Theodoros, sculptor

Theodoros, sculptor, Manipulations—Antispectacular, 1974, sculptural installation in five parts, Collection National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), installation view, ANTIDORON. The EMST Collection, Fridericianum, Kassel, photo: Jasper Kettner

Since the end of the 1960s, the sculptor Theodoros has systematically brought the medium of sculpture into dialogue with other media, including mass media, such as in his “anti-spectacular screens.” In the context of that era’s television, a medium that in Greece became a mass medium only after the colonel’s regime appreciated its propaganda potential, as well as in relation to today’s decaying self-referencing TV programs, these screens ask questions and demand bi-directional communication. In order to reinforce the possibility of communication between artist and audience through the artwork, Theodoros exhibited the screens together with a questionnaire that viewers were asked to fill in, calling into question the process and rules that govern the creation and reception of art as well as the institutional framework on which these are grounded.

Variations for a Monument to the Known… (Fire) is part of a series of anti-monuments to military violence in which Theodoros subjects the Matraque-Phallus, his invented signature symbol embodying the interconnectedness of state, sexual, and artistic power, to a series of tortures.

WITH LOVE
DON’T LOOK—PROJECT YOUR VISION
OUT—UNDER THE FRAMEWORK
BEHIND—BEYOND THE SURFACE

Posted in Public Exhibition