Fantastic beings and where to find them (City Dwellers and Hadjipateras’ natural philosophy of restlessness)

   A very small introduction

 I have a small confession to make.

 When I was initially approached by Alexandra Koroxenidis to make this presentation of Mark Hadjipatera's work, I had some doubts.

 As a writer and researcher, for the last few years, my focus has been almost exclusively on women artists, femininities and generally on feminist and political art.

 This task seemed like a departure from my usual path, and that was a challenge. Alexandra Koroxenidis, who was my chief director while working in the Art Newspaper, knows my field of specialization very well; that is why I was puzzled at the beginning.

 It is not that I didn’t know Mark Hadjipateras' work. Of course, I did, especially his public works and a great part of his paintings, but not the whole of it. And you never really know an artist's work if you haven’t looked at it in its entirety, valuing its path and evolution through time and space.

Only then can you realise their artistic philosophy and the spirit that undergoes their work.

 So, only when I delved deeper into Mark Hadjipateras' work did I come to understand why Alexandra had asked me this task. The more I immersed myself in this beautiful book, studying these magnificent works and the excellent texts accompanying them, the more I understood how Hadjipateras’ artistic vision is so compatible with the political and the humanitarian vision of a world of diversity and inclusion which is also my research focus points.

So, If I could give a title to this presentation this would be:

Fantastic beings and where to find them

(City Dwellers and Hadjipateras’ natural philosophy of restlessness)

The Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, at the beginning of his Book of Imaginary Beings ―a small encyclopaedia of how rich human imagination could be, envisioning the different― wonders how come and children who go to a zoo for the very first time never get alarmed or frightened by all these peculiar creatures they have never seen before, but, instead, enjoy it so much.

 Plato (says Borges) (if he were invited to join in this discussion) would tell us that the child had already seen the tiger in a primal world of archetypes and that now on seeing the tiger she recognizes it.

 Schopenhauer (even more wondrously) would tell us that the child looks at the tigers without fear because she is aware that she is the tigers and the tigers are she or, more accurately, that both she and the tigers are but forms of that single essence, the Will.

 According to Schopenhauer, will is the substratum of all appearances and hence of all nature (…), which we find in our innermost selves.

 This notion, the will, that is, the presence of a common base, a ground or energy that through its unstoppable flow and transformation, everything human or non-human, organic or inorganic, is taking shape, has appeared in many ways throughout the human history of ideas.

 Lucretius called it the clinamen, and the philosopher Baruch Spinoza named it conatus. For the French philosopher Henri Bergson, it was the Elan Vital, and Gilles Deleuze named it the plane of immanence.

 In all these philosophical systems, the main idea spins around vitalism. Existence as a form of becoming.

 Since the beginning of his career, Mark Hadjipateras’ work has had this distinct quality of being on the verge.

 The lines in his early paintings are always ready to become something else; it is like nothing is stable or definite, and this sense, this constant implication of a movement (as described by Barry Schwabsky, who gives an excellent account of this quality in his amazing catalogue text), seems to create a crucial element of his artistic identity.

 A very personal natural philosophy of restlessness.

Within this reading, Hadjipateras’ artworks are in a flux, in an organic evolution that feels like leading them from one medium to another. They move from two dimensions to three and back, from representation to abstraction and back to representation, and all these in such an organic sequence, like through an inner impulse. It is like it couldn’t be otherwise. Nothing implies any kind of stiff determinism. There is no obvious artistic target. Only, perhaps, a kind of inclination, a slope. Creation is always moving forward.

This permanent transitional status reminds me of the quality art historian Herbert Read describes in his History of Modern Sculpture when he discusses Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore’s sculptures. He calls it the “anima” that we project into all subjects, the quality of the Chinese ch’I, the universal force that flows through all things, and which the artist must transmit to his creations if they are to affect other people.

This notion of ”anima”, or Chinese ch’I, so indispensable for the engagement of the public, encompasses the Budism’s worldview of a world where everything is interconnected, a world inter-dependency we could say.

It is also another approach to vitalism.

While keeping up with this artistic genealogy of Vitalistic tradition, Hadjipateras is at the same time in continuous interaction with his own era as well as with Art History. His late 80s abstractions, for example, were carrying modernistic utopias and youthful idealism, the strong desire for a dialogue with nature ―wishing to convey a sense of Nature’s cycles as beautifully described by Koroxenidis in her text―, while in his following sculptural installations, we can detect a disquiet about time and its stratification, almost similar to Robert Smithson’s thinking.

 In works like Terrain (1993) and Manahatta (1994)), besides his obvious critical look towards power games and colonisation’s cruelty, there is also this subversive sense of an emergence, the indiscernible shaping of a new form through what was already there. The before and the after always coexist in an inquiry on time and space while something is about to be born; the artworks function as the innuendo of the passage from the virtual to the actual, a very slow and gradual, almost molecular rising movement, like a plant that is about to sprout.

 A wink to biology.

 I think this is when the City Dwellers, his fantastic beings, start their virtualisation.

 In the introduction of his seminal book, The Order of Things, the French philosopher Michel Foucault makes his own reference to Borges. In his short essay, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins Borges refers to another encyclopaedia, an infamous Chinese Encyclopaedia titled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which ―according to the philosopher― through his paradoxical taxonomies shatters the known order of things.

On the basis of the power of the continuum held by nature, says Foucault in his book, the monster ensures the emergence of difference.

By monster, he means everything that is beyond what we call normal.

The monster is called a monster because it belongs to a category different from the one the normal belongs, according to the known order of things.

Now, let’s follow City Dwellers’ path towards actualization: From unexpected small Arte Povera sculptures made by found objects and natural materials at the end of 90s and pop-art vibrant acrylics, through the Box Series’ comic drawings (1998) and his surrealistic meetings in True Love and Lost and Found sculptures, till the beautiful ethnographic chaos of NO VISA (2003) world, there is a free metamorphic line that tends to play with the outlines while shaping abstractly historical and mythical elements.

I’d like to interpret this movement as stepping out from the Known Order of Things (that is, the strictly disciplined order that is somehow expressed in earlier works like Terrain (1993) or Bittersweetville (1992), for example) and walking into gentle chaos. A creative chaos. The ground where the Lucretian clinamen is bound to happen. Koroxenidis finds its origins in Brussels (1988) and describes it as the combinatory motif of order and disorder.

In here are the roots of every myth, an investigation of the primordial. The seeking of a utopian ideal. Don’t we need a new chaos for a new vision after all? Don’t’ we need to shatter the known order of things to create a welcoming disorder?

City Dwellers are the proud offsprings of this fertile chaos, the carriers of the new. Their virtuality has passed through oil monotypes, sculptures made of found objects, New York underground walls, and ceramic abstractions, encompassing several lines, motives, and feelings before finding a distinct material body only at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, a heavy era, an era of turbulence, large-scale people’s movement and financial but mostly humanitarian crises.

Adapting this quality of monotype — a medium that Hadjipateras loves so much— which accumulates in every artistic step traces of the previous ones, City Dwellers seem to embody the artist’s long artistic history within their forms. Like the Imaginary Beings in Borges’ book, City Dwellers draw on multiple sources, friendly alien intermarriages of myths and facts, feelings and thoughts, dreams and reality, modernism and contemporary pop culture.

Sometimes, they have escaped a fairy tale or a feeling; other times, they come straight from the physical world or technology. Their strong metamorphous force leads them to several formal and spatial adventures. They travel through abstract spaces. discuss with Arp and Miro or Picasso and Gorky, following the morphic inquiries of Dubuffet or vaguely referring to some surrealistic landscapes, sometimes cheating abstraction with dreamful representations. And all these, just before reincarnating first into bronze, vibrating from the spirit of music, and then into aluminium, starting to create their very own playful settlements.

Hadjipateras chooses the term Universal Habitat to describe the gathering of his polymorphic creatures. This choice is more than sensible. They are not colonies, not even societies. These words are polluted by a vociferous, greedy and cruel humanity, by exploitations, inequalities, exclusions and unfair wars. By violence.

In contrast, a habitat carries the tranquillity of the natural world—the serenity of a lake or a forest where Western human civilisation hasn’t yet imposed its canons and dualisms, or, even better, of an afterwards community, in a post-human or rather post-anthropocentric age.

 And from this fresh posthumanist and non-anthropocentric standpoint comes another very new reading of the old good vitalism by the postmodern feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti.

 Within her vitalist materialism, Braidotti describes the flux of existence as a process of becoming—a perpetual entanglement between different forms of matter. Breaking away from the dominant dualistic mindset, this new materialism proposes a new conceptualisation of difference.

That is ―as Foucault would say―a new conceptualisation of the monster. It is exactly this post-humanism vision that City Dwellers articulate through their hybrid playfully monstrous nature and their marvellous combination of so many different aspects of matter, feelings, and imagination.

None of the creatures of The Universal Habitat is defective. Like the pebbles on a beach, they are distinctive, alternative and beautiful in their different sizes, shapes, and moods. They cannot adhere to any aesthetic criteria; they are all equally joyful. Their hybrid and polymorphic peculiarity challenges anthropocentrism and invites us to engage in an affirmative, childhood experience of the world as a place full of animated matter, possibilities, and diversity.

They call us to recognise that we are the monsters and the monsters are we or, more accurately, ―as Schopenhauer would say― that we and the monsters are but forms of that single essence, the will.

Keeping up with their perpetual spacetime game between virtuality and actualisation, City Dwellers project part of themselves into the future of the 2020s, when the artist returns to his modernistic origins. Proceeding from his earlier “art history paintings” to a new vibrant geometrical idiom, he researches relationships and aesthetic possibilities between colours and shapes, shadows and planes.

Within these bold and rich colourful abstractions that were made during and after the long quarantine’s difficult years, Hadjipateras lays a loud claim to pleasure. As Koroxenidis notices aptly in her text, Hadjipateras identifies colour with beauty, which can be a controversial issue in contemporary art. And she continues: He associates beauty with pleasure and enjoyment, with feelings based on the sensory and empirical world.

By opening his artistic vision towards the fair demand for happiness, he actually continues the affirmation process that is so prominent in City Dwellers and Universal Habitat.

In times of war, conflict, and social upheavals, says Braidotti, the suitable way to pursue social justice is through affirmative ethics.

Affirmative ethics mean, among other things, the construction of hope, or as Hadjipateras names his playful children's installation, Building Hope, a mindset well rooted in his bright internationalist optimism as is wonderfully described in Christopher Hudson's text.

Signifying and proposing a new, more profound and tender way of approaching life, inviting us to recognize the sameness of our substructure, our common original material, and glorify the similarities and differences of all the elements of our world, human or non-human, organic or not, City Dwellers, these meta-mythical shapeshifters, Hadjipateras’ fantastic beings, proud inhabitants of his restless and ongoing Universal Habitat, introduce a bright democracy of gaze.

This gaze, this democratic gaze, allows us to look at the overwhelming multiplicity around us with excitement, admiration, and engagement, just like children who go to the zoo for the very first time and, instead of getting alarmed or frightened by all these peculiar creatures they have never seen before, they enjoy it so much.

 this text was originally written for a lecture given to the hellenic center IN march 2024 ON the occasion of the publication of mark hadjipateras’ book homeward