A Church, A Sculpture, A Score: Unsettling the Ground of Modern Athens with Three Compositional Figures

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of three artworks—a church, a sculpture, and a score—situated in Athens, Greece and how their heterogenous compositions unsettle the oft-rigid foundations of the Greek capital. The project is framed through a traditional pairing from art history, “figure / ground,” a pairing which has long organized taxonomies of visual representations as well as defined the terms by which Athens has been understood. The city, I contend, stands on unstable ground—historically, geographically, politically, seismically. In response to these unsteady oscillations, Athens has been grounded along three axes—“visibility,” “continuity,” and “autochthony”—which have sought to stabilize the material and discursive construction of the modern city. The figures, meanwhile, begin as a church, a sculpture, and a score (corresponding to the study’s three chapters), which are paired respectively with three conceptual figures: topography, subterranean, and the continuum. Throughout this dissertation, I trace how these oscillating figures soften and wear down the foundations on which modern Athens has been built. The church, Agios Dimitrios Loumbardiaris, was a millennia-old structure renovated in the 1950s by the architect Dimitris Pikionis. Thinking with the architect’s written and spatial practice of topography, I foreground how the myriad surfaces of the building and its surrounding pathways run in an unsteady continuity with the accreting topographies of Athens. In doing so, I argue that Athens is a composite city, not pure and unbroken; more a material bricolage, than textual palimpsest, of pieces of its past. The sculpture, Fix It, is a site-specific installation by the artist Mona Hatoum, held in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. Composed of rusting industrial detritus salvaged from the Museum building’s former life as the Fix Beer brewery, the installation is alternately animated by a buzzing hum and shocking jolts of electricity—before falling silent. The work has had an oft-interrupted exhibition history, all while its sculptural form continues to break down into rusty flakes and gathering dust. Moving alongside the work’s decomposition, I follow the artwork’s vibrations underneath the museum and into the earth, seeking a subterranean perspective from which to trace the frequent disruptions that have defined the history of modern Athens. The score, Epicycle, was composed by Jani Christou in 1968 and debuted in a performance in December of that year. The continuum was a central idea in Christou’s work and was expressed in Epicycle as an ongoing yet constantly interrupted line, a “sustained sound” that, like Fix It, falls silent. The continuum spans the composition’s score before running off the page’s edge—into the work’s performance, its two recordings, and connecting to the wider socio-political context of 1968. Oscillating between repetition and disruption, Epicycle mirrors the broken continuities that span the bricolaged, topographic surfaces constituting Loumbardiaris and the decomposing, subterranean forms underlying Fix It. Ultimately, these three figures of thought do not offer a method, exactly. Rather, they begin by reflecting the material and compositional qualities of the artworks that engendered them; ripple outward to produce different understandings of modern Athens; and then spiral further to unsettle prevailing narratives that underpin the modern Greek nation-state. And finally, softly, these oscillating figures disturb the sometimes static relationship between figure / ground on which art history has rested, asking what potentials the discipline could hold to be practiced differently.