go marching in the streets.

    Dimopoulos leaves visitors to his web site in no doubt that painting trees blue is not just a magical aesthetic experience, but one that will help to prevent the de-afforestation of the planet. In this way, he wraps himself and the ‘Sacred Grove’ project in the pure intentions of Gaia. This is what the [2006] web site said:

    Sacredgrove—the blue forest is a public art installation by conceptual artist Konstantin Dimopoulos. Sacredgrove is a global afforestation art action using art to highlight trees as sculptural forms, and the need to replenish the world’s trees.

    When the Melbourne City Council finally rejected the ‘Sacred Grove’ project, and the State Government in Victoria was called on to justify the c. AU$100,000 it had given to Dimopoulos, it came to light that among the expenses for the project were amounts for promotional multimedia materials to be distributed to other cities around the globe. The purpose of these materials was to promote similar projects in other cities: sacred groves growing up all over the planet… Just imagine it! What a neat little money-spinner the success of ‘Sacred Grove’ in Melbourne would have been. As it turned out, a Melbourne hotel took pity on Mr Dimopoulos and allowed him to paint a small grove of trees it manages at the entrance to its Collins Street building. (Dimopoulos’s promotional materials, including a Wikipedia entry written by his publicity team, now refer to the ‘Sacred Grove’ episode as a “pilot”, no doubt in order to prepare anyone who sees photographs of it for how underwhelming it was, and to gloss over the fact that negative public opinion killed the actually proposed project before he got a chance to get away with the loot.)

    Konstantin Dimopoulos, installation of blue trees at the Sofitel Hotel in Collins Street, Melbourne, 2005.
    Konstantin Dimopoulos, installation of blue trees at the Sofitel Hotel in Collins Street, Melbourne, 2005.

    As a ‘public’ and ‘conceptual’ artist, Dimopoulos makes claims that, from an art historical point of view, make no sense. For example, Dimopoulos is quoted in the article, above, saying to a journalist (who cannot be blamed for not knowing what the next question should be):

    Public art is about taking risks. It does cost money but it brings people together.

    I think this must be disingenuous. It is simply incredible that someone who calls himself a ‘public artist’ would not know about Christo and Jeanne-Claude; or have the temerity to believe no one would or could make the just comparison between this kind of public art and the public art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. There are obvious comparisons to be made, in both the approach to getting works approved and in the works themselves.

    For anyone not familiar with the details, here are the basic facts, to help the comparison along…

    Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ‘Wrapped Reichstag’ project, to take a well-known example of their work, took 24 years to bring to fruition. During all this time, and after it was achieved, they did not accept a single cent, or a single pfennig, of payment from public funds. In fact, Christo and Jeanne-Claude never accept any public monies to complete their art works.

    It is also instructive to note that the Christo and Jeane-Claude’s process for achieving their public art includes having to convince everyone, including the public and any interested parties, that the artwork should be permitted to proceed.

    They are justifiably famous around the world for the rigour of their approach. Think what you like about the aesthetic experience of their art, no one I know of doubts the purity of their practice. They are beholden to no one.

    The risk they take for their public art is their own misfortune.

    Dimopoulos’s plan to make the people of Victoria pay for his project to re-aestheticise the world’s parks and avenues does not sound so heroic in this light, does it? His public art does not sound so risky.

    Perhaps it would help if his project had the advantage of originality, but it cannot even claim that. Dimopoulos knows that the tradition of painting trees is a very old one in Greece. It survives today, to the surprise of many visitors, in the practical habit the Greeks have of painting roadside trees white where there is no road lighting.

    Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Trees at Riehen in Switzerland in 1998.
    Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Trees at Riehen in Switzerland in 1998.

    Beyond that, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have beaten him to the tree game as well.  (The photograph, above, is of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Trees at Riehen in Switzerland in 1998.)

    There is a striking similarity between these pictures and Dimopoulos’s “BLACK PHARAOHS APPROPRIATION 2005”.

    Dimopoulos's 'Black Pharaohs'.
    Dimopoulos’s original description of the project ‘Black Pharaohs’ refers to the inspiration of his childhood, but does not mention he copied Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

    The original 2006 website posting about Dimopoulos’s pharaohs refers to Greek mythology and the legend of Theseus (the pretentiousness of it is excruciating), but not a single reference to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Then, sometime in 2006, images of the “BLACK PHARAOHS APPROPRIATION 2005” were removed from Dimopoulos’s website, only to reappear years later with a different description, written by Ken Scarlett.

    The new description acknowledges the original work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and says that the Dimopoulos variation is “interesting”—the kind of thing critics say with their chins balancing precariously on a curled index finger, à la Steve Jobs, while they try to force their eyebrows together to form a landing-platform for a new idea.

    The suddenly proper acknowledgement of the debt to Christo and Jeanne-Claude still does not include any comment on the difference between Dimopoulos’s methodology and that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

    Dimopoulos’s public relations team would be happy for you to think he works ‘in the tradition’ of Christo and Jeanne-Claude; not so happy for you to know his public art is an intellectual vacuum whose purpose is to suck up public funds.

    In the years since Sacred Grove in Collins Street, Melbourne, ‘The Blue Trees’ project has become a whirlwind of public relations spinning. Though Dimopoulos has been happy so far to take $100,000 here, or $25,000 there, to paint trees in Melbourne, or Houston or Vancouver, or wherever local governments can divert funds from worthy projects to pay for his airfare, his ultimate aim is to paint the Amazon.

    In the long PR journey that the Blue Trees is on, there is no mention in the world’s media so insignificant that it cannot be turned into an artistic aggrandisement. His 2013 website résumé proudly proclaims that the Blue Trees was named by TrendHunter as one of the top 100 activism trends of 2012. Indeed. Here is the reference from the TrendHunter site:

    Trendhunter website screenshot.
    Trendhunter website screenshot.

    With a score of 3.7 on the TrendHunter scale the Blue Trees project ranked below the trend of making sub sandwiches out of cucumbers, which scored 4.8.

    Trendhunter website screenshot.
    Trendhunter website screenshot.

    TrendHunter has estimated the worth of Dimopolous’s “art actions” perfectly. Here is a picture of the winning sandwich:

    Photo of the 2012 'cucumber sub' trend, which was a much more significant trend than Dimopoulos's 'blue trees', according to the Trendhunter website.
    Photo of the 2012 ‘cucumber sub’ trend, which was a much more significant trend than Dimopoulos’s ‘blue trees’, according to the Trendhunter website.

    Post script, 22 March 2015 — the Squamish affair

    In the world of public relations even failures must be put to work boosting and spinning whatever it is ‘the company’ wants to foist on dazed consumers.

    So it is with Mr Dimopoulos. In his latest pretence, on the unsuspecting citizens of Squamish, Vancouver, he uses images of his failed attempt to paint trees in Melbourne’s Yarra Park. The electronically altered image of Yarra Park appears on the Vancouver Biennale website, alongside images of other projects (which may or may not be altered, too, I don’t know).

    Here is the image of the ‘proposed’ Yarra Park project, which never happened:

    Image of the proposed Yarra Park project in Melbourne, reproduced in a Vancouver Biennale website where there is no comment on the fact it is not real.
    Image of the proposed Yarra Park project in Melbourne, reproduced in a Vancouver Biennale website where there is no comment on the fact it is not real. The blue trees in this picture are digitally altered to appear blue; they have not been painted.

    Here is an actual (that is, unaltered) photograph of the blue trees project (aka ‘Sacred Grove’) in Melbourne, as it actually happened:

    Entrance of the Sofitel Hotel in Melbourne, where the blue trees project ended up after a public scandal over the waste of public funds.
    Entrance of the Sofitel Hotel in Melbourne, where the blue trees project ended up after a public scandal over the waste of public funds.

    It does make me wonder if the good people at the Vancouver Biennale ever saw the real thing, or if they know they have published photographs of projects that have not happened?

    Further reading
    • In the circle of men singing – Why, when the singing was over, did the young man’s nose look crooked? Normally, a choir will line up to fill the space in which it sings, but this choir is a circle. When the game is over and the teams fall back to their rooms, the losing side sits dejectedly along the walls. The […]
    • Not a threepenny opera – “Why, if Mr and Mrs Been-to-La-Boheme-six-times can have their seats subsidised without filling out a form in triplicate, are the processes for writers’ grants so damned complicated and exhausting?” Toner-gate, Victoria’s little arts scandal, revealed some interesting facts about government and administration of the arts. Firstly, public sector employees working in the arts believe that […]
    • The risk-free ‘art’ of Kon Dimopoulos – The general flavour of reporting about the failure of Konstantin Dimopoulos’s tree-painting project in Melbourne was sympathetic. The Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt took at a swipe at the waste of public monies. Aside from that, it was Victorian politician Mary Delahunty who took most of the ‘blame’ dished out in public over the failed plan. […]
    • Cry babies and bloggers – Jill Greenberg slagged off the bloggers. They apparently have too much time on their hands, because why else would anyone, looking at the photos in her latest exhibition, End Times, at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, reach the conclusion that she was a monster who had abused the children who […]
    • David Hensel | interview – I cheered on reading Brian Sewell’s scathing article about the Summer Exhibition, because I read it returning from going to the preview, where I’d hoped to find my own sculpture. Instead what I found was the empty base, without the sculpture. We know the art market prefers obscure art as somehow more advanced, and anything […]
    • L’Affaire Dimopoulos: ‘copy’ of ‘difficult’ N.Z. ‘artwork’ installed at Federation ‘Square’ – Following the controversy, in 2005, about the Melbourne City Council’s sensible rejection of Kon Dimopoulos’s ‘Sacred Grove’ project, the Minister for the Yarts in Victoria, Mary Delahunty, announced that the AU$73,000 odd dollars ear-marked for the blue trees would be spent instead on a “site-specific” sculpture “similar in concept” to ones already installed at a […]
    • Ironising the ironisers: Edwards does Britney from behind – Daniel Edwards’ take on the pro-life debate is so outrageously perverse the pro-lifers are beside themselves, not knowing if they should be thankful or horrified. Edwards plants Britney Spears on all fours on a bear skin rug, arse in the air, the head of her baby crowning between her spread legs while her milk-laden breasts […]
    • Swinging pink flesh drives Indonesian Muslims wild – Here is the photograph, reproduced from the Sydney Morning Herald, that is causing all the fuss in Indonesia. It is, to be frank, neither very offensive nor very interesting. As usual, scale makes up for what imagination fails to provide…
    • Pathologies of outrage – Rhizome.org Rent-a-Negro Damali Ayo 25PEACES Tanja Ostojic The Rent-a-Negro website link flew around the internet a while back, many people linking to it as a humorous site. Initially few people recognised that the site was, as well as being very funny and beautifully written, a ‘serious’ art project. More recently, and more controversially, Tanja Ostojic’s […]

  • Cry babies and bloggers

    Jill Greenberg slagged off the bloggers. They apparently have too much time on their hands, because why else would anyone, looking at the photos in her latest exhibition, End Times, at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, reach the conclusion that she was a monster who had abused the children who were her subjects?

    Thomas Hawk thought she should be arrested and charged with child abuse. Jeremiah McNichols weighed in then from a visual arts perspective.

    The curator, Paul Kopeikin, is complaining about the hate mail and Greenberg has made it all the way to BBC podcasts in what is, without any doubt, an advertising coup for her exhibition and her career as an artist. At last—she can now breathe a sigh of relief—she is famous, and her photographs are, if Kopeikin’s suggestions can be believed, walking out the door. And there won’t be any police enquiries into child abuse—not unless there are some facts we don’t yet know about, or perhaps the parents of the cry babies have some startling revelation about the unauthorised use of electrodes.

    Greenberg pointed out in interviews broadcast by the BBC that babies cry all the time, at the drop of a hat, so to speak, and stop crying just as quickly. Babies cry, she told us, because lollypops have been taken away from them. In fact, that is how she got many of the babies in her photographs to blubber: she took their lollies away from them. When that didn’t work, and some other method was needed, the childrens’ parents were taken out of the room.

    Before looking closely at these photographs—they claim to be art, after all, so we must look closely at them—there is one more thing I think it is important to note about this exhibition: Jill Greenberg has already told us what it means. I heard her talking about the meaning of the photographs before I had seen them. When she reminded me that children cry very easily, I felt sympathy for her position immediately. (She is being accused of child abuse, which is a serious thing to say about anyone.) A striking thing about the conversation, though, was the completely straightforward manner of telling us what the photographs mean.

    Jill Greenberg wants to show us how upset these two and three year old children would be if they “realised the world they would inherit” (BBC Radio Newspod 27/7/2006). She feels upset, herself, about the environmental policies of George Bush, and is ‘depicting’ this distress through pictures of children that are upset. Greenberg has two children herself, a one year old and a three year old, so, naturally, she’s been thinking about these issues. The photographs were taken with the permission and co-operation of the children’s’ mothers; so there seems to be no question that, if Jill Greenberg was abusing these children, we are bound to hear about it from someone closer to the crime than the bloggers who want to put Greenberg away. Greenberg takes several swipes at the bloggers, saying of them that they obviously have too much time on their hands, that they hide behind a screen of anonymity, and have been careless with her reputation while putting nothing of their own at risk. (Or words to that effect.)

    The question of the treatment of the subjects during the photographic session threatens to derail the stated artistic objective of the pictures, possibly because the stated artistic objective of the photographs is weak. It really is striking and ironic that in an age of very sophisticated understanding of art theory it should seem acceptable that a photographer-artist tells us what her photographs mean. Possibly it is just because we do not have direct access to the intentions of artists that they must now tell us what they mean. It is even stranger, really, that having heard what the photographer tells me the photographs mean, I don’t believe her—and, actually, I think, the meaning of the pictures is, at least as stated, more than a little bit silly. Greenberg cuts the legs from under the theorem she posits about her own pictures by immediately attempting to demystify the childrens’ apparent agonies. Children will cry about anything, and can cry almost all the time, so we shouldn’t be worried. Greenberg took their lollies away from them and, if that didn’t work, she took their mothers away from them.

    In truth, we are being asked to suspend our disbelief for a little while, and consider what a child might do, how a child might behave, if it had an understanding of what its parent’s generation was doing to the world in which it had to live. Very specifically, the meaning of the photographs is a kind of joke: this is how we should react, Jill Greenberg seems to be saying to us, when we hear that the American military apparatus is torturing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay; and the appearance of the crying child in the photograph entitled ‘Torture’ is merely the weak, almost irrelevant, punch-line of the joke. We look at the poor girl’s face, the corner of her mouth falling off her face, and read the title—’Torture’ or whatever is underneath the next photograph on the wall—the same lame joke repeating itself over and over again.

    It’s very strange, then, to be confronted with both a claim about the photographs in End Times and an obvious truth about the same photographs that are completely incompatible.

    The children in End Times are presented to us in much the same way as the apes of Greenberg’s previous exhibition. Each child seems to be positioned carefully in front of a bluish, neutral screen, lit so that it is whiter at the centre. The children are lit like commercial objects, their skin and hair displaying a tremendously effective sheen, as though they’ve really been polished up for presentation to the camera. Some of the children have great rivers of tears flowing down their cheeks. Some look a bit dry. They are all, of course, without their lollies or mothers, a bit emotional; and Greenberg appears to have done a good job capturing the great variety of expressions that have enabled her to label the photographs so creatively. I can’t say that I laughed out loud when I read the titles, so perhaps the titles are meant to be amusing in the ‘Oh, that is deep, yes, how could anyone disagree with those sentiments’ sense, rather than the ‘O, God, please make it stop—I’m laughing so much it hurts’ sense. Greenberg has managed to keep the children positioned for the camera with great effectiveness, just as she did with the apes. Perhaps there is a technique she hasn’t let on? Were they (the kiddies or the apes) restrained in some way?

    Most importantly, the sympathetic impulse one feels when seeing these pictures is qualitatively no different to the impulse one feels when seeing any child cry. There is nothing in the photographs about the state of the planet’s ecology, about the betrayal of public trust. Nothing whatsoever. There is just the title, hanging limply off the bottom of the image.

    The children in End Times do not look like they are contemplating a terrifying legacy or some ineluctable, depressing future. Actually, they look like young children who have been bitch-slapped by a photographer. They look like exactly what they are.

    Just in case you haven’t caught my drift, here is a truly disturbing photograph, taken in 1990 by James Nachtwey, of a child confined to a filthy cot in a Romanian orphanage for ‘incurables’:

    Child in a Romanian orphanage, photograph by James Nachtwey (1990).
    Child in a Romanian orphanage, photograph by James Nachtwey (1990).

    What art there is in this picture has been put to the service of underlining the horror of its subject’s predicament.

    Looking at a picture of this kind, we do not sense that there is any trail of evidence leading from the child’s cry to the photographer. The photographer is irrelevant. Instead, we immediately find ourselves standing in the place of the camera, while very basic impulses rush to the front of our minds.

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