Euripides Altintzoglou | Reversible

Exhibition duration: September 22th – October 15th, 2011

Beton7 Gallery presents "Reversible" a solo exhibition of Euripides Altintzoglou.

Euripides Altintzoglou presents us with a body of work that encourages change. In doing so, the first collection of works is a group of engaging radical portraits that allow the viewer to become part of the work while at the same time they invite us to face various prohibitions that impede our personal development. These portraits are complemented with a self-portrait of the artist that underlines the anti-dualist character of these works. Change, then, expands onto the socio-political domain as the second group of sculptural installations draws on issues around knowledge, trust and systemic flaws.

Euripides Altintzoglou was born in Drama in 1978. From adolescence, he comes into contact with art through his family environment and takes classes in traditional sculpture and painting. Enthused by Conceptual Art, in 1996 he begins his studies at the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Wolverhampton, specializing in Sculpture, supervised by David Bainbridge (founding member of Conceptual Art group Art & Language). He continues his postgraduate studies at the same institution choosing directions that expand his practice (MA, Fine Art as Social Practice) and also theoretical and philosophical interests (PhD, Dualism and the Critical Languages of Portraiture). Since 2004 he is employed as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts and Photography, University of Wolverhampton, and since 2011 he holds the same post in the Department of Philosophy at the same institution. In 2009, he embarks on the theoretical project Obituaries, combining Critical Theory and Philosophy, which is published in the form of a monthly column in the British magazine It's Alive, also available online in the form of a blog (culturalobituaries.blogspot.com). In 2011 he launches the international research journal Desearch, providing publishing opportunities to young researchers, for which he soon wins British and European awards. His work has been exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions in private galleries (New Art Gallery Walsall) and public museums of Great Britain.

Artist’s Statement

Back in 2003 I was in the city of Manchester for a day, showing my support to a good friend who was giving a lecture at the Cornerhouse Gallery. I arrived a couple of hours early in order to take advantage of the day out and see the town. On my way to the Cornerhouse I walked into Manchester Art Gallery coming across a touring show organized by Channel 4 called Self Portrait UK. The exhibition included a number of self-portraits by celebrities as well as up to a hundred works created by amateur or occasional artists for Channel 4’s project. Up to this day I was largely indifferent towards conventional portraits, which I used to consider as being the result of narcissism and self-valorization, given their aesthetic and ideological subservience to the honorific mechanisms of celebrity. However, while I was skimming through the works with this preset opinion I came across a few portraits that forced me to question my recently acquired pseudo-intellectual arrogance.

The most intellectually stimulating self-portraits were the ones created by A. P. Wilkinson, Suzy Mason, and Jenni Setchel. Wilkinson’s portrait was a minimalist monochrome, nothing more than a framed blank black sheet of paper. The work was accompanied by Wilkinson’s statement:
At your portrait competition I thought I’d have a go. But how to start my painting I really don’t know. The man said anyone can do it. But my paper’s blank, you’ll find as this is how I see myself. Because you see I’m blind.

In its poetic sincerity Wilkinson’s statement conveys a brief account of the current popular perception of what is a portrait: a visual representation of external appearance. Yet, Wilkinson’s drive to overcome the restrictions of his physical impairment enabled him to produce a self-portrait as a form of protest against the visual heritage of modernism, by referring back, perhaps unintentionally, to its key avant-garde moments. Wilkinson’s non-figurative take on portraiture was extended even further by Mason’s contribution to the show, a self-portrait consisting of a framed supermarket receipt. This radical portrait avoided conventional means of representation by disassociating the portrayal of the self from the body through the employment of allegory. In doing so, the work redirected attention to the representation of the self as an active presence in the world, whose importance is largely dismissed by Cartesian method. The substitution of the figure with text was what caught my attention in Setchell’s self-portrait, which consisted of a selection of printed memories tactically organized in discreet envelopes labeled chronologically. Like Mason, Setchell turned to the domain of lived experience (as opposed to private introspection) in order to create her self-portrait, reflected in the act of archiving her most treasured memories. More significantly, Setchell’s self-portrait touches on an important question of consciousness (how the mind’s cognitive functions rely on external information) thereby, rejecting the customary Cartesian view of a competitive relationship between mind-body, inner-outer, subjective-objective.

What these three works demonstrate, first and foremost, is that aspects of radical or alternative forms of portraiture have permeated popular perceptions of selfhood. What is also noteworthy is that this radicalism runs parallel with the latest philosophical and medical advances in the theorization of consciousness, the self and subjectivity. For instance, W. Teed Rockwell proposes that consciousness is not the sole product of a centralised mind located in the brain at all, but it is instead the product of the entire nervous system.[1] Contrary to neuroscience, and artificial intelligence theory, this approach therefore does not focus on the brain’s intrinsic qualities, but relates brain activity to behaviour, language, etc.; in short it perceives brain activity as a part of a “nexus of relations between brain-body-world”.[2] Therefore, the brain should not be seen as a “separate organ distinct from the rest of the nervous system” [3] as this leads inevitably to materialist claims regarding unidentified brain activities, and also to the metaphysical claim that some sort of ‘psychic’ power is involved in channeling information from body-neurons to the brain. If, instead, consciousness is a property of the brain and the rest of the body then there is no need to talk of the internal channeling of information. Rockwell is allocating an equal importance to all parts of the brain-body-world network by rejecting the false perception of a hierarchical order with an independent brain sitting on the top. However, he does not claim that all parts of the nexus are self-conscious, but that, consciousness is a collective product and an emergent property of the interactions between the nexus’ parts. The outcome is that the central dualist image of a conflictual relationship between mind and body is replaced by one of distribution and collaboration.[4]

In medical science, the theory of Cellular Memory – organ cells bearing memory of personality traits – threatens to shake the very foundations of dualist notions of human nature and biological and medical understandings of the human body. Gary Schwartz, Linda Russek and Paul Pearsall, the leaders in this area of research, interviewed almost three hundred cases between them of transplant recipients who have experienced personality changes as a result of their surgical procedure.[5] According to Swartz and Pearsall, when patients receive organ transplants often they will inherit traits of the donors’ personalities. The overwhelming endorsement of Cellular Memory by parapsychology, however, has damaged its scientific credibility. [6] Yet, Candace Pert has approached the subject from a biological-materialist perspective in an effort to clarify the medical and philosophical implication of this phenomenon. Prior to her research amino acid chains were known to exist solely in the brain. As a result of her research, though, she has discovered their existence in various parts of the body, particularly in the major organs such as the lungs and heart.[7] The discovery of neuropeptides in all body tissues encouraged Pert to suggest that cellular receptors regulate the conscious or unconscious status of memories. This finding enforces the possibility of an existing network of physiological connections between memories, the brain and major organs, all of which participate in the emergence of consciousness.

The concept of Cellular Memory, then, deals a second significant blow to dualist materialism (mind = brain), adding to recent neurological research that suggests the brain is more hormonal than neural,[8] that is, both areas of research reject the concept of the brain as the body’s headquarters where all information is directed through neurons to a central processor. Moreover, both of these research programmes support Rockwell’s network theory in so far as they allow for a theory of consciousness and self to emerge out of collaborative relations and not from hierarchical body/mind divisions. As we have seen for Rockwell, it is philosophically ignorant and scientifically impossible for a conscious mind to emerge without the presence and equal participation of the body; without the influence of the body the mind would have very little to reflect on.

The relationship between portraiture and philosophy is not causally linked in a direct sense, since such a position would presuppose the subordination of art to philosophy. Therefore, an account of portraiture is at the same time not reducible to the formation of the Western subject.   However, we have to ask why do portraits exist in the intellectual form that they do? My approach to this art-historical question is defined by the view that the relation of art and philosophy is synagonistic and not antagonistic, both sharing a common reflective nature and often, as such sharing similar paths in their development. The notion that the causal view is highly problematic is highlighted by its potential methodological ineffectiveness in a discussion of early portraiture in relation to the representation of the self, since the self, as a distinct concept did not exist before Descartes, in spite of the fact that the dualist mind/body problem derives from Plato and Aristotle. A systematic philosophic analysis of human nature and metaphysics might not exist prior to classicism, yet, the strong influence of the concept of the ‘after life’ in Egyptian religion, culture and art (viz pyramids, sarcophaguses) acts as a testament to the fact that artists’ dealing with certain issues which have come to be considered as philosophical subjects, might be parallel to, yet independent of philosophy.[9] Thus, artists may not necessarily be philosophically aware of the mind/body split but they do acknowledge the issue through the adoption, transformation and development of the subgenres of portraiture. It could be argued that every artist that has dealt with portraiture has dealt, to a variable extent, with the question of being and identity.

The traditional, academic portrait has clearly been subject to various forms of denaturalisation over the last 100 years, but it is only with the incorporation of photography, and text, into 1960s avant-garde art, and as such its rejection of the 'expressive' model of representation generally, that the claims of the traditional portrait to reflect or mirror the identity of the sitter have been questioned in any explicit fashion, producing a widespread critique of the Cartesian self. Up until the moment of post-1960’s portraiture the course of aesthetic development for the last four thousand years has been trapped in a formalist vicious circle between realism and abstraction. Starting from the abstract representations of Egyptian Pharaohs portraiture was then taken over by Classicist naturalism only to return to abstraction during the Byzantine era and the Middle Ages. At the dawn of the Renaissance and the cultural return to the classicist humanist ethos excellence in portraiture became intrinsically connected with realistic depiction, although classicist notions of the ‘honorific’ and ‘exemplary’ have pushed artists to idealize the representation of their subjects. The modernist rejection of realism encouraged a full return to abstraction with portraiture offering extra challenges for formalist experimentation. Naturalism is no longer the preferred model for the representation of the sitter’s ‘inner being’, insofar as it is regarded as too formally restrictive and too subordinate to the interests of clients. Accordingly, formalist abstraction begins to gain ground as it enables an impression of the ‘spiritual’ in artistic form to transform the physical representation of the subject. Post-1960’s portraiture abandoned the expressive heroism of high modernism, adopting a research-based approach to the representation of the subject. However, this realism is not to be identified with aesthetics and formalism, on the contrary it should be seen as a form of practice that is developed in tandem with heuristic demands of extra-artistic research.

This change of approach – from representing concepts of being deriving from various ideological pools (the state and/or religion) and philosophy to using art as means of producing philosophy – has in many ways freed the self-definition of the subject. The notion of singular authorship was successfully deflated by Conceptual art’s collaborative practices, such as those pursued by Art & Language, where authorship is attributed to all members of the group. Moreover, Art & Language’s employment of the studio for intellectual debates and research activities explicitly rejects the dualist and modernist model of solitary studio practice that produces original knowledge based on ‘intuition’ and ‘formal innovation’. Art & Language’s seminal work Index extends their notion of collaboration into a critique of the clash of subjectivities, through the dissolution of modernist artistic subjectivity, which deflates sole authorship by inviting external participation in the production of a ‘group portrait’.

In many ways the reflective properties of the mirror in my triptych Untitled (I Will Never Escape From What I Think Of Myself, etc.) encourage collaboration by opening up the process of production of meaning beyond my personal concerns, as an artist and subject. As a result, this endless extension of meaning attacks both the closed nature of modernist art and the dualist introvert subject. Once the meaning of a work remains open and capable of accommodating a multitude of viewer responses, the dichotomies between object (artwork) and subject (meaning), artist (producer of knowledge) and viewer (perceiver of knowledge) are dissolved by a collective and cooperative approach. The network that is formed as a consequence of the viewers’ equal participation in the production of meaning is analogous to W. Teed Rockwell’s network theory: brain (artist) + body (physical body of work) + world (audience) collaborate in the production of the actual work, which takes the form of an intellectual event that adapts to the specifics of each collaborator. As a result, this potential for a limitless number of participating viewers in the production of meaning opens up the range of possible subjectivities involved in the production of portraiture beyond the two involved in pre-modernist and modernist portraiture (artist-sitter).

In the Soulseeker, we witness the overall rejection of dualist practices that have haunted western portraiture. The dualist religious ideology surrounding the concept of the soul is negated through the scientific methodology of the work (x-rays) that brings to mind the age-old quarrel between science and religion. This clinical exposing of the subject should also be perceived as an alternative to the Neo-Platonic revisiting of the concept of ‘pure vision’ in modernism – the supposed artist’s ability to see beyond appearances and thus reveal the true Form of things – that has encouraged the adoption of formal abstraction as the means for establishing a personal aesthetic style, advocating the uniqueness of the individual. At the same time, it is this precise methodology that allows the artist to produce a realistic yet non-naturalistic and non-expressive work, evading all the dangers of either Neo-Platonic abstraction or Aristotelian idealization; the lack of posing is consistent with the negation of appropriation and thus idealization.

In light of the recent and somewhat parallel development of the philosophy mind and portraiture, the general perception of portraiture’s role should be freed from its historical burden of self-promotion and elevated into a critical genre of invaluable intellectual importance. Change cannot come without understanding, and art through radical portraiture provides us with this very promise.

Euripides Altintzoglou

[1]               W. Teed Rockwell, Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory (Cambridge & London: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 22-25, 31.

[2]               Ibid, p. 54.

[3]               Ibid, pp. 36, 39.

[4]               Ibid, p. 104.

[5]               Gary E. Schwartz, Linda Russek and Paul Pearsall, ‘Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients That Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors,’ Journal of Near-Death Studies (vol. 20, No. 3, Spring 2002). See also Paul Pearsall, The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy (Portland: Broadway Books, 1998).

[6]               See for instance Gary E. Schwartz, The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death (Simon & Schuster, 2003), and Gary E. Schwartz, William L. Simon, The G.O.D. Experiments: How Science Is Discovering God in Everything, Including Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).

[7]               Candace B. Pert, Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

[8]               Richard Bergland, The Fabric of the Mind (New York: Viking, 1985).

[9]               In his seminal essay on portraiture Ernst H. J. Gombrich discusses how the experiments on the psychological and cognitive perception of the human face run by Töpffer preceded the similar ones run by the psychologist Egon Brunswick in Vienna one hundred years later. Ernst H. J. Gombrich, "The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and Art", in Ernst H. J. Gombrich et al., Art, Perception, and Reality (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 120.