A Modern hug

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Where have I been?

I have been making sculptures.

I have been a studio artist. Me in the studio we constitute an homme machine.

How he enjoyed his time away from work is a title I borrowed from a Russian propaganda collage of the 20s. The collage depicts Lenin on his leisure time playing softball with factory workers. Excessive pride on the act of work paradoxically produces a misunderstanding which takes repetition and more work to clear.

Similar to any small business, the studio curates the different stages on the line of production and sits on a set menu of specialties (Representation), routines (Replacement), trials (Rapture) and positions (Reconciliation).

Where am I now?

I am not a studio artist. I like to look at things. I am trying to articulate a definition for the studio as a mindscape. I made precarious structures that blocked parts of the view thinking a lot about syntax, about how the subject of desire has often been omitted and interpretation lay on speculations about the context.

Where do I want to go?

All over the world people make things to function, and right next to them they make things that don’t function and don’t answer to any known need apart maybe to taste. I have always been keen on such structures, attracted by their formal resourcefulness, originality and lack of meaning. I believe I have done them wrong. They have to come from an attitude of faith, they cannot be representations of eccentricities and collective madness, have to be close calculations on a thing that’s always missing. I’m siting Mark Twain who bestowed us with a beautiful word to express them:

We picked up one excellent word — a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word — ‘lagniappe’. They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish — so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a ‘baker’s dozen’.It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop — or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know — he finishes the operation by saying — “Give me something for lagniappe.” The shop man always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor — I don’t know what he gives the governor; support, likely. When you are invited to drink, and

this does occur now and then in New Orleans — and you say, “What, again? — no, I’ve had enough;” the other party says, “But just this one time more — this is for lagniappe.” When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady’s countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his “I beg pardon — no harm intended,” into the briefer form of “Oh, that’s for lagniappe.” (from ‘Life On The Mississippi’ by Mark Twain, 1883)

Dora EconomouAthens, September 2013

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table of images:

p. 2&3 “Edge”, KAPAmount, pins, rice paper, pencil , 175X90X35 cm

p. 4 “Prison break”, silicon, 58X6X3 cm

p. 5 “Thick credit incident”, cardboard, color, putty, 22Χ22Χ24 cm (twice)

p. 6&7 “Born in flames”, PLEXIGLAS, 23X3X0,5 cm (thrice)

p. 8&9 “The prairies”, paper, 185Χ80Χ11 cm

p. 10&11 “Weather forcast”, KAPAmount, synthetic wadding, 90Χ90Χ50 cm

p.15 “The taxi makes the vegetables fly”, photograph

p.16 “Thomas l’ oscur”, photograph

p.17 “A Modern hug”, paper, 43X30X10 cm (thrice)

p.18&19 “Late night shopping”, 12 Α4 b&w photocopies on colored paper (twice)

Dora Economou 2013