DIACHRONIC AFFIRMATIVE TENSE IN CRISIS
CONSTANTINOS TALIOTIS
The soundtrack of this island is its own history and remixes are unacceptable if not sinful. The hegemonic stature of history, amongst other stereotypical emblems, like the religious, the political or the cultural, elevates their narratives beyond dispute, almost at a disengaged place of natural existence, from where they can make their way into the social strata smoothly and be uncritically received. The score is diachronically monotonous, running in circles following the same tempo. Like The Dogma of the Emperors, the time bars between the Emperors - and therefore the Dogmas - are equal, leveling any variations that might exist between the personas interrupted by the visual noise. The quick zapping of Emperors leads to a series of insipid significations, blunt authoritarian figures which are equated to the most recognizable televisual element; the noise. Moreover, the political voice of each one of them - one of them is even depicted in front of the microphone -, which has coated the recent history of the island, immediately disappears once their images fade out into noise, and they become noisy hums. With a careful video juxtaposition and a simple editing tool, Helene Black has managed to disarm the significations assigned to each one of these Emperors, turning them to mute images. What is revealed here is Helene Black's concern with those images or labarums that are now implanted in the subconscious of a nation and how their determined interpretations perpetuate the stasis of criticality. At first, though, perhaps a closer examination of the space of the emblems / stereotypes is needed here, before we move to the various tactics Black employs to subvert or quake their stagnancy.
The emblem / stereotype is the outcome of a stereo - if not dolby surround - marching percussion, that has long lost both its concrete connections to its origins and its target. Its ears are entertained and allured by this monotonous cadence and its repetitive utterances are the very evidences of its indisputable authority and wide acceptance. As a statement, it exists outside the rectilinear current of time and has a permanent and diachronic visa to the present tense, just like a performative act. Embedded in the substrata of a society, in a state of amnesia and ignorant of the promise of the future, not only does the dolby surround voice of the stereotypical image demarcates the territorial boundaries of what it defines, it also exercises an absolute authority over this definition. What is at stake here, therefore, in this immediate and direct response of a stereotypical adjective to a state of affairs, is the stereo (dual) essence (ousia) of the stereotype / emblem: that of the topographical ownership of territory / property (periousia) and that of the ownership of indisputable authority (exousia). In other words the space (periousia) of what it defines is immediately enclosed and monarchically under its own power (exousia) defying diversity.
The hegemony of the myth - implicit to both the emblem and the stereotype -, whether it constructs a national image or a story, is established via a hazy, yet unspecified and deceiving relation with a past. Its authority, after all, appears when a confusion between the constructed past and that of the real is brought by excess and repetition. Identities and identifiable symbols are fabricated to remain diachronically significant and flash as directly recognizable images that replace the known with the familiar. The question Helene Black poses through her work is how does art intervene and upset this prosaic perambulation of labarums, the majesty of the stereotypes and emblems of both language and visual language that parade in a humdrum and uninterrupted consistency. How do we overthrow the authority (exousia) of the property (periousia) of the stereotype, suspend the superficiality of its ostensible connections with a past which infuses emblems with a familiarity, decentralize and multiple narratives, and instead equip the reader / viewer with tools to stimulate him / her excavate for knowledge. A knowledge which as a terminal point becomes insignificant and constantly deferred once critical thinking comes to the scene, in the activity of excavation. Even though in the Strange Bedfellows, Black seems to depict the cemetery of knowledge, buried under the insulation material with the tomb stone of the familiar statuette from the prehistory of the island, thus commenting on the mis-reception of the familiar as the known, Black's work intends to function as a reveille from the hypnosis that taking the familiar to be the known might lead to. When reading the Strange Bedfellows under the general context of Black's work, its terrain starts to wobble: is it the cemetery of knowledge or the promise of fertility? All of a sudden the direct symbolism collapses, the authority of the emblem is lost once it is caught up within two narratives, one deriving from its form - the cross - the other from its content - symbol of fertility. The work becomes a battlefield, and as such the most efficient artillery against the stasis of familiarity that appears as the absolute claimant of knowledge.
The empire of myths is the empire of its own anniversaries that have lost their reference points to their past. It is a spatiotemporal smelter, ignorant of any other place or time but their own timelines which construct the silences, the secrets and the Rescued Histories. The blind spots and the fizzy plats are long predefined in the topography of the identity of the island. It is an empire with no expansive policy, simply because it knows no other place to expand to, No stories left to tell, and remains in the lethargy of its hereness, of its presence and in oblivion of otherness and its absence. Exporting finds no entry in the vocabulary of this empire. And so does the careful handling of what leaves its borders. Simply because it denies the "over and beyond". It is like an insight joke that neglects the outside. Once the spatiotemporal continuum is circumscribed, the time of the other becomes the territory of the past in mono, in a vertigo of tenses and spaces. At the other end of the flow of time, the space of the future and the future of the space is unknown, not, though, as an unknown variable with the potential of being at some point occupied and understood, but as an unimagined territory that defies potentiality as such. After all, spatiotemporal otherness is denied and rendered impossible. Thus this empire is only (mono) left with the chimera of its history to entertain itself; thus it Fires and Forgets in a series of instantaneous infinitesimal launches, as if champagne corks, like the emperors, that in the flow of time become empty signs following a dull tempo. The promise of the future is for ever lost.
Not only does Black raises questions about the status of what is inherited and the modes of its reception, but she also problematizes the persona of the receiver. In Rescuing History, the boundaries between the past and the present remain unclear. History is not a different country. It is the only country known, simply because, not only is it an empire but moreover it is an absolutist empire, a monarchical power. The hegemony of history as an indisputable space is what enables it to rule, and it only comes in singular form. It comes in stainless steel, rescued from rusting, and captured with an elated step of a classical yet irrelevant figurine. Or is it the other way round: the classical figurine being magnetized by the statuettes, those idols of fertility, and lifted to the status of history? The homogeneity and continuity in material creates once again a temporal confusio. It is indistinguishable who is the rescuer and who is the rescued. The rescued and the rescuer occur concomitantly in a commixtio of rescued history rescuing the rescuer in endless circles ad infinitum. No rust found in either. No signs of time. Costis Papayiorgis asks in his recent About Memory (2008): "If the present is giving birth to the past [since the past can only exist in its retrievable form in the present tense] how can we accept that the present is (also) born by the past? How can the mother give birth to the child and the child to the mother?" (pg. 86/87)
