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Julia Strauss | Welcome to the Mediterranean Basin
Exhibition duration: January 28 – March 30, 2010
It is a big moment of transition. A change in art that starts from Athens.
How happy I am, and proud of the artists in Greece. They have deep knowledge and are not driven by the art market, but by the Gods.
(JS, Sky Radio Athens, 18.02.2010)
After a six week "Celebration of Beauty", restless daily collective work under the participation of an inquisitive public, Beton7 Gallery is delighted to announce "Welcome to the Mediterranean Basin", the first solo exhibition of Joulia Strauss in Greece.
The dragon Python has not been killed by the young Apollon, but only forced into the ground. He has woken up to the riots and seeks to assist in the Cultural Revolution. The sarcastic title "Welcome to the Mediterranean Basin" is for those, who have problems with saying "Greece" or don't even know where it is.
A large scale 3d-looking wire sculpture is part of Strauss' sculptural system of "Mathematical Operation Animals". It assembles five couples of hypolydian turtles and five lydian dogs in a circle. These characters embody the structure of the modulation of the Second Delphic Hymn to Apollon, which is otherwise hidden by signs and no longer perceivable to our ears. Ancient Greek music notation is, first of all, a notation of harmony. Therefore it can be (per)formed as sculpture.
An archaic dog carries the melody used in the rituals of 600 BC. It hesitantly touches two turtles, lydian scale of part one changes into the hypolydian two and so on... Limbs of the animal bodies display the dynamics of melody and explore the beautiful moments of transition between scales (modulation) as different states of hybrid beings. The turtle's fin (oreótato pterígio), simultaneously is a leg of a dog (skiláki) which in turn becomes the aristocratic foot of a swan from the hypophrygian scale. At the end of the archaic part dragon Python "helps" Cultural Revolution and changes the classical part, composed by Limenios, furtherdeveloping the myth, the hymn, and the sculpture. The final, tenth part, is a wild dog (2010 CE) ouroborously finalising the composition by biting into its ansestor's tail. "Art that thinks is always an art, which knows of its interplay with the media and lays it open. Hidden in media, it lets Physis reveal itself", as Friedrich Kittler writes in a text, dedicated to Joulia Strauss. Her work, in opposition to subjectivity without content, usually reveals universally valid knowledge, but in very specific self invented languages of today.
Cultural Revolution neither understands itself as a "monument in the permanent state of becoming... to which every new passenger can add a further stone"[1], nor does it rethink itself as a "complete circular movement designating an orbital period with a begin and an end".[2] It is far from seeing violence as a manifestation of the Gods,[3] but it questions the claim that art lacks the emanation of political energy.[4] Image war is part of the war. The floating sculpture appears to become pure light, as thousands of spectrum particles cover its wire surface. It throws shadows in 3 directions and moves with the melody, turning the exhibition space into a 3d animation. This speaks to an Ethos that contains a model of relations between characters in different stages of transformation, resistance and insurrection, and calls Friedrich Hölderlins "reliable laws of beauty" into a Presence. This dispositive organises the dispersed reality of the Empire by the rhythm of the Second Delphic Hymn to Apollon, which is also a celebrative and poietic manifesto of artists in our dearly beloved Greece.
At the finnisage on March 30th, a new video "TK-News Athens" by Joulia Strauss and Moritz Mattern will be presented. It is a special edition of pseudo sci fi news usually reporting on the discursive processes in Spree-Athens (a new coined name for Berlin).
Joulia Strauss (1974) is based in Spree-Athens. Her roots are in the deep forests of Mari,
a pagan tribe in the most eastern forests of Europe. She studied at the New Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and at the University of Fine Arts, Berlin in the Georg Baselitz class. Her works have been shown at Pergamon Museum (Berlin), Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Tate Modern (London), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Hudson Valley Centre for Contemporary Art (New York), Philadelphia Science Centre, Hamburger, Frankfurter, Wolfsburger Kunstvereins, Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), Moscow-, Tirana-, Athens Biennale. She has just accomplished her residency at MyLivingRoom, Athens. Currently Joulia Strauss together with the music scientist and media philosopher Martin Carlé are working on Cat-Notation, the long-term development of notation in the temporal domain of simulation.
[1] no Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari
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