| Elaine Angelopoulos is onto something big in her work—not in terms of scale, though she has worked in large formats, but in terms of meaning. She has been producing webbed and interconnected sculptural forms using string, ropes and boxes and she also does performance works. Her art elides between the personal space of the body and memory and the political space of society and culture. I suspect that her work is about to go in a direction more towards the specific space and presence of the body, less about the culture. |
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Elaine Angelopoulos: Engaged by Anne Swartz
Elaine Angelopoulos is onto something big in her work—not in terms of scale, though she has worked in large formats, but in terms of meaning. She has been producing webbed and interconnected sculptural forms using string, ropes and boxes and she also does performance works. Her art elides between the personal space of the body and memory and the political space of society and culture. I suspect that her work is about to go in a direction more towards the specific space and presence of the body, less about the culture. I say this because she has placed limits on how much she’ll involve herself in her art and I suspect that she’ll get more and more capable of integrating the personal aspects of her art with the political.
Let me give you some evidence of what I describe. Elaine was born in America, the daughter of a traditional Greek immigrant father and a first-generation Greek American mother. The flow of trauma experienced by people in the recent past in Greek history flows through her art the way a painter spreads oil across a canvas with a brush. It is everywhere in her work. She has carefully studied symbolism—cultural and folk—to identify ways to connect herself to the oft-broken and scattered history of her northern Greek ancestors, of her family and of herself.
Elaine, perhaps like all of us, has made it a central theme in her work to explore finding one’s the way in the world today. She focuses on understanding who her ancestors were and why she hears their voices in her life now. Much of this history wasn’t discussed in her childhood, perhaps the common notion among immigrants that assimilation meant alienation from one’s past for her mother; for the artist, it was assimilation, cultural pride, and preservation of traditions on behalf of the elders and adults. So, she must find that history and locate her gender within a predominantly patriarchal culture where the glories of an ancient Sapphic or muse past no longer have resonance. She found ways through her art and other personal modes to exist both in the past she imagines for her oppressed ancestors and for herself in the present, a child of a country where she never lived and only visited.
The Ottoman Empire of the Turks, which actively enslaved Greeks for centuries, comes up repeatedly as a topic with current resonance for Elaine, despite its decline in the early twentieth century since past political struggles and tyranny bear on her conception of her present (really of the present for all American people). She is finding and locating metaphors about her sense of fragmentation from her personal past with the present political situation in America. The idea of freedom much desired but often compromised today is a recurrent theme she discusses as residing prominently in her art.
Entanglement became a recurring theme for Elaine in the 90s. Works such as Radiowave Venus are complicated masses of string or rope entangled into a seemingly convoluted hive of strings, constantly turning back on themselves. This work is four feet long and sixteen inches wide by twenty inches wide. Since it is smaller than the body, it is perceived as related to the body—as something that can be contained with it or held by someone—even though it is related to the ceiling, and, is, therefore, usually far away from the viewer. The soft tendrils of the work loop and drape from the wooden platform. The contrast between the white of the wood and the white of the rope recalls much of the celebratory work of women artists during the 70s working in wood, like Jackie Winsor, even as the use of the image of weaving gone awry goes back a little further to the outrageous forms Eva Hesse made in the late 1960s, also often related to the ceiling or the corner. The irregularity of the edges of this sculpture bespeak the loose and whirling space of imagination and its possibilities, what the artist has titled the “radiowaves,” swirling overhead and around us with information and ideas as well as an often monotonous drone carried over the radiowaves. The artist has remarked on how she listened to seemingly endless hours of radio shows while making the piece, the idea of daily repetition embedded in the twists and interlacing of it. She also has a persistent interest in challenging the notion of the object and letting process determine the product (the looping and knotting building the form as an emanation from the armature). This approach resembles natural forms, such as when insects and animals create nests and hives. Gravity, the presence of form in space, and organic shapes all have the added benefit of a lack of cultural specificity—particularly appealing to an artist concerned with the weight of culture seeking a way out from under the burden of past culture.
One of Elaine’s most interesting performances is Sweat and Tears of 2004. This work included her having to contend with feeling so overwhelmed that she had to escape into some lockers located alongside the performance space, which was an intrinsic part of the piece. She developed the choreography of the performance in relation to the lockers in the room and remarks, “As a physical process of generating sweat, attempting to memorize and recite the text in enclosed lockers was a way of creating mental sweat, and to reveal the awkward and personal reinterpretation of text according to one’s memory.” She is clothed throughout the entire performance in street clothes as she is in her other performance-based work. She needs costumes, so engages with the most personal content, yet takes on a new persona or at least interrogates what her standard, everyday attire means. She has to engage with her own dressing in the performances as a way to consider or deconstruct how she attires herself and its meaning. In other performance-based work, Reading Quotes of Dissent, she appears as a street crier on a street in Brooklyn. In Mending Civility of 2004, she appears as an office worker, slowly and laboriously pasting the Bill of Rights back together from its shredded form. She is an active member of Artists Against the War, whose membership includes artists such as Joyce Kozloff and Martha Rosler. I realized that her mundanely clothed appearance in her performances like this one recalled the hilariously angry Semiotics of the Kitchen by Rosler where she is seen in a happy, flowered apron converting common kitchen utensils into weapons for her personal revolution against the otherwise complacent status of the housewife.
Elaine draws from the recent past of artists concerned with healing and form, both conscious and unconsciously, I would propose. Joseph Beuys and Bill Viola both seek to heal society with shaman-like force, whereas Eva Hesse never stated such an interest. Hesse’s work reveals and accomplishes a state of emancipation from the tyranny of the body (she was short and made work that countered her petite size), the distress of familial dysfunction (parental divorce, as well as her own separation, and maternal suicide), and the difficulties of being a refugee (as a Jewish child escaping Germany in the late 1930s); for the artist she also contends that Hesse’s interest in minimalist forms was a way to diminish emphasis on self. The forms and compositions of Hesse’s work clearly inform Elaine’s art, as well as reference many of Hesse’s complex issues as well. Healing in Elaine’s work is a significant issue, on a personal level and on a cultural level. Her small and large sculptures of knotting and webbing, and her performance rituals, both bespeak a desire to connect in a meaningful way to those internal parts of us that have to contend with current and past oppression and its effects on the body, on our families, and on our societies. Elaine wants projects an aura of strength and healing in her art, a reversal of the kinds of trauma associated with displacement, alienation and assimilation. More is about to come from Elaine and it will be exciting to see how she proceeds, especially with her interest in metaphysical theories.
