Water
Amphora, diameter 22cm x 60 height- 2018.
The European
Commission in Cyprus and Europa Nostra, selected this particular
Cypriot terracotta amphorae, for the European Year of Cultural
Heritage. Three amphorae were made, all three shared the same
quote by Gottfried Semper and the same 7thC BC bird:
A video with
artists notes were made:
The handwritten
text is a quote from Gottfied Semper´s Der Stil in den
technischen und tektonischen Künsten (186063; Style
in the Technical and Tectonic Arts): *«Every artistic
creation (
) presumes the destruction of reality, of the
material, is necessary if form is to emerge as a meaningful
symbol, as an autonomous human creation»
#Prolegomena - practicalAesthetics
#materialTransformation
#CulturalHeritage - Artistic motive
And on the other half is a handpainted 7thC
B.C. archaic bird with tree branch ( as seen in the Cypriot
Archaelogical Museums and reproduced today by the Handicraft
Centre, a government-sponsored foundation committed to preserving
Cypriot heritage handicrafts).
At the entrance of the amphora is a stainless-steel
sink fitter.
For the most part, an amphora was
tableware, or sat close to the table, was intended to be seen,
and was finely decorated as such by master painters.
Stoppers of perishable materials, which
have rarely survived, were used to seal the contents. This water
carrying amphora , today replaced by the tap (hence the
contemporary household sink gadget) has the exact copy of the
painting of the 7th BC bird with a branch (seen in one of the
amphorae of the Cyprus Archaelogical Museum). And the readymade
sink stopper on its lip. READYMADES (an art term),
usually associated with Duchamp, are ordinary manufactured
objects that challenged conventional notions of what is, and what
is not, art.
Cultural heritage implies values and
traditions, a shared bond, our belonging to a community. It
represents our history and our identity; our bond to the past, to
our present, and the future.
As an artist I spend a great deal of my
time visiting museums. And on my way out from many of these
museums, I pass by the gift shop. I believe that today we live in
a Culture of Copies, replicas or reproductions.
Within these art museum gift shops, one
can often find plaster casts of famous sculptures, copies of
ancient amphoras, postcards, magnets, posters, etc., copies,
reproductions in all different sizes of the art objects held in
the museum itself. And I always wonder who makes them? In Cyprus,
the Cyprus Handicraft Centre has trained staff to make the most
excellent copies in clay painting, with an aim to preserve
cultural heritage.
Museums are commonly described as
storehouses of the real, authentic, material object, yet today
they are eagerly embracing old and new copying technologies, not
only for selling in their gift shop, but also for exhibiting
inside their museum space, from handcrafted to 3D printing of
museum copies (sometimes even replacing the authentic that either
belongs to another museum or is lent), to complete multimedia
sensorial-immersive digital exhibitions, usually of old masters
such as Caravaggios art revitalized etc
This has provoked debates which have
produced binary oppositions: the original versus the copy, the
material versus the immaterial, the real versus the virtual, and
the authentic versus the inauthentic ( not to mention the
interrogation of fakes and forgeries).
The sum up, the water amphora is
placed on a rotating stand (with a microwave mechanism), and
merges different chronological styles, from the bird of antiquity
to the modern household readymade sink, via the German architect Gottfried
Semper, (1803-79) who who spend his life studying and writing
about the classics in Style in the Technical and Tectonic
Arts.
A rotating display stand to exhibit this
amphora made by the artist would be the optimum way to exhibit
this piece. The rotation mechanism is taken from a microwave.