ISCC 3 (2) pp.

225–241 Intellect Limited 2012

Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture

Volume 3 Number 2
© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/iscc.3.2.225_1

PeneloPe Petsini
University of Patras

Appropriative strategies
vs modernist orthodoxies:
Postmodern concepts
in contemporary Greek
photography

AbstrAct Keywords
This article addresses the appropriative paradigms that marked the western art Greek photography
world from the mid-1970s, delineating first some of the wider issues raised by the postmodernism
term and then outlining their introduction into Greek photography from the early appropriation
1980s onwards. As a term in art history and criticism, appropriation is associated pastiche
with the rise of postmodernism and the introduction of critical theories of repre- parody
sentation reflecting on the conditions of authorship. As such, it has a contiguous critical practice
relationship to the long-standing debate between ‘originality’ and ‘imitation’. The
Greek photography world of the 1980s, defined by a modernist orthodoxy which was
(and still is) largely predicated on the triumph of compositional originality could
not accept any challenging of the authenticity of a work of art or, even more, of
the nature of authorship itself. In effect, the reception of postmodern ideas such as
appropriation involved selective understandings and distortions. Photography prac-
titioners in Greece produced works that were postmodern in sensibility, but they
were only understood and framed in a modernist discourse. This article introduces

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 Penelope Petsini

some prominent examples of these cases and discusses them in the context of post-
modern theoretical reflection.

In this article I am primarily concerned with the condition and position of

postmodern critical practices in Greek photography of the last three decades
(1980–2010). The article will explore the various appropriative strategies
utilized by Greek photographers in order to highlight the differences in context
and reception of postmodern ideas in Greece. By ‘appropriation’ I refer to the
diverse ways by which previous works of art may be referenced in particular
photographs. The focus will be on ‘critical practice’, in other words, an art
practice which focuses on ‘the artwork’s ability to question, to contest, or to
denaturalize the very terms in which it is produced, received and circulated’
(Solomon-Godeau 1999: 231). Appropriative strategies drew critical notice in
the western art world and its peripheries in the late 1970s, during a period
in which the triumph of the Right was manifest in both the cultural sphere
and in the political one, evident with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher in the United States and United Kingdom, respectively. The view
that a once transgressive modernism had become thoroughly institutional-
ized, and that ‘an alternative had to be formulated urgently’ (Evans 2009: 14)
gave rise to appropriation art, centred mainly on photography, which had
been received and analysed as a reaction to modernism’s institutionalization,
and framed in the context of postmodern theory. During the same period,
Greece experienced different circumstances both in terms of the political situ-
ation and with respect to photography’s status. The emerging local critical
discourse on photography found itself very much caught within the limits of
the modernist orthodoxies of autonomy, originality and authorship. In effect,
the reception of postmodern ideas such as appropriation involved selective
understandings and distortions. While photography practitioners in Greece
started producing works that were postmodern in sensibility, they were only
understood and framed in a modernist discourse. In this article I will intro-
duce some prominent examples of these cases and discuss them in the context
of postmodern theoretical reflection.

the (re)definition of PhotoGrAPhy: Power struGGles in

the GreeK PhotoGrAPhic discourse
Associated with a revalidation of photography, postmodernism recast the
discussion of the long-standing debate between originality and imitation, intro-
ducing theories connected to discourses like Walter Benjamin’s dissolution of
the aura and Roland Barthes’s death of the author. The notion of appropriation
is acknowledged as a key component of postmodernism, not just one strategy
amongst many but rather ‘the very “language” in which the postmodernist
debate was conducted’ (Evans 2009: 14). In art history and criticism, appro-
priation is used as a term to refer to the straightforward or indirect annexation
of an object or an existing work of art into another work of art, a practice that
in the twentieth century can be tracked back to Modernist avant-garde works
such as the Cubist collages of Picasso and Braque (1912), Duchamp’s ready-
mades (1915) and Warhol’s appropriations of pop culture images (1960s). The
term appropriation is particularly associated with the ‘Pictures Generation’,
a group named after the so-called exhibition at Artists Space (1977) that
was curated by Douglas Crimp and featured the work of Tony Brauntuch,

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 Appropriative strategies vs modernist orthodoxies

Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith. (The term
‘Pictures Generation’ was later expanded to include artists such as Cindy
Sherman and Barbara Kruger.) Centred on New York in the 1980s, appropria-
tion was supported and extensively analysed by such postmodern critics as
Rosalind Krauss (1991), Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1991) and Douglas Crimp
(1980a, 1980b). In this account, borrowings, citations, fragmentation, accumu-
lation and repetition of already existing images, both expose and undermine
the notions of originality and authenticity, concepts essential to the hitherto
clearly hierarchical modernist discourse of High Art and the Museum. Though
some theorists later reassessed this view of appropriation as unconditionally
critical and identified both regressive and progressive postmodernisms as well
as corresponding forms of appropriation (Crimp 1983; Foster 1984; Solomon-
Godeau 1999), appropriative strategies and gestures are largely considered as
a form of perceptible cultural resistance: by moving the artist from the tech-
niques of production to those of reproduction, they are seen as challenging
the institutional framework of art itself (Crimp 1980a: 53).
In the United States and United Kingdom, appropriative paradigms
emerged within a conservative socio-political context determined by neo-
liberalism, and cultural trends which propagated a return to traditional art
forms and a revival of authorial presence defined and described in terms of an
active resistance to these very political conditions (Solomon-Godeau 1991).
Greece in the same period displayed a different social and political landscape:
the collapse of the military junta in 1974 and the abolition of the monarchy
brought back a long-demanded democracy after a long period of politically
troubled history. In 1981, the country elected its first socialist government
when the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) seized power. ‘Change’
was the slogan trumpeted throughout the 1980s and expressed through the
legalization of left and communist political parties and by the flourishing of a
new middle class.
Such political discontinuities resulted in cultural ones: despite efforts
made in the first half of the twentieth century, Greece had no coher-
ent academic modernist tradition in the arts that contemporary practition-
ers and critics, left or not, could oppose, apart from a romantic pictorialism,
which had been identified but could hardly be described as a living tradi-
tion (Stathatos 1984: 40). In the late 1970s, photography was still regarded
as a transparent technological process of representation; it remained isolated
from the rest of the visual arts, and it was still the subject of debates concern-
ing its art status. Accordingly, museums and galleries ignored photographic
production and photography exhibitions remained a rare phenomenon. The
only kind of photography to describe itself as artistic was that being produced
by amateurs (Stathatos 1984). The domestic scene was dominated by the
Greek Photographic Society whose members – mostly amateurs – promoted
an obsolete aestheticism that was full of clichés and remarkably uncritical.
At the time when critical postmodernists had been writing ‘in opposition to
the academicized mausoleum of late-modernist art photography’ (Solomon-
Godeau 1991: 226), Greece had neither such mausoleum to deconstruct nor
any kind of ‘academization’. On the contrary, the only department of photog-
raphy, established at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens as
late as 1985, had to struggle in order to justify the necessity of its existence.
The emergence of a new generation of Greek photographers trained in the
United States, United Kingdom and France promoted the establishment of
galleries exclusively devoted to photography with the Photography Centre of

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 Penelope Petsini

1. The PCA was founded Athens (PCA) being arguably the most prominent.1 Magazines, publications
in 1979 by the
photographers Kostis
and photography festivals showcasing the work of many of the photographers
Antoniadis, Yiorgos later described by John Stathatos (1997) as the ‘New Greek Photography’
Depollas, Nikos were also founded.
Panayotopoulos,
Stefanos Paschos To the degree that, historically, photography’s recognition as art was
and John Demos, as justified by modernism, Greek photography would insist to identify its
a ‘strategic alliance’. purposes with the tenets that ‘supplied its identity and assured its legiti-
Though they did not
share a common macy’ in the rest of the West (Solomon-Godeau 1991: 86). This hegemony
perception of the of the modernist belief system determined that any critical discourse would
medium, they were
mostly influenced
eventually find itself to be firmly premised on an aesthetic of the ‘exclu-
by the genre of sively photographic’, an emphasis on the medium itself and its autonomy.
creative photography. At the same time, in terms of the ‘academic’ discourse, photography theory
Following the
Photographers remained firmly attached to a primarily aesthetic approach to photography
Gallery in London, and there was a strikingly limited list of theoretical texts available in Greek,
as a model, the PCA namely six essays by the end of 1990s.2 The articles and essays of Plato
presented works of
both Greek and foreign Rivellis dominated domestic publications. Rivellis was the founder of the
photographers and Photography Circle, a commercial photographic association established in
organized lectures,
seminars and audio-
1987 that published extensively his personal approach to photography that
visual presentations. fiercely dismissed both postmodernism and left ideas in general.3
For a comprehensive The difficulty of Greek criticism to recognize and address appropriative
account on its
influence on Greek strategies results partly from its reluctance to develop a critical postmod-
photography of the ern reading of photography practice in general. Apart from the writings of
1980s, see Stathatos Nikos Panayotopoulos and Stathatos in the 1980s and 1990s, both of whom
(1997).
examined notions such as identity and politics, the rest of the discourse
2. These were: Walter remained attached to an examination of strategies specifically associated
Benjamin’s ‘A Short
History of Photography’ with the nature and character of the medium itself. In effect, the local critical
(1978); Gisele Freund’s debate on photography of the time lacks not only references to appropriation
Photography and
Society (1982); Roland
but also to other cornerstones of postmodernism such as hybridization, differ-
Barthes’ Camera Lucida ence and gender, even though such issues may be traced in the work of Greek
(1984); John Berger’s photographers.
Ways of Seeing (1986);
Susan Sontag’s On
Photography (1993);
and Vil m Flusser’s Fur APProPriAtive strAteGies vs modernist orthodoxies: the
eine Philosophie der Presence of the Author
Fotografie (1999).
In the 1980s appropriative strategies used by Greek photographers were
3. The Photography Circle
revived the genre of neither addressed as such nor acquired the same critical importance and
street photography relevance they had in the respective western discourse. Any appropria-
and exercised an
influence on part of
tive gestures and strategies were not seen to challenge modernist notions
the Greek photography of authenticity and originality. Instead they were treated as evidence of
world, attracting the photographer’s originality and, even more, statements of authorial
several amateur
photographers, some creativity. One pertinent example here was Hercules Papaioannou’s Used
of whom later were Landscapes (1994–1996), a series of re-photographed advertising posters in
recognized as artists. which he isolated details of idealized landscapes which were used as back-
Initially a lawyer,
Rivellis became grounds for advertisements. Papaioannou aimed to reflect on the iconic
a photographer, and stereotyped images of mass culture – recalling the work of Richard
teacher, curator
and critic in early
Prince of almost a decade earlier and explained these intentions in his
1980s. His rejection writing (Papaioannou 1996).4 However, the work ended up as part of a
of postmodern group exhibition that focused on creativity and aesthetics, apprehended
ideas is evident in
his description of as the experimental work of an author exploring the limits of photogra-
Barbara Kruger’s phy itself. As the accompanying catalogue clearly registers, the exhibition
work, for example, sought to explore the ‘photographer-creator’ and ‘his inner, creative world’
as ‘photographs
which remind us of (Antoniadis 1996: 36).

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 Appropriative strategies vs modernist orthodoxies

Appropriative strategies often involve the use of vernacular, amateur photo- advertisements, while
graphs with no apparent aesthetic value or quality. For the Greek modernist- they induce an easily
digestible, if not naive,
inflected discourse, this was problematic since it contaminated the ‘purity’ of message […] not to
local modernism’s desired separate categories, namely ‘art’, ‘professional’ and be found even in a
teenager’s album’
‘amateur’ photography. Critical postmodern practices positioned themselves (Rivellis 2000: 153–54).
within an inclusive and non-axiological category beyond a high–low dichot-
4. Papaioannou, who
omy, whereas the domestic discourse was still struggling to typify a category later established a
of ‘art photography’ beyond the functional practice of the professionals and successful career as
the vernacular practice of the amateurs. curator and critic,
was a photography
In this context we may see an exhibition described as the ‘Black practitioner in the early
Photographs’ (PCA, 1991) organized by Kostis Antoniadis who arranged a 1990s. He encountered
number of his own family snapshots on the gallery wall and re-presented postmodernism
through the work
them as a comment on his own theory of ‘the message of the genre’ of Cindy Sherman
(Antoniadis 1995: 134–44). The process involved selecting, enlarging, and Sherrie Levine
during his studies
re-printing, mounting and finally framing photographs in a manner that of photography in
essentially altered them both in terms of form and of meaning. Antoniadis New York University.
decided to re-contextualize his family snapshots to set up an exhibition On his return to
Greece in 1992,
which he describes as, Papaioannou employed
the appropriative
the most dark, mournful and depressive show I have ever seen […] modernist technique
of photomontage
sullen and rather frightened faces, grotesque scenes, inappropriate (Ex More, 1992–1994)
timing […] the pictures I selected escaped from the rule that charac- and appropriation to
negotiate and reflect
terizes the snapshot genre […] they created flaws in the typology, and on notions such as
allowed us to see the pure image inside the picture. fragmentation and
(2012, emphasis in the original) discontinuity of
thought, action, work
and everyday life, as
True to the modernist canon of the era, Antoniadis could not claim authorship well as to point to the
of this work, so the respective entry in the archive of the PCA lists no author. fact that no image
stands alone today.
No statement or invitation card was ever catalogued, if there ever was one,
and the work was never published.

Figure 1: Katerina Kalogeraki, Untitled, from the series My Father’s Land, 1986–1992.
The text on the left reads – The ultimate purpose in one’s person’s life is to get married and have
children – Mother; Parents without grandchildren are very unhappy and unworthy parents – Father;
Photographs: Father and mother on their wedding day. Father, mother, my brother and myself. Father, my
brother, my grandmother, my uncles, my cousins, and myself.’

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 Penelope Petsini

5. He was also assigned

by the Greek Ministry
of Culture in 1995
to write the first
systematic inventory
of Greek Photography,
entitled Image and Icon
(see Stathatos 1997).

Figure 2: John Stathatos, Sydney James Diamonds in Australia, 1990

(installation detail).

A similar exercise in appropriation and the re-contextualization of family

snapshots has been Katerina Kalogeraki’s My Father’s Land (1986–1992),
a project in which she is revisiting her family photographs to explore her
long-standing interest in her own gender and cultural identity (Figure 1).
Stathatos’ Sydney James Diamonds in Australia (1990) (Figure 2) also
involved the use of pre-existing photographs he discovered in a long-aban-
doned house on Kythera Island, a work dealing with self-representation,
staged imagery, cultural archetypes, identity and narrative. Both works are
attempts to reconstitute history, collective and individual memory, and are
engaged simultaneously in an inventory of the real and the willing creation
of myth attuned to postmodern concerns. Both photographers, however,
lived and worked in London and these works had been presented and
appreciated mainly in the context of the United Kingdom. Kalogeraki’s
work remained unknown in Greece until recently and Stathatos did not
receive any critical attention despite being a member of the PCA, as well as
a prolific author, curator and photographer within Greece.5 Such margin-
alization echoes the ways in which Antoniadis’ ‘Black Photographs’ were
largely unrepresented.

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 Appropriative strategies vs modernist orthodoxies

modes of homAGe And PArody

Within this context, works using homage, namely the appreciation and deliber-
ate appropriation of the style of a specific predecessor (Dyer 2007: 37) prevailed.
Homage is an appropriative mode which belongs to the semantic environment
of pastiche, a widely and loosely used term that refers both to a combination of
aesthetic elements and to a kind of aesthetic imitation (Dyer 2007: 1) produc-
ing work which is ‘neither original nor copy’ (Hoesterey 2001: 5). Pastiche as
homage involves the most basic imitation, and works thanks to the recognition
and valorization of an identifiable artist’s particular style. The kind of appropri-
ation it involves is not necessarily direct – in other words, of particular works –
but it identifies certain practices as no longer representing the cultural norm.
According to R. Dyer, one imitates their predecessors in order to achieve what
they had achieved; homage is rooted ‘in a sense of timelessness of artistic
consciousness’ (2007: 36). With the Greek photographers using homage in
the 1980s and 1990s, the significance of their appropriative strategies seems
to be predominantly a function of fascination dealing with the dominance of
a ‘great ancestral tradition’ – and by ancestors I mean visual artists of the
broader western canon. Pertinent examples should include Stelios Skopelitis’s
series Fabien (1989), later represented as D’Après Rodin (1999), which directly
appropriated photographically Rodin’s drawings of female nudes in the most
intimate sensual poses in Dessins Erotiques (Figure 3); Dimitris Tsoublekas’s
Notes for Leonardo (1994) whose over-painted photographs were variants on
da Vinci’s anthropometric drawings; Nikos Markou’s Through the Naked Eye
(1995) whose elongated figures recalled El Greco’s saints and martyrs. In all
these works appropriative strategies at play involved ‘rewriting’ but not ‘prob-
lematizing’ as a critical practice would do, their major aspect being emulation
through creative imitation.
This sort of creative imitation is at play in a significant number of the works
of Kostis Antoniadis, who has made this context his main locus of creativity,
employing appropriative strategies to enquire into the nature and character of
photography itself. Antoniadis adopted a similar form of homage described as
adaptation, in which he modified artistic material transposed from one genre
to another (Hoesterey 2001: 10): Photo-Set (1988) employed the standardized
form of stencil pages to photographically present stereotypical social postures
and gestures (Figure 4); in A True Love (1995) he appropriated and manipulated
video stills of close-up female faces taken from pornography films juxtaposed to
excerpts drawn from pulp fiction (love novels), following the stereotyped narra-
tive pattern of the early cinema with its alternation of scene and legend (Figure 5);
and in La Nuit Americaine (2000–2011) he photographed the Greek landscape
applying the ‘day for night’ visual effect technique from American western
films. All these works creatively appropriate and reuse traditions, motifs and
even ways of seeing, bringing them into the context of photography without
however challenging the authority of the author or problematizing their process
of signification in the sense that a postmodern work would do.
Antoniadis also took formal elements of past styles and brought them
forward into a contemporary context: The Four Icons (1991) and The Passageway
(1992), both parts of the Second Hand Photographs series, directly alluded to
the sacred temples of Greek Orthodox churches and the forms of the classi-
cal and neo-classical friezes, respectively. His models, young people wearing
modern clothes, gave a radical contemporary life to old forms, infusing the
past with contemporary relevance. He created a synthesis of past form and

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 Penelope Petsini

Figure 3: Stelios Skopelitis, Untitled, from the series Fabien – D’Après Rodin, 1989.

present context, effectively presenting a process of refiguration or conversion:

‘the past form is converted into a sign of the present, while the present is
historicized through its containment within a formal element taken from the
past’ (Hoesterey 2001: 15).
The overbearing authority of modernist formalism was a pressure strongly
felt by local practitioners and theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. This determined
the response to works seen as having nothing to add to ‘the exploration of the

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 Appropriative strategies vs modernist orthodoxies

Figure 4: Kostis Antoniadis, The Walk, from the series Photo-Set, 1988.

Figure 5: Kostis Antoniadis, Untitled, from the series A True Love, 1995.

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 Penelope Petsini

Figure 6: Manolis Kontaxakis, Untitled, c.1988.

medium’. While homages flourished, works employing appropriative strate-

gies similar to critical postmodernism, such as imitation, critical distance and
parody, were overlooked. For example, Manolis Kontaxakis’s attempt to reap-
proach classical antiquity as part of contemporary Greek identity in a series of
black-and-white nudes (Untitled, c. 1988) in which he disguises himself as a
range of infamous ancient sculptures representing both gods and goddesses
(Figure 6). Providing a relatively polemical allusive imitation of classical cultural
production, Kontaxakis converted its homage quality into parody, a move that
dismantled what the series seemed to fetishize. By ‘quoting’ classical sculptures
through ridiculous hubris, such the posing of a large, hairy male as the statue
of Aphrodite of Milos, Kontaxakis subsumed the critical potential under parody
and paid a negative homage to an overpowering cultural presence, namely clas-
sicism, which is a central force in the cultural imagination and self-definition of
the Greeks (Panayotopoulos 2009). Still, the local discourse of the era retained
a largely modernist view of parody, which allowed the series to be recognized
as criticism but not as art, hence this work remained unpublished. The rationale
behind it emerged from an approach that was missing from the Greek photog-
raphy discourse, and its inclusion would require its radical revision.

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 Appropriative strategies vs modernist orthodoxies

Parody is one mode of appropriation that is closely associated with post-

modern practices. Linda Hutcheon (1988: 1–2) argues that the postmodern
itself is parodic or ironic in its relation to the past both formally and socially,
aesthetically and ideologically. No one has made parody his or her locus of
creativity to the same degree as Yiorgos Depollas, one of the prominent figures
of the ‘New Greek Photography’, who has been self-consciously employ-
ing parody as a strategy in most of his works, either mocking the status of
would-be art photographs (On the Beach, 1985) or superficially staging images
mimicking the most banal of press photographs (Unpublished Documents, 1991).
However, his grounds proved far from being postmodern. Whilst starting as a
systematic assault on conventions, the criticality of all these works had been
defined only by modernist orthodoxies of originality and authorship. On the
Beach, for example, was first presented as ‘a provocative photographic state-
ment, which undermines the conventions of personal style’ (Panayotopoulos
1985: 51). When it was later published as a monograph, it defined itself as ‘an
aesthetic idiom’ characterized by ‘particular originality, far beyond the fash-
ionable obsession with searching for pretentious originality or regurgitating
infertile styles and themes’ (Papaioannou 2003: 25). Following the modernist
canon of the era, Depollas retained the modernist split between parody as
criticism and parody as art (Rose 1993), a split which has manifested itself
most concretely in his most recent ‘Inlook’ (2003) project (Figure 7). This will
be discussed in detail in the next section, which focuses on the 2000s and
the emergence of a new generation of Greek photographers readily adopting
postmodern concepts and styles.

Figure 7: Yiorgos Depollas, Quest, from the series Inlook, 2003 (installation shot).

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 Penelope Petsini

6. The ‘visual arts PArody As criticism And PArody As Art

generation’ should
be distinguished Greece only experienced a certain institutional consolidation and legitima-
from the ‘New Greek tion of photography as art in the mid-1990s. The 2000s witnessed the emer-
Photography’, the term
that was invented by gence of a new group of photography practitioners, commonly referred to
Stathatos to refer to among photographers as ‘the visual arts generation’, though never formally
Greek photographers
emerging in the late
addressed as such.6 The unifying factor of this group is not aesthetic, but its
1970s to early 1980s participants’ success in being represented by and shown in private art galleries
as well as younger and museums other than the exclusively ‘photographic’ ones, hence becom-
photographers active
in the 1990s. The ‘visual ing fully accepted and canonized by the visual art discourse. A new discursive
arts generation’ (also space has been gradually projected, transforming and displacing the earlier
referred to as ‘the exclusively photographic and decisively modernist discourse. Practitioners who
generation of the
galleries’) is a group positioned themselves within this new framework, had either pursued post-
of photographers graduate photographic studies abroad, or had been prominent figures of the
some of whom were
part of the New Greek
previous generation (the ‘New Greek Photography’) but largely (re)considered
Photography – who their approach to place their works in a contemporary visual arts discourse.
managed to be part of The inclusion of Panos Kokkinias and Nikos Markou in the international
the broader visual art
system. This happened art exhibition ‘Outlook’ (held in Athens in 2003) amid celebrated artists ranging
during the 2000s. from Damien Hirst to Gregory Crewdson, had been seen by many as a decisive
7. Curated by Christos moment in the acceptance of photography by the visual arts and the canonization
Joachimides, the show of Greek photography. Featuring the work of 85 international artists ‘Outlook’
ran for four months became, according to many, the biggest cultural event of its kind in Greece,
in three famous
venues of Athens: especially as it raised significant controversy, implicating a right wing leader, the
the ‘Technopolis’, Greek Orthodox church, the Greek Ministry of Culture and the public. Three
the former Athenian
gasworks of the mid-
incidents of censorship that occurred during the exhibition, involving the official
nineteenth century deposition of a painting by Thierry de Cordier (Asperges me, depicting a cross,
industrial complex, an erect penis and semen dripping from the crucifix), and the destruction of a
the Benaki Museum
and ‘The Factory’ sketch by Raymond Pettibon (a full-frontal nude) and a photograph by Thanassis
exhibiting space of the Totsikas (a self-portrait in which the Greek artist depicts himself as copulating
Athens School of Fine with a watermelon in a bucolic setting), raised serious critical questions regarding
Arts. The exhibition
was organized by the freedom of expression and the reception of contemporary art in Greece.7
Cultural Olympiad for Yiorgos Depollas’s ‘Inlook’ (2003, PCA) was a response to the ‘Outlook’
the Olympic Games in
Athens 2004.
exhibition. Depollas took this most admired show and ‘retold’ it in a sharp
comic satirical manner employing the appropriative codes of parody and trav-
esty in the sense of lowering, of debasing and bringing a serious event down in
order to mock, as well as critique what he appreciated as the ‘dominant views,
associations and impositions of contemporary art’ (Papaioannou 2004).
‘Inlook’ presented dramatically scaled photographs with ambiguous
subjects and pompous titles referencing those of ‘Outlook’. It even included
an installation referencing Totsikas’s controversial photograph, involving
a watermelon with a hole in it, a layer of tiles and instructions on how ‘to
adjust the appropriate height’ in order to ‘do it like the artist’. There was
also an exorbitant text meant to mock the stereotypical banalities of contem-
porary criticism (produced by Ph.D. graduates), assigned to and written by
Hercules Papaioannou and signed by the name of his 1-year-old son. Depollas
reactivated his favourite parody style to accommodate his discomfort about
the mainstream contemporary art imposed and traded by private art galleries
and sanctified by museums and cultural events like ‘Outlook’. He challenged
contemporary art photography in ‘its immense ease […] of impressive pres-
entations which do not reflect essential qualities’ (Papaioannou 2004: 48,).
The strategies of large sizes, complicated frames and ‘impressive’ prints,
implies that a significant part of contemporary photography verge towards

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 Appropriative strategies vs modernist orthodoxies

homogenization and shallow commerciality, superseding the ‘original crea-

tive spirit which escapes categorization and opportunistic fashions’ (Papaioannou
2004: 48, emphasis added). Parody and travesty in this case came into play for
the ‘unmasking’ of this art, which, according to Depollas, has seized dignity
and authority by deception. ‘Inlook’s’ interest focused on the negotiation of
resistance against the contemporary, market-determined art production and
the over-intellectualism of criticism, exemplifying a perception claiming that
the ‘visual art photographers’ had been recycling mainstream forms and fash-
ions, producing in effect a homogenous, over-theorized, photographic style.
Though critical in its initial intentions, ‘Inlook’ does not represent a postmod-
ern critical practice. The ironies produced by postmodern practices rely on a
distancing that prevents them from being nostalgic; there is no desire to return
to the past as a time of simpler or more worthy values (Hutcheon 1988: 8).
Depollas propels us to assume that what he is actually proposing is an uncon-
ditional return to the modernist photographic tradition formed by his own
generation and, as much as this ‘return to tradition’ scheme is nothing new in
both the international and local art scene in general, it certainly is not some-
thing progressive. However, the fact that ‘Inlook’ parodies and mocks what
Depollas sees as contemporary and postmodern does not cancel out its iden-
tity as hybrid and critical and, in effect, can be seen as postmodern in sensi-
bility. At the same time, it highlights the contradictions that attend critical
practices within specific discursive formations, being postmodern in nature
but nostalgic for modernist belief systems.

PArody And Postmodern PAstiche

The recent financial and consequently political and social crisis propelled more
artists to gradually turn to the domestic environment changing their practice
and, in effect, the way it is perceived. Parody as a double-coded device, which
can be used for more than mere ridicule, that is parody as postmodern pastiche
(Hoesterey 2001), had a significant role to play within this critically upgraded
sensibility. Panos Kokkinias’s recent exhibition, with the sarcastic title ‘Leave
Your Myth in Greece’ (2011) parodying the infamous ‘Live your Myth in
Greece’ slogan of the National Tourism Organization, aimed to address the
concerns of the Greeks during the crisis. Following his favourite formal charac-
teristics, namely visual clarity, breathtaking details, staged imagery, Kokkinias
shifted from pure existential (and allegedly universal) impasses to sharp social
and deeply political comments through parody and pastiche. These pictures
are about what is happening in Greece, he states, ‘not necessarily a protest,
but more an ironic observation’ (Papadimitriou 2012: n.p.) and, in this sense,
they are about culture.
Kokkinias showcased several photographs with both an explicit and implicit
political dimension, some of particular local interest: jubilant people who run
behind a car cheering and waving Greek flags (Salvation, 2009) (Figure 8);
an Evzon, colloquially, a tsolias – traditionally, a soldier of the mountain unit
of the Greek army, now mostly referring to the kilt-like dressed ceremonial
unit that takes precedence in military parades – floating on a beautiful blue
sea under a bright blue sky (Yiorgis, 2011); a man dressed in a suit talking on
his mobile inside an archaeological site scattered with the ruins of an ancient
temple while his four-wheel-drive car is parked inside the site (Arcadia, 2011)
(Figure 9). In the latter, the Arcadian scene is disturbed not only by the man
or the car’s presence but also by the industrial buildings of the background.

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 Penelope Petsini

Figure 8: Panos Kokkinias, Salvation, 2009, from the series Leave Your Myth in
Greece.

‘Leave Your Myth in Greece’ is a postmodern pastiche, an appropriative

practice ‘aspiring to attain the status of a critical art that could legitimately
claim to represent an emancipatory aesthetics’, an art that fosters criti-
cal thinking (Hoesterey 2001: xii). Not one eclectically or uncritically adopt-
ing styles of past and present, but one which inventively extends the parodic
tactics of radical postmodernists to record the contemporary era and one’s

Figure 9: Panos Kokkinias, Arcadia, 2011, from the series Leave Your Myth in
Greece.

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 Appropriative strategies vs modernist orthodoxies

own domestic environment. An era in which narratives are constructed based

upon other, pre-existing narratives, and art practice itself has to do with more
with intellectual than with aesthetic responses.
Kokkinias created a framework defined by Greek tourism’s visual clichés,
namely blue sky, blue sea, ancient ruins and turned to several symbolic
elements of the contemporary Greek national and cultural identity, which also
had powerful visual connotations. The Yiorgis photograph, for example, nego-
tiates the ideologically charged symbol of tsolias, the signification of which
ranges from the proud Greek soldier evolved from the fighters of the Greek
War of Independence against the Ottomans to a kitsch or picturesque figure
of Greek nationalists and conservatives. The figure appears within a monu-
mental landscape shot from above and full of ambiguity. Is this a corpse or a
living person? Has he drowned or he is just enjoying a swim? The patriotism
of tsolias is rendered melancholic or ludicrous, depending on one’s political
beliefs and his presence in the Greek landscape is as ambiguous as Greek
reality itself.
Salvation, in turn, is a dramatically scaled panoramic photograph that
dominated the exhibition room. The group of jubilant people waving the
national flags appear within a vast and empty landscape, a no-man’s-land
near the northern borders, which could arguably serve as an allegory of the
Greek social landscape itself. It is difficult to tell whether this is a parody
of a nationalistic delirium or of national embarrassment. For Greek viewers,
there is an obvious connection between the image and the infamous
Memorandum of the 2 May 2010, whereby Greece was granted a sizeable
loan from the Eurozone countries and the IMF in order to ‘save’ the coun-
try from bankruptcy, in exchange for harsh and deeply unpopular austerity
measures that have precipitated large demonstrations and civil unrest. In this
sense Kokinias’ image can be seen to reflect the ambivalent initial reception
of the Memorandum by the public and many noted that it is difficult to know
if people in the picture are in a patriotic mood celebrating or running away
altogether (i.e. Papadimitriou 2012).
This work shows how parody is not necessarily negative and reductive. It
also makes us aware of the potential of the appropriative strategies and post-
modern pastiche to reflect on contemporary culture. As I. Hoesterey stresses,
by reassembling and reappropriating elements, these works adopt a dialectical
stance towards history; they are essentially concerned with both interrogating
the way western thought has dictated our ways of seeing (Hoesterey 2012: 25)
and exposing and refiguring cultural codifications that propelled or marginal-
ized identities (Hoesterey 2012: 29).
In today’s Greece, the contemporary political circumstances, namely
the rampant financial, political, moral and cultural crisis that plagues the
country, anticipates the collapse of both social and cultural models as well
as institutions, including the political ones. Within this context, contempo-
rary artists and critics are strongly challenging every old authority and power.
Not only criticality itself but also a redefinition and, in effect, a reconstitution
of a domestic cultural identity became, according to many (i.e. Gregos 2008;
Arapinis 2012), one of the most salient issues today. Critical appropriative
strategies are of crucial importance within such a context, especially in their
function as tools of ideological critique that foster critical thinking, a means
which could help us analyse and understand both how we make culture and
how we make sense of our culture. Parody, irony and critique appear to have
every potential to be significant in this process.

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 Penelope Petsini

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suGGested citAtion
Petsini, P. (2012), ‘Appropriative strategies vs modernist orthodoxies:
Postmodern concepts in contemporary Greek photography’, Interactions:
Studies in Communication & Culture 3: 2, pp. 225–241, doi: 10.1386/
iscc.3.2.225_1

contributor detAils
Penelope Petsini studied photography in Athens and the UK (University of
London, Goldsmiths College, University of Derby) sponsored by the State
Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y.). She is a Doctor of Philosophy in Arts and
Humanities, specialized in photography (Derby). Her theoretical work has
been both published and presented in conferences. She has also curated a
number of exhibitions and publications related to photography and visual
arts. Her photographic work has been exhibited and published in Greece and
abroad (four solo and sixteen group exhibitions). She is an adjunct lecturer
in Photography Theory since 2004, currently at the School of Architecture,
University of Patras.
E-mail: ppetsini@gmail.com

Penelope Petsini has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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