TELEVISED REVOLUTIONS, SATELLITE DISHES AND SIDE DISHES
CONSTANTINOS TALIOTIS
(*) No doubt, when he is environed by the vertical spines of historiography, they, on their
turn, surrender as sample tubes to his appetite. Its a table for two; be my guest, after you.
The odor of electricity captured in a megaphone
The last few days I wake up in black and white. Apart from the taste of sleep that
intrudes my mouth and eyes, I am enchanted by two images of close kinship, but bringing
them any closer to each other scares me of possibly committing incest. In a world where
J.L. Godard was an antenna provider, he would still be in a league of his own. There is,
perhaps, no other image producer that possesses that capacity of detecting his/storys, and
film historiographys frequencies, and re-broadcasting them on celluloid, via the means
of paying homage or practicing captivity techniques (hostages are always his guest stars,
arrested from various pages and frames, from other books and films). In a mathematical
equation where the guest is added to the host, the mathematical variable of the latter is
that which gives home to these pages to be reread in a different book, and the former is
that same page that is happy to be reproduced. The ghost the sum of this addition is to
be found on the stitches of the books spine or somewhere by the splicing tape of the film
roll. It is no coincidence that so much has been written about Godards montage; he
produced too many books of nothing else but covers, stuffed with given ingredients.
In this dilution of citations, quotes and various other guests, posing in their
holiday outfits, invited to reside in the hosts hotel resort offering 24 rooms per second,
but one can still book into a suite of prodigious view(ed), Godards Passion, for example,
is fully booked from painting masterworks the privacy is often rendered seamless, and
the screens raised to separate the various guests become apparitional. Sherlock Jr.1
resides in 1924 - Sherlock Holmes stayed briefly in that room. He attempted to transcend
the frame of his narrative by leaping into the screen of another film [img.1]. When
Michelangelo2 leaps onto the stage in 1963, in an attempt to reenact what Sherlock Jr.
had done 40 years earlier, he comes across the reality of film being a phantasm, while we
are faced with the ghost of historys hotel mathematics [img.2].
En-Suite
When T.S. Eliot writes Good poets borrow, great poets steal scaling up the
depth ones hand penetrates anothers pocket, he forgot to mention those who steal from
those that had already borrowed and vice versa ad nauseam. This is a poet deeply in love
with the Latin language. For someone like Eliot who has directed the organized crime of
literature like few have managed, hosting numerous borrowers and thieves in his [The]
Waste Land Hotel, one is left in doubt in regard to how such a scoop has slipped away his
armpit. Perhaps this has been a carefully placed trapdoor for the future thieves to tip over
and become hostages hosted in his hotel.
Olympia-goes Limassol
It is no coincidence that one of the images under interrogation, is one that crossed
the threshold of many hotel rooms, found itself under many dimmed lights in the arms of
various lovers; a goddess demoted to a prostitute; an Aphrodite from Olympus to a
prostitute named Olympia before she becomes a guest in her own coffee-shop and is re-
baptized µ. Guest + Host = Ghost. Her breath is left in all her hosts bed sheets.
So does her faint aroma. So does her ghost. It stains. Giorgione [img.3] seduced her first
when still a virgin (was she?) before Titian [img.4] found her having a nap and invited
her, before Inges [img.5] took her to his room. By the time she got to Manets room
[img.6], she dropped the odalisques cape to move more freely, and by 2000 she becomes
a Cyprian [in the dual meaning of the word] when she is seduced by Spyros Demetriades
along the coast of Limassol.
Half time
On the bedside table, there is a bowl full of Gioconda chocolates. I try one. She is
hairy and she has a hot arse [Marcel Duchamo, L.H.O.O.Q.; Elle a chaud au cul]. I
step out of the hotel and go round the corner. I buy Turkish Delights from Yeroskipou. I
find her on the package once again. But this time she is Boticcellis.
A little bit of Monica in my life / a little bit of Erica by my side / a little bit of
Rita is all I need / a little bit of Tina is what I see
On the way to Paphos, for the Assumption of Mary celebrations, which entail a
massive fiesta where the stomach curvature is stretched to its limits, and for some even
beyond, falling out to fatalities carried away on stretchers, which to all appearances have
been part of a long tradition, Limassol revealed its motorway façade to me in that
apocalyptic light of Cypriot Augusts, that deprives earth from shadows and renders
overexposure 3D. The land stretching on the right side of the motorway to the hills, as
one is ascending to Paphos, a piece of land that has experienced no moments of silence
since I remember, has been the [chosen?] location to give home to a type of architectural
model that combines classical / neoclassic elements columns, friezes and pediments -
with a flavor of Cypriot kitsch extravaganza pink surfaces and heraldic garden fences.
A cocktail model, not dissimilar to any long drink served by the hotels inhabiting the
premises on the opposing side of the motorway, featuring the drinks small scale
fireworks, glittering gimcracks and flags of countries of undefined location, but visually
familiar, through a vague association provided by Olympic Games and World Cups. In
the same way, this architectural model in the scenery is the offspring of such an
undefined and vague familiarity to architectural fragments made explicit in past
excursions [Munich, Athens, Vienna or St. Petersburg] espoused by components deriving
from folkloristic rural-village architecture (i.e. the use of enormous terracotta jars in the
gardens, utilized as flower pots or fountains for Manneken Piss effigies, the fixation in
having imbricated ceramic tile roofs tegulae / solenes and imbrices /kalupter - a
predominantly functional feature for keeping out the rain a derivative of village and
later colonial architecture, which here, though, is out of season, due to the minute rain fall
that can be reined by a simple gutter or the use of vine trees as car shelters). The same
phenomenon of paying homage to extrinsic architectural features, by accommodating
them in ones home or office, is apparent in the attempt to Chicagonize Nicosia in the late
1980s and early 1990s, in a Perfect Stranger way, by raising miniature skyscrapers that
fulfilled the standards in terms of the materials used, but felt short in achieving
magnitude [img.7]. Indeed, Mies Van Der Rohe, without the cigar. Such an architectural
modality, which, if one was to borrow postmodernisms vocabulary it would be described
as pastiche the unsuccessful attempt to create shopping malls in Nicosia, and especially
City Plaza, which combines discontinuous neoclassical elements with mirror windows, is
a poor illustration of this genre -, demonstrates Guest + Host = Ghost: reenactment
twisting appropriations elbow behind its back, spiced up with apparitions, slow-cooked
at 150°C and served with St. Johns koumandaria. It is the combination of a primitive but
extreme desire to become godfathers of a European romantic, modernist and modern
tradition because such movements are to Cyprus what igloos are to Bedouins, since
they merely encountered Cypriot Augusts, such an encounter as the one the miniature
skyscrapers have with the sky by immersing them in ppalouze and hosting a reception
ceremony with walnut sweet bonbonnieres. An architectural style immersed in syrup, and
admitted to the scenery as a glutinous entity, on which anything, stylistically, goes. These
edifices utter the voices of many languages, but only as far as lawyers speak Latin or
chefs, Japanese. The epitome of arbitrariness and absurdity; id estie yõskoku ante sushi ad
infinitum, pas ta karvouna.
IKB with JVC
JVC has been Arsenal FCs sponsor from 1982 to 1999, but that is irrelevant to
this article, needless to say to the exhibition as well. Useless knowledge, though, is
always welcomed to check in.
IKB [#002FA7] without JVC
Yves Klein invented IKB (International Klein Blue) in 1958, but that is irrelevant
to JVC, and consequently to Arsenal. Cyprus knows blue very little. In that same year the
expectations had risen, by some, that blue was the new rainbow. The rainbow bear-er,
Makarios III, was released a year earlier from Seychelles, where he was exiled, but was
prohibited from entering the island. He had launched his way to becoming a statue or
many, to be precise but still far from the possibility of being explored and exploited as a
subject of artistic production. It was to be proved, at a later stage, following the Anglo-
Swiss advice, that the golden-green combination with no accessories was the most
suitable one for Cyprus. It has not been possible to clarify what Charalmbos and Vaso
Sergiou have been engaged with that same year, but the chain of logic will lead us to a
mere fact: their visibility would only be made possible under the microscope of their lab,
rather than over it3. Their Beheaded Young Boy(and the priest), part of the series
Mythologies, fabricated in a territory that brings together the facts mentioned above,
raises all the non-arbitrary non-encounters namely Klein meeting Makarios III, Klein
visiting Seychelles, Makarios III awareness of IKB, Sergiou inviting Klein to Seychelles,
Renaissance in Cyprus to the potentiality of diversion; which is to say the activity of
establishing a connection between internationally acclaimed artists (guests) and the local
including themselves - (host), providing the arena for diversion. Mythologies is a
residency program run by Charalambos and Vaso Sergiou, imposing to their guest
residents a strictly predestined agenda. Klein, for example, is invited to travel to
Seychelles, where his encounter with his close friend Mr. Bernard Furth, the chemist,
combined with the discovery of an acephalous Renaissance boy-souvenir, would become
the origin of Beheaded Young Boy(and the priest): a small artifact featuring two
Archbishop Makarios III statues taking the place of the boys head, all dipped in IKB.
Precisely this gesture of procreating the conditions for a trajectory orientated in the
invitation of a guest and (+) his cohabitation with the host, but anticipating the fleeing (=)
towards a spectral / phantasmic off-road which is the sum of the preceding addition, is the
demonstration of Guest + Host = Ghost par excellence.
A Monument to Monument in italics
One and three chairs. A monument is a monument is a monument. Art after
philosophy and after. A monument after a monument and after. I ve been thinking of a
statue pretending to be a statue. I ve seen its eyes moving. I ve heard it breathing, like
Venus or Olympia, but havent spotted out its perfume yet. Tatlin never made the
monument [img.8]. Flavin monumentalized that which Tatlin never did [img.9]. It gave it
oxygen (or electricity) and made it breath, or, to be more acute, buzz like a tube light.
Koumides invited it once again to his Topia. The breath became a breeze. It cuts through
the landscape like a ghost, flickering once in a while the Flavian perfume. They pay
homage to a landmark that never landed, and hovers like a ghost-artifact haunting the
field of those who are willing to host it. I stand under the shade of Koumidess tower of
Flavins monument of Tatlins monument trying to find out what is this shade protecting
me from. There is a familiar smell in the air. I am unsure how far Koumidess Topia is
from Demetriadess Olympia, but I have a feeling it cant be more than a few roads
towards the sea. I wonder, how come when Latin phrases are cited are always written in
italics?
Guest
" "
. 26
()
: " .
,
[...]. ,
: ' ,
'" (" "). "
" , , "
" ,
"
(Alanus de Insulis),
Corpus Hermeticum
, ()
["( ()) ,
, "]
" . ,
, :
" " ()
"Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (),
: " (The Analysis of Mind,
1921) ,
" " ,
'' ''.
.
, ,
. , ..." ("
" ).
" " (
) : "Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the
earth. So what as Plato has an imagination, that all knowledge was but
remembrance, so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is
oblivion" (" : . ,
"). ,
MC-Queen DJing Keaton
In what has, since, become one of the most iconic sequences of domino icons of
catastrophe, William Canfield Jr. unnoticed by him but in front of the stretched faces of
the audience is in danger by the sexual attraction the façade of a building gives in to
and eventually falling like a lover over the earths body [img.10]. Being aware though,
that William Canfield Jr. is Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), we are assured
that he will find the window to escape from the undesired possible consequences of being
smashed amongst the gravity pulling the lovers bodies to each other. In fact the window
finds his way to meet him. The house has not proved to be exceptionally hospitable to the
hero of the film, but due to luck he escaped intact. This domino effect pushing down
destruction after destruction, found Buster Keaton invited possible this time under
better conditions in the re-enactment which is twisting appropriations elbow behind
its back - of that same image in 1997 by Steve Mcqueen [img.11]. And what a great host
he is, enabling the ghost of Keaton to emerge from the dust / sand explosion under the
heavy breaths of the lovers; earth and façade. Keaton and Mcqueen will share together
the fragrant ghost and from one glass of koumandaria.
ps. This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood () First of all
he looked for a womans face, at the end of the jetty [img.12]
1
Buster Keaton, Sherlock Jr., 1924
2
Jean-Luc Godard, Les Carabiniers, 1963
3
Charalambos Sergiou is a professional embryologist
