Friday, July 26, 2013

The dark world of Antoine D'Agata


I read that photographer Antoine D'Agata won a great award for his book, titled "Anticorps", at the annual photography festival of Arles. Immediately my mind went a few years back when I met him at the same city, where I went to attend his workshop. I still wonder what made me choose him among so many other photographers. Maybe it was the fact that he had already become a hot name in the world of photography, or the curiosity how his workshop would be, taking into account his personal work: dark, feverish images full of sex, drugs and human flesh.







Getting along with him was tough. He can be as raw as his pictures are and he was pushing everyone to the same extreme limits that he pushes himself. I remember some girls often bursting to tears and as far as I was concerned, I felt detached from the whole process and demotivated. I thought I had made a wrong choice and compromised with the idea that this workshop was for me a waste of time and optimism. I kept shooting photos only for the shake of the rest of the class and they were terrible.

One evening, after a very long day of lesson, shooting and merciless critique we ended up having a drink at the famous "yellow house" of Van Gogh, which is now a bar on the main square of Arles. I was exhausted physically, mentally and psychologically and I was looking forward to finish my drink and go back to my hotel to collapse. When I mentioned my intention, D'Agata told me that this was the right moment to go to shoot photos. I thought he was kidding, but no, he meant every word. I asked him if he was tired and he replied, no, not at all, despite the 48 consecutive sleepless hours (he also mentioned his record was 76 or so, no surprise one of his books is called "Insomnia")... He suggested that I should do something extreme, like walking to Marseille (200 km away) or punch someone and see what will happen. I realized that there was a whole universe separating our worlds, but somehow I appreciated his effort and started understanding his point of view.





The next day I decided to skip the workshop and I went to see various exhibitions around the town. I ended up to the exhibition of D'Agata. I already knew many photos, but there were some I had never seen before. The experience of the previous night at the bar made me see them with a different eye. I am neither conservative, nor a puritan, however some the images shocked me and others disturbed me deeply. After I left the exhibition I realized that these particular images got imprinted in my mind for hours, even days. My response to them was developing with time and when I managed to become honest to myself, I realized with shameful surprise that they were also exciting, in a very instinctive or subconscious level that I have probably been trained to dig deep under multiple layers of good manners and moral principles. It was then that I made some sense out of the work of this unusual man. He takes long, desperate dives into the dark corners of the soul, where one usually does not dare to look, where unacceptable thoughts and unspeakable desires are pushed and brings them to the surface. D'Agata shoots daemons, his daemons, our daemons.










One day, desperate with our bad photographs, he said to someone (it could very well have been me, but it was not): "Let's go back to the basics, why do you photograph?". I don't remember the response of the poor guy. but I remember very well the answer of D'Agata when I addressed the same question to him: "All I want is to keep on living in this world of sex and drugs and photography is the way I found to do it and be paid for it". Only much later, I realized that this sentence was the only, but very important lesson I learned in this workshop: the life and the work of a true artist are one and the same thing.









Some years later, an exhibition based on his work "Anticorps" was presented in the city where I live. A text written by him accompanied the photographs. I kept some passages that show his own views on his work:

The only freedom for those who have nothing, lies in self destruction. Refusing to reduce themselves to servitude, they find an outlet in sex, drugs and violence. In the same way, depravity has always been for me, a step towards emancipation. Years of slow and reasoned self-destruction, of narcotic experimentation, of urban survival and liaisons with prostitutes, have provoked in me a slow process of maturation on these questions. I cannot risk on purpose, my destiny without getting too close, that is removing the physical distance from the photographed body, coming materially into contact, seeing beyond and smelling odours, totally immersing myself through the senses and the nerves and eliciting physical reactions also in the self and the other. I photograph carnal relationships, scenes of ecstasies:I look at shattered bodies that struggle and console the other in primitive copulations. I have sex with prostitutes and I lick flesh and bodily fluids as an antidote to the profound silence that weighs on minds dehumanized by global economy and religion. My photography is developing immunity to stereotypical morals. It is condemned to be subversive, asocial, atheistic, erotic and immoral.

Instead of reducing photography to the sole capacity of recording reality, I take responsibility for the position I assume. Rejecting voyeuristic or sociological standpoints, the images ensure art and action are inseparable in the frantic search for the feeling of being alive, of being part of life. In this fragile attempt, the image is defined both through and within the act that engenders it. It's not my insight into the world that matters but my most intimate rapport with the world. I structure a physical and psychic path overshadowed by deformity, rejection, dependence, pain, numbness, estrangement, risk, hazard, desire or unconsciousness.





Monday, July 22, 2013

Το μυστικό της ανθρώπινης ύπαρξης


"...Γιατί το μυστικό της ανθρώπινης ύπαρξης είναι τούτο: Δε θέλει μονάχα να ζει, μα να ξέρει και γιατί ζει. Αν ο άνθρωπος δεν έχει μια σταθερή φαντασίωση του σκοπού για τον οποίο ζει, θα αρνηθεί να ζήσει, θα προτιμήσει να αυτοεκμηδενιστεί..."

Φ. Ντοστογιέφσκι, Ο Μέγας Ιεροεξεταστής

Saturday, July 20, 2013

"Burn in hell"


When Margaret Thatcher was at the peak of her power, I was a schoolboy living in a suburb of Athens. My age, my interests and my location back then, were simply too far from her affairs for me to have a personal and contemporary impression of her. I only remember the general feeling from the adults around: only Hitler was less popular. Years later and only after she had retired, some politicians back home dared to refer to her policies and ideas in a positive way.

When I started following the news, reading the newspapers etc. I got a rough idea of her ideology which I think the Pet Shop Boys accurately summarized in just one verse of their song "Shopping": I heard it in the House of Commons: everything's for sale


The ethics of political correctness require that immediately after the death of someone, especially of someone important, the achievements and qualities of the deceased should be underlined and the controversies should be overlooked. The text of Andrew O'Hagan, published (in the New York Books Review) just one month after the death of M.T is a spectacular expression of disrespect to this hypocritical rule and, at least for this reason, I think it is worth reading.

Some passages:

- She always slightly hated England’s elite, or hated the idea that you couldn’t have an elite of shopkeepers, and by the end she left Britain a greedier and seedier place. Despite the pomp and circumstance of her funeral and the many plaudits she has garnered since her death, her great experiment actually didn’t work: the people who could get rich got richer, of course, but she and her followers had no plan to relieve the economic misery that befell the others, the people who were now forced to live on state benefits, which continued to grow. It is the communities of the other—where no new investment took hold, where no new jobs came to replace the ones that were scrapped—that continue to fester in modern Britain.

- There was a country that died, the one in which the classes felt a little responsible for one another, survived wars together, a country in which young people used to have options outside the service industry or the gambling fraternity. And you can still see that country dying every day of the week on television. Gap-toothed and overlagered, unemployed and proud of nothing, the great-grandsons and daughters of the respectable working class are seen screaming at each other on The Jeremy Kyle Show, a tribute to Thatcher’s legacy and her impact on British social cohesion.
It was an impressive work of social engineering but ultimately a dreadful one. She created a population that is more dependent and less productive. She made us more individual but less cooperative.

- She ground the unions down but left workers with no alternative form of self-esteem or protection, and the result, today, is a workforce of the alienated. She boasted of setting people free but British working people have never been more enslaved to the whims of fashion, corporate greed, and agism than they are now. A young person from a former mining community where there might have been classes in the evenings and a sense of propriety, decency, modesty, and community can now only hope for a place in “the zone”—the world of the “haves”—by winning a celebrity contest or by thriving on the black market.
She made a Lottery nation.

- I grew up on one of those housing estates in Scotland. It was Ayrshire: a mining community and one also given over to farming and manufacturing. The first time I heard someone from our street talk about Thatcher, it was a couple of neighbors who had decided to buy their council house. Thatcher had made it possible for the government’s housing stock to be sold, giving tenants a “leg up” onto the property ladder. The couple loved Maggie: they were able to buy their house cheap and immediately changed the color of their front door, to show their neighbors they were now different.
All the kids in my class were given a small bottle of milk every day at mid-morning. It was nice to drink the milk, but nicer, in some larger way, to learn that you lived in a country where the government your parents paid their taxes to cared about you that minutely. Thatcher stopped the milk. It seemed new, the thought that people who didn’t want to strive and become better than their neighbors were totally lacking in spirit.
At first it seemed like a small philosophical problem: older people, hard-working people, contented people, sick people would argue that they didn’t have to be winners. They didn’t want to do better: they were quite happy to do fine. They liked being like other people. It squared with their sense of belonging and with their idea of what made British life stable. My mother worked in a youth club and Thatcher closed it down.

-In 1984 the coal miners down the road at Auchinleck went on strike. It wasn’t controversial to hold the view that some of the unions were out of control, that change had to happen, and that arrogance was rife. But suddenly there was a turn in the conversation, not locally, but on the TV news: the union men were now corrupt, evil, violent criminals. To us they were hardworking men who made half-decent wages in terrible conditions, people who lived in modest houses and had holidays at the English seaside. But in the news they were tyrants and Mrs. Thatcher was going to bring them down.
There was never any sense that she respected these men or the dangers they endured; no sense that these people were fighting for something real and good and irreplaceable. To us Thatcher was always a politician made of hard dogma, almost sociopathic in her inability to see the human beings behind the percentages she wielded like knives.

- Those who want to test the view that Mrs. Thatcher’s government had excellent recovery plans for Auchinleck and New Cumnock should visit the towns today. Unemployment and social problems have destroyed community life there and in March 2013 New Cumnock was voted Scotland’s most dismal town. There are no shops, there are derelict houses, the town hall is facing closure, and the church is empty. And that is only one of hundreds of towns in Britain that felt the impact of the Thatcher revolution.

- There was a vanity in Mrs. Thatcher, much copied by her followers, that the enmity she stirred up in people was merely a reflection of her toughness when it came to “getting things done.” But it was mindless of her to think so. Politicians have always been disliked and always blamed, but Thatcher appeared to many people in Britain to have no feeling for the people whose lives were hurt by her policies. No feeling and no understanding. Her stridency appeared to excite boys who remembered their nannies, but to other men and women, the poorer sort, she was the incarnation of blind authority. She knew there were real families out there in Britain’s hinterlands or northern lands, yet, like a crazed statistician or a bad novelist, she couldn’t really imagine what their lives must be like.

- “Can’t pay. Won’t pay.” That was another slogan born around the same time in response to the Poll Tax introduced by Mrs. Thatcher. The idea was to levy the same local rates regardless of income, a boost to rich people on large incomes in the south but a misery for those struggling in the north, which was already blighted by industry closures. It was the final nail. Even her biggest supporters recognized that, with the Poll Tax, Mrs. Thatcher was contravening a basic tenet of fairness that had always, at some level, seemed crucial in Britain. (Even if it wasn’t: it seemed so.) It wasn’t fair what she was doing and the fact that she tried out the Poll Tax in Scotland before bringing it to England felt like a beastly act. It was probably the single biggest contributing factor to the resurgence of the Scottish National Party and the later establishment of a devolved Scottish parliament. She hated the idea of such a parliament but it can be counted as one of her unwitting creations.

- The Economist, still admiring her linkage of low taxes and the end of the cold war, sees that she was too often driven by something punitive. “Hatred, it is true, sometimes blinded her,” said the magazine in a recent editorial.

- Her stridency, from her early days as “Thatcher the milk snatcher” to her defenestration by her own party, was divisive. Under her the Conservatives shrank from a national force to being a party of the rich south. She couldn’t hold the nation together, indeed she drove it apart, and that is because she didn’t really believe in the nation except as a sentimental or martial entity. That’s the strangest legacy of all about Maggie: if you listen to those who loved her and thought she was manifestly right, you find, after a while, that you are with people who don’t know their own country and don’t like it either. They think they like it because they don’t like Europe, but in fact, they abjure both. They like their own lives, of course, and their own kind, but they imagine the rest of Britain is mainly an unspeakable place of aliens and scroungers. This feeling borrows heavily from Thatcher and her notion that there is no such thing as society.

- She wasn’t fair and she didn’t know the meaning of the word. If she had, she would have helped, not opposed, Nelson Mandela in his fight against apartheid. She wouldn’t have personally ordered the sinking of the Argentinian warship General Belgrano even though it was outside the defined exclusion zone. (Three hundred and twenty-three men died that night.) She wasn’t fair and she wasn’t just, either, otherwise she would have seen—as many of her ministers did—that the Poll Tax would only make life harder for people who were already struggling.

- Those who questioned the rise of get-rich-quick-ness as a responsible way to live and a decent way to support the population were treated as Communists. Speaking personally, I never particularly liked the manners and corruptions of a certain bullying group of trade unionists. But still, looked at with open eyes, one might argue that the excesses of those union men were a little smaller-scale, a little local, when compared with a good many of today’s bankers and oligarchs. To Thatcher’s metaphorical children there is no argument there: a free-market criminal is always preferable to a left-leaning one, even though, as we have discovered, both can be state-sponsored.

- Mrs. Thatcher gave the modern world a new kind of distrust for liberal values whenever they came up against market demands. She thought people who didn’t agree with her revelations were “the enemy within.” People who didn’t agree with Mrs. Thatcher were just not “one of us,” they deserved no empathy, had to be beaten, and Britain for a while found her drama of certainty addictive.

- There was, appropriately enough, a gun carriage and a military procession in London on the day of her funeral, while 378 miles away, in the former mining town of New Cumnock, the third-generation unemployed put their dole money together to throw a street party.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

"Πως να κυβερνήσετε την Ελλάδα, for dummies"


Έχει καταντήσει αστεία αυτή, η τόσο προβλεψιμη πλέον, επανάληψη, ο (φαύλος) κύκλος που ακολουθούν όλα τα κόμματα στην Ελλαδα μ.Κ (μετά Κρίσης):

Στην αρχή (όταν τα ποσοστα είναι χαμηλά) το σύνθημα είναι να σκίσουμε τα μνημόνια και να βγούμε από το ευρώ, μετά (όταν ανεβούμε κανά-δυό μονάδες) το αλλάζουμε λίγο: να σκίσουμε τα μνημόνια αλλά να μεινουμε στο ευρώ. Όταν τα ποσοστά ανεβούν αρκετά ώστε να υπάρχει κυβερνητική πιθανότητα το σλόγκαν γίνεται: να διαπραγματευτούμε με τους εταίρους (την απαγγίστρωση, το κούρεμα, τη μερική διαγραφή, την ολική διαγραφή διαλέξτε τι σας αρέσει). Όταν, με το καλό γίνουμε κυβέρνηση, επειδή δεν έχουμε κανένα δικό μας σχέδιο αλλά χρειαζόμαστε τα δανεικά ευρώπουλα, υπογράφουμε ό,τι βρούμε μπροστά μας.

Το έκαναν όλοι (από πασοκ ως, νδ, απο καρατζαφέρη ως δημαρ), τώρα έμαθε τα κόλπα και ο συριζα:

"Tο νέο ενιαίο κόμμα που προέκυψε από το τετραήμερο Συνέδριο του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, καταψήφισε όλες τις "ριζοσπαστικές" προτάσεις της Αριστερής Πλατφόρμας, εκφωνώντας ένα ηχηρό "Όχι" στην έξοδο της χώρας από την Ευρωζώνη καθώς και οιοδήποτε ενδεχόμενο μονομερούς καταγγελίας του Μνημονίου."

Άντε και πρωθυπουργός Αλέξη, είσαι έτοιμος.

Ρε όλοι το ίδιο manual "Πως να κυβερνήσετε την Ελλάδα, for dummies" διαβάζουν;

Υ.Γ στοιχιματιζω οτι και η Χ.Α αν ξεπεράσει το 20% θα γινει πιο διαλλακτική...