ISSN 2411-0795
ISSN 2411-0795
Keywords: Elytis, modernism, cubism, imaginary museum, French theory, curatorialism, art criticism, metaphysical painting, construction of experience
Markov A.V. Odysseas Elytis as an Interpreter of Modernist Art. // Theory and History of Art. 2023. N 3/4, p.182–195
This article examines an essay by the greatest Greek poet of the twentieth century, Odysseas Elytis, The Divisor K in Modern Painting. The essay refers to the type of imaginary museum accompanied by a curatorial text. Elytis highlights and justifies the metaphysical line in the development of art, which he draws from the hieratic art of ancient civilizations and contrasts it with the procedural line in art, to which he includes both representational and non-representational art of inner experience. Elytis does not use any special terminology, but only generates a phenomenology of affects that distinguishes the metaphysical art he likes from the procedural art.
A number of methodological tools are involved to reconstruct Elytis's position. First, his thought belongs to a specific post-Byzantine tradition in which the argument is constructed not as a constitution but as an arc of demonstrative persuasion, with elements of iconicity. Second, the movement of his thought largely reproduces the principles of Grounded theory in sociology, where the application of qualitative methods at all stages calls for the displacement of concepts with images. Third, Elytis, who was familiar with French speculative thought and psychoanalysis in the first half of the twentieth century, carries out operations comparable to those of Lacan and his followers as well as to the post-structuralist understanding of seduction.
The application of such tools has made clear the conception of Elytis's imaginary museum. First of all, Elytis combines the notion of the imaginary from French theory with a depiction of the museum as a house, a building, a structure, as opposed to a laboratory, that is, he applies an institutional critique. Further, Elytis treats the subjects of modernist art not as a deformation and transformation of reality in art, but as a search for equivalents, thereby bringing together the norm of Orthodox iconography as a direct representation of the otherness and the norm of the Paris studio (like Picasso's studio) as a constant fabrication in different techniques of equivalents of the artist's experience, the relentless production of correspondences to the artist's experience in different materials. Finally, Elytis applies a mathematical code that can construct the unity of the artistic process of the modernist era - and this version of unity may well be in demand by contemporary art history and art criticism as well.