Art In Athens Research Articles

The FIX-up mix-up; undue façadism or adaptive reuse? Examining the former FIX brewery transformation into the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens

PurposeThis study aims to examine the rehabilitation project of the iconic urban industrial building in Athens, “FIX” brewery, and the practices followed, so as to initiate a discussion on the role of the façades in such a process. In particular, this study suggests that by choosing to restore just two of the façades out of the whole building, while placing emphasis on creating a new face for the new use, frontality is promoted against the pre-existing homogeneity approach, and façadism is introduced. However, both façadism and frontality distance this project from the rationale behind the adaptive reuse and redevelopment of built heritage.Design/methodology/approachA thorough architectural analysis of the FIX brewery building's long history and its consecutive transformations, besides providing adequate evidence for the hypothesis set, provided the opportunity to broaden the scope of this research and explore the role of the façades in adaptive reuse practice. Methodology-wise, this research was further strengthened by a comparative analysis of the Weverij De Ploeg adaptive reuse project in Bergeijk.FindingsIn the light of this critical analysis, the current study first highlights the importance of a building's façades in shaping public perception and establishing a connection to the city, by transmitting information and meanings about the building's structure, function, character and era. Accordingly, it stretches the need for façades' retention when adapting an industrial building of cultural heritage to a new use. Second, it emphasizes the need of fostering a holistic perspective toward a historic industrial building of such merit, respecting the building as a whole and in all its depth.Originality/valueThis in-depth analysis provides a solid ground for rethinking adaptive reuse, concretizing the appropriate approaches to industrial buildings of cultural heritage from parties involved (inter alia government leaders, legislators, property developers, historians, urban planners, architects and other engineers), to ensure both the building's continuity and longevity, and an efficient and sustainable urban regeneration.

Figuring crisis

This essay contributes to the growing body of research on crisis-related street art in Athens by focusing specifically on the political potential of artworks that posit the human figure as the central device of expression. Through the work of the artists One Yuro and EX!T I argue that figurative street art stages a powerful response to the biopolitics and affective regime of the crisis by rendering visible and sensible the embodied effects of precarity that it bestows upon the subject. In fostering a dynamic interplay between the body of the city, the bodies on the streets, and the bodies on the walls, these artworks claim the urban landscape of Athens as a space for collectively processing and addressing the prolonged state of exception, in turn offering a symbolic point of departure for reimagining the crisis city as a site from which collective forms of solidarity and resistance may emerge. Departing from fetishizing notions of crisis creativity, they form part of a broader ecology of resistance that is sustained by a relationship to the social world of crisis that is poetic and performative rather than mimetic and representational, weaving a sense of political potentiality into the very fabric of everyday life.

Creating the 'George N. Papanicolaou Medal' by the Academy of Athens: An interview with Professor of Sculpture Theodoros Papagiannis (Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens, Greece).

The ‘George N. Papanicolaou Medal’ is a brass medal commissioned by the Academy of Athens on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr George N. Papanicolaou in 1983. It was created by Professor Theodoros Papagiannis, Professor Emeritus of Sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts in Athens, Greece; the medal presents Dr George N. Papanicolaou with his microscope. According to Professor Papagiannis, the medal was requested by Professor Nikolaos Louros, Emeritus Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Athens School of Medicine and it was created according to the ancient Greek style. The medal was given to all honored participants of the special ceremony organized by the Academy of Athens in May 13th, 1983, in the context of the 100 years from the birth of Dr George N. Papanicolaou. The ceremony was performed at the Central Hall of the Academy of Athens in Athens under the auspices of the President of the Hellenic Democracy Constantinos Caramanlis. A copy of this medal is being exhibited at the ‘Museum of Contemporary Sculpture Theodoros Papagiannis’ in Elliniko at the Municipality of Katsanochoria close to Ioannina (Greece), as well as at the newly founded Institute of Paediatric Virology based on the island of Euboea, birth place of Dr George N. Papanicolaou.

The city of Athens

Archaeological data from the city of Athens entered into Archaeology in Greece Online this year are derived from recent work announced in the press or unpublished field reports and from the latest Archaiologikon Deltion, covering work in 2005. The difficulty of bridging this gap of almost a decade is eased greatly by the publication of a series of lectures held at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens by members of the Ephoreias of Athens and Attica, covering in a much more detailed way than ADelt allows many important excavations and research projects. The support of the Goulandris and Latsis Foundations, both in organizing the lectures and in publishing them in timely fashion and at very low cost (€10 per volume), is to be applauded (M. Dogka-Toli and S. Oikonomidou (eds), Αρχαιολογικές συμβολές. A: Αττική – ΚΣΤ’ και Β’Εφορείες Προïστορικών & Κλασικών Αρχαιοτήτων and Β: Αττική – Α’ και Γ’ Εφορείες Προïστορικών & Κλασικών Αρχαιοτήτων, Athens 2013). Further information, images and bibliography for the following summary can be found by searching the given ID numbers at AGOnline:www.chronique.efa.gr.

Painting human rights: Mapping street art in Athens

Street art in Athens has boomed over the last years, transforming the fixed landscape of a city into a platform for negotiation and dialogue. As an art form, it is largely connected with the existing social conditions. A huge influx of immigrants/new citizens is transforming central areas and traditional notions of Athenian identity, giving birth to a new street-level language that has twisted, innovated and filled in the gaps of a culture’s hegemonic discourse. In this article, street art appears as a visual marker of the shifting, complex discourses of power struggles, marginality and counter-cultures that establish a new reality that must be seen and heard.

Book Review of Art in Athens During the Peloponnesian War, edited by Olga Palagia

Book Review of Art in Athens During the Peloponnesian War, edited by Olga Palagia

Art in Athens during the Peloponnesian War

1. Athenian religion and the Peloponnesian War Michael A. Flower 2. Archaism and the quest for immortality in Attic sculpture during the Peloponnesian War Olga Palagia 3. The Eleusinian sanctuary during the Peloponnesian War Kevin Clinton 4. Attic votive reliefs and the Peloponnesian War Carol L. Lawton 5. War, plague, and politics in Athens in the 420s Lisa Kallet 6. The north frieze of the temple of Athena Nike Peter Schultz 7. Thucydides and the unheroic dead Brian Bosworth 8. Images in the Athenian demosion sema Hans Rupprecht Goette 9. Children in Athenian funerary art during the Peloponnesian War John H. Oakley 10. Alcibiades: the politics of personal style H. A. Shapiro.

The Keros Hoard: Some Further Discussion

The term was introduced in the literature by Getz-Gentle (formerly Getz-Preziosi) in 1983. This term describes an extensive group of Early Cycladic objects, mostly fragments of marble figurines, allegedly from Kavos, on the island of Keros, a site that had suffered intensive looting before the first rescue excavations in 1963. About half of the original group was in the Erlenmeyer Collection in Basel. The rest, which Getz-Gentle had first seen in the hands of a dealer who was the original owner of the assemblage, had been dispersed to various museums and private collections. Fragmentary material from this was first published in the catalogue of the exhibition on the art and culture of the Cyclades in the third millennium B.C.E. held in the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe in 1976. The Keros Hoard has been the subject of debate in the past, and discussion has been renewed with the publication of my monograph on the assemblage. The controversy stems from the fact that it consists largely-or as a whole-of material of questionable provenance and authenticity. The suggested date of its looting has also been disputed. The contents of this hoard and the date of its looting are discussed here using evidence from the archives of the Badisches Landesmuseum and the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens.

Towards the formation of a professional identity: women artists in Greece at the beginning of the twentieth century

In nineteenth-century Greece women of the upper and middle classes were usually occupied with some form of art destined for the private sphere of their familial or friendly circle or sold for philanthropic purposes. The foundation of a female class for painting and sculpture at the state School of Arts in Athens in 1894 seems to have given women the chance to demand and assure equal academic opportunities with men in the first decade of the twentieth century, despite strong objections from their opponents on the issue of the life-class. For some women this was the first step away from amateurism and towards professionalism and was to be followed by a series of initiatives, including the maintenance of a well-organised atelier, steady participation in exhibitions and artistic unions, the adoption of modern art tendencies and publicity through the press, all of which guaranteed their professional engagement with art. Next to contemporary feminist demands for emancipation and female attempts to enter traditionally male professions, women artists' endeavours contributed, as can be detected in some painted and photographic portraits of Flora, Laskaridou and Asprioti, to the formation of the image of the New Woman as well as to the promotion of female artistic individuality.

Towards the formation of a professional identity: women artists in greece at the beginning of the twentieth century

Abstract In nineteenth-century Greece women of the upper and middle classes were usually occupied with some form of art destined for the private sphere of their familial or friendly circle or sold for philanthropic purposes. The foundation of a female class for painting and sculpture at the state School of Arts in Athens in 1894 seems to have given women the chance to demand and assure equal academic opportunities with men in the first decade of the twentieth century, despite strong objections from their opponents on the issue of the life-class. For some women this was the first step away from amateurism and towards professionalism and was to be followed by a series of initiatives, including the maintenance of a well-organised atelier, steady participation in exhibitions and artistic unions, the adoption of modern art tendencies and publicity through the press, all of which guaranteed their professional engagement with art. Next to contemporary feminist demands for emancipation and female attempts to enter traditionally male professions, women artists' endeavours contributed, as can be detected in some painted and photographic portraits of Flora, Laskaridou and Asprioti, to the formation of the image of the New Woman as well as to the promotion of female artistic individuality.

The Eye of Greece. Studies in the Art of Athens. Edited by Donna Kurtz and Brian Sparkes. Cambridge U.P., 1982. Pp. xxv + 188, with 48 plates and 4 text figures. £29.50 net.

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Numismatic Commentary on Pausanias, III. Books IX. X., I. 1–38

With this third part our Numismatic Commentary is completed. It consists of three sections:—(1) Boeotia and Phocis (Paus. IX. X.)(2) Athens (Paus. I. 1–38.)(3) Supplement; containing coins of Peloponnesus omitted in parts I. and II. of the Commentary.The Athenian section of the work involved great difficulties, especially in view of the fact that it was difficult to treat of the Athenian coins without reference to reliefs and other works of art of Athens. This difficulty the compilers have met as best they could: the Athenian coin-lists were drawn up in the first instance by the Swiss colleague.Special thanks are due to Herr Arthur Loebbecke and Professor Rhousopoulos of Athens for most liberal envois of casts: also to Professor Michaelis for valuable hints and corrections in the Athenian section.