No place on Earth ought to have extra authority to talk about the enduring attraction of democracy than the place that first got here up with it. However a brand new artwork exhibition in Athens appears reluctant to shout about its credentials. You need to stroll proper to the tip of the Nationwide Gallery of Greece’s present, previous 137 works by 54 artists, earlier than you come throughout something like a declare to authority – and even then it’s removed from triumphant.
Rika Pana’s work of the Parthenon, set towards backgrounds of melancholy blue and muddy inexperienced, intensify not the steadfastness of the final word image of Athenian democracy, however its eventual spoil. In three work, from the collection The Erosion of Civilisation, the pillars of the temple – commissioned by the unconventional democratic reformer Pericles within the fifth century BC – appear to be plumes of black smoke, the uncertainty of its iconic define emphasising its personal perishability.
The sombre tone feels well timed: Democracy, because the present known as, opens midway by way of a yr full of watershed plebiscites which have an ominously terminal really feel and pose uneasy questions. In its liberal consultant iteration, democracy could have established itself because the norm of governance in most of Europe, the Americas, giant components of sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. But in nations as soon as thought of democratic strongholds, many citizens appear tempted to swap it for a model headed by strongman leaders keen to interrupt free from constitutional checks and balances. What occurs to democracy when the democrats not need it?
Appropriately, the present’s curator Syrago Tsiara presents democracy not as a closing stage of historical past etched in stone however as one thing that was solely forcefully wrenched again from the arms of autocratic leaders half a century in the past – not simply in Greece, however nearly concurrently in Portugal and Spain. Fascism made in Thirties Italy and Germany, together with the autocratic rulers of the Soviet bloc, has such a powerful maintain on reminiscence that these army dictatorships of southern Europe are sometimes forgotten on the remainder of the continent, regardless of their apparent commonalities.
António de Oliveira Salazar, Georgios Papadopoulos and Francisco Franco have been all army males, who cracked down on civil liberties and used torture on their enemies, however have been Christian traditionalist slightly than fascist-revolutionary of their fervour. Within the chilly warfare, their strident anti-communism assured them the popularity or direct help of the US, and in Greece and Portugal’s case membership of Nato.
Their dictatorships all got here to an finish inside an 18-month interval within the mid-Seventies, however democracy triumphed in several methods in every nation. In Portugal, the turning level got here with a army coup in April 1974, whereas in Spain democracy was restored steadily following Franco’s loss of life in November 1975. In Greece, the junta’s rule unravelled extra shortly: pupil protests triggered inner divisions inside Papadopoulos’s circle. Then got here a coup in Cyprus adopted by Turkey’s invasion of the island, and the seven-year army dictatorship finally collapsed.
To the artists who continued to provide artwork regardless of strict censorship, the face of repression in these nations seemed remarkably comparable. The Athens present has a 1972 sculpture made by Spanish artwork collective Equipo Crónica, depicting one of many inconspicuous spies of Franco’s secret police, dealing with an nearly equivalent paintings exhibiting the faceless informants of the Greek surveillance state, produced by artist Yannis Gaïtis on the identical time.
Symbols of protest have been shared: pink carnations should not solely ubiquitous on the graffiti and protest banners of the peaceable “carnation revolution” captured by Revolução, Ana Hatherly’s 1975 movie collage, but additionally in Greek artist Vlassis Caniaris’s untitled grid of flowers moulded from plaster, made in 1969. Papadopoulos, the army officer who led the coup in 1967 then put in himself as Greece’s prime minister till 1973, used to say his dictatorship was merely “a plaster forged”, there to guard the affected person throughout the “operation” required to restore democracy.
Dimitris Alithinos’s sculpture Occurring II appears to reference this metaphor, besides the affected person here’s a man strapped on to the roof of a automotive and suffocating beneath a sheet of plastic. Within the work of Nikias Skapinakis, our bodies dare to breathe once more, bare and unbowed. Democracy, for artists like him, was a bodily act of liberation for the whole physique politic.
Essentially the most exceptional footage within the present are stunning for his or her selection of creative type. Pop artwork is often considered an Anglo-American style, celebrating the substance and veneer of client tradition. But for artists equivalent to Spain’s Alberto Solsona and Greece’s Alekos V Levidis, it was the proper option to expose political violence – even when it was, because the title of the latter’s 1969 monotype on paper has it, “Made within the USA.”
Pop artwork can be the type by which artist Giorgos Ioannou chronicled the occasions that triggered the junta’s undoing. In November 1973, regulation college students barricaded themselves contained in the capital’s Polytechnic college, demanding its removing. The protest scuppered a sham technique of liberalisation initiated weeks earlier by dictator Papadopoulos, who brutally cracked down on the occupation.
Ioannou’s comic-panel work appear to be a macabre homage to Roy Lichtenstein’s well-known Whaam! diptych, solely right here we see the bullets ripping into the our bodies of younger folks. No less than 40 college students died throughout the Polytechnic uprisings, with hundreds injured.
The range of creative kinds on show in Democracy in the end comes throughout as a form of commentary on the overarching theme: that there might be no such factor as a “democratic” type in artwork. The truth is, in some instances the visible language deployed by some southern European artists to inform the story of their democratic liberation has an oddly anti-egalitarian bent. In Nationwide Technical College of Athens, a Marios Vatzias portray from 1975, the protesters who have been killed are picked up from the streets by angels and carried to the gods. They’re not a part of the lots however elevated to the few.
Martyrdom is a surprisingly widespread theme, particularly within the works of Greek engraver Tassos, whose imaginative and prescient was celebrated within the first present on the Nationwide Gallery after the autumn of the junta. Freedom fighters listed below are depicted as strange residents however stylised as archangels toting machine weapons, whereas the executed communist resistance fighter Ilektra Apostolou turns into Jesus on the cross.
The present’s opening assertion is jarring: the journey in direction of democracy, the wall panel claims, “begins with figuring out the opponent” – which sounds extra like a pronouncement from the anti-liberal political theorist Carl Schmitt than a formulation for a functioning trendy democracy. The road protests that accompanied Portugal and Greece’s shift to democracy are, nevertheless, given their rightful place, even when the geopolitical circumstances that made dictatorships brittle sufficient to be toppled by the demos are largely absent from these artworks – specifically the colonial wars that had fatigued the Estado Novo’s armies, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus that undid the junta’s declare to competence, and the rise of the European Financial Neighborhood.
Societies that suppress freedom of expression, this exhibition contends, are doomed to fall. On this respect at the very least, artwork and the pursuits of democracy align. However that they don’t at all times overlap ought to be clear, even if you happen to don’t agree with critic Kenneth Clark, who in his 1945 essay Artwork and Democracy concluded that artwork was “incurably aristocratic” in its tendency to exemplify the “rule of the various by the few”.
The present begins and ends with Konstantinos Parthenis’s giant portrait of Alexandros Papanastiou, whose stint as prime minister in 1924 paved the way in which for the Second Hellenic Republic. There’s additionally a small image, by the identical artist, of the goddess Athena’s head, which served as an emblem of the Republican social gathering. However as you stroll by way of the present, these tributes to parliamentary democracy are shortly forgotten. Revolutions make higher footage than establishments.
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