While walking through Kolonaki the other day, I stumbled upon an art gallery filled with small architectural drawings. An exhibition at Kalfayan Galleries Athens by Bill Balaskas that closed this Saturday, it involved coloring in a small section of many of Lawrence's drawings of ancient Greek architecture. For example, this image of the topography of the Athenian acropolis:
The website for Kalfayan Galleries includes the following in its biography of Balaskas:
The exhibition at Kalfayan Galleries revolves around the artist’s new in-situ installation titled “Architecture of Good and Evil”, which investigates the cultural origins of the current socio-economic crisis. The work features an inverted replica of an Ionic column and 172 works on paper. The artist has chosen to intervene on pages from the seminal book of A. W. Lawrence “Greek Architecture” (1957), which depict architectural sketches of ancient Greek monuments. By painting over a single part or shape of each sketch in blue, Balaskas raises questions regarding both the polysemy of symbols and the role played by their monosemous theorization in the formation of a national or cultural identity.
While I'm not sure I'd call Lawrence's drawings "sketches," I'm nonetheless intrigued by the concept - but it's just that, a concept. All of the drawings were framed and arranged at eye-level throughout the gallery, and readily visually accessible but to me, it fell a little short in its intended meaning. How does modifying a 50 year old architectural drawing - and by "modifying," I mean coloring in a little square or rectangle - make a statement about symbols and their place in the formation of a national or cultural identity? And what does it mean to remove such drawings from a book and the contextual meaning they're meant to represent, which is a visual interpretation of scale and preservation?
What would Lawrence think?
 |
| (Photo via Kalfayan Galleries Athens |
The exhibition at Kalfayan Galleries revolves around the artist’s new in-situ installation titled “Architecture of Good and Evil”, which investigates the cultural origins of the current socio-economic crisis. The work features an inverted replica of an Ionic column and 172 works on paper. The artist has chosen to intervene on pages from the seminal book of A. W. Lawrence “Greek Architecture” (1957), which depict architectural sketches of ancient Greek monuments. By painting over a single part or shape of each sketch in blue, Balaskas raises questions regarding both the polysemy of symbols and the role played by their monosemous theorization in the formation of a national or cultural identity.
While I'm not sure I'd call Lawrence's drawings "sketches," I'm nonetheless intrigued by the concept - but it's just that, a concept. All of the drawings were framed and arranged at eye-level throughout the gallery, and readily visually accessible but to me, it fell a little short in its intended meaning. How does modifying a 50 year old architectural drawing - and by "modifying," I mean coloring in a little square or rectangle - make a statement about symbols and their place in the formation of a national or cultural identity? And what does it mean to remove such drawings from a book and the contextual meaning they're meant to represent, which is a visual interpretation of scale and preservation?
What would Lawrence think?
No comments:
Post a Comment