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Unstoppably voluble
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Kostis Velonis making a political statement with his art (Photo Christos Theodorides)
Offbeat, prickly art created by a loner who describes himself as a ‘craftivist’ – craft + activist – is currently on show in Nicosia. THEO PANAYIDES meets its politically minded maker
“I hope you weren’t disappointed,” says Kostis Velonis unexpectedly, fixing me with his rather moist, melancholy eyes. We’re upstairs in a small office at Omikron Gallery in Nicosia; two floors below, in the basement, Kostis’ exhibition ‘Building the Stage’ officially opens in a few hours. He’ll be there for the big event, then flies back to Greece first thing in the morning. He’s got other openings to organise – next on the list is the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art – the Nicosia show exhibiting only a small selection of his work.
Ah yes, the work. I was down in the basement earlier, just before our interview, getting a sneak peek at the paintings and modern sculptures, hence his slightly unnerving question. ‘No, I wasn’t disappointed,’ I reply – which is true, but it’s also true that I knew (more or less) what to expect, having rooted around on the internet. I can see how someone coming to it cold might be underwhelmed, and/or find it pretentious – a response he may be half-expecting (hence the question), especially in a small place like Cyprus where he hasn’t been exhibited before.
It was actually a bit surreal seeing the exhibition before it opened, because much of Kostis’ work uses everyday materials and looks purposely half-finished or thrown-together. Once or twice I found myself wondering if this or that object was in fact an exhibit, or just a prop used by the gallery staff which would be removed before the crowds arrived. Was that wooden lectern some kind of step-ladder, used to hang up paintings? (Certainly not; it’s a sculpture entitled ‘The Same Sad Rhetoric’.) What will Joe Cypriot make of a painting like ‘Direct Democracy and Informal Debate’ – which, despite its title, is composed entirely of two grey blobs, looking like two lengths of pipe (one L-shaped, the other like a fire extinguisher), joined by a single diagonal black line? Then there’s the centre-piece, half a wooden bench upended on its side with planks and yardsticks jutting up behind it. One plank is red, another has white stars on a blue background, another has a top hat and crudely-fashioned eye holes. Looked at from the front, it uncannily suggests an American tank with soldiers standing up in the turret – hence its title, which reads (in its entirety): “Mr. President Said: I can’t do well when I think you’re gonna leave me, but I know I try… Are you gonna leave me now, can’t you be believing now?” How’s that for a conversation piece?
Kostis’ own conversation is as quirky as his artworks. Mournful, intense eyes perched between a bald dome and a ginger beard, he talks incredibly fast, riffing on his own words as one idea draws his mind to another; it’s not that he ignores questions – he’s very polite – more that he approaches them in a high-flown way that refuses to be pinned down. “These are very good questions, very pointed. I didn’t expect it,” he mutters, unprompted, at one point, but in fact he mostly uses my questions as springboards – and it seems unfair to try and steer him back when he’s in full flow. I was mildly surprised when he insisted on speaking in Greek since his blog - kostisvelonis.blogspot.com – mostly a collection of random texts and pictures he finds interesting – is entirely in English (he did Cultural Studies in London, among other things), but I think I can see why: his English may be fluent, but I can’t imagine anyone conversing so volubly and unstoppably in more than one language.
Cultural Studies was just one of his degrees; he started with Film in Athens, moved on to History of Art in Paris, then the stint in London, then Architecture again in Athens (at the fabled Metsovio). Once you include National Service, I’m assuming he’s one of those people who was still a student in his early 30s (he’s now 43), raising the question of how he made ends meet – a question that elicits another of his antic answers. “I tried to look at it stoically, and persuaded myself that I was a kind of Pippi Longstocking – that I always had money, in my fantasy world, even though of course I didn’t. Because when I opened the treasure chest, I didn’t find any gold coins, I didn’t find anything – yet I always had a sense that the chest with the golden coins existed. It’s as good a way as any to deal with poverty.”
He’d always been creative, but it took time for his creations to find an audience. The son of a journalist and an engineer, he saw himself initially as a photographer and filmmaker but gradually segued into fine art. His parents had no connection with art (though they liked books and music); it wasn’t a case, as he puts it, of growing up with artistic education and “parents taking the child to the museum every day”. In any event, he adds, it’s impossible to breed artists in that way. An artist isn’t forged by well-meaning stimuli, but by the circumstances of his (or her) life – especially the darker, more hopeless circumstances.
“I think artists find a safe haven in what they do, because they feel from very early on that they’re problematic,” says Kostis candidly. What did it for him, he adds, was “the fact that I felt incompetent at a series of other things, and this sensitivity to failure got channelled into art. It’s like writing poems because you’re in love with a person. You don’t write because you love poetry – you write because you have no other way to express your feelings for this person, who may have rejected you. That’s basically how you end up doing fine art, due to a series of failures that you experience in life”. Intriguing – but then, when I ask what those failures were, he turns elusive. Really just a sense of inadequacy, he says, “a feeling common to all men, this sense that we’re vulnerable and may disappear at any moment… These are the failures I’m talking about, purely on an existential level.”
I suspect it’s just that he always felt different, maybe even (to use a more existential word) alienated. Even now, the steady stream of words also operates as a kind of defence mechanism, obscuring the real person. Note, for instance, that he thinks of the blog as his “diary” – yet the content, as already mentioned, is impersonal, except insofar as he’s gathered all this material in one place. Note also the kind of person he seems to be: introspective, somewhat anti-social. “I like being alone, I enjoy it… I’m an indoor type generally”.
He likes chamber music over symphonies. When he travels for a new exhibition, he asserts with a touch of provocation, his favourite part of being in a new place is the lonely solitude of his hotel room. (‘But a hotel room is so anonymous,’ I point out. “I know!” he laughs; “I think I might be a bit autistic.”) His favourite films are the spare, minimalist dramas of Bresson and Dreyer – spiritual, transcendent cinema, even though he himself is a passionate atheist. Does he have any hobbies, anything outside his work? “There’s nothing else,” he replies. “I just like to read. I like poetry – I never read novels, I only read poetry”. Right now he’s very into Georg Trakl, an Austrian poet of the early 1900s who died of a cocaine overdose at 27 – though Kostis himself has never gone in for such wild living. “I’m a very conservative person,” he insists. “I don’t even smoke. I don’t even drink coffee”. Just as well, given how fast he already speaks.
Then there’s the politics – which, again, tend to be inward-looking, favouring individual rights over social groups. Kostis takes politics seriously, as implied by the titles of his paintings and sculptures. “I’m not abstract,” he insists, “nor am I a conceptual artist”; he defines himself as a “craftivist”, combining ‘craftsman’ and ‘activist’ – but his activism isn’t tied to the usual ideological camps (he has contempt both for the crisis of capitalism and the “intolerable, outdated rhetoric of the Left”). “I believe I’m an anarchist,” he says, though certainly not a “hooligan” or even an “anarcho-Communist”; he considers “Ronald Reagan more of an anarchist than [left-wing Greek politician] Tsipras”, for instance. You might call him a libertarian – a believer in the freedom of the individual to do whatever he chooses. Very much including the freedom to make offbeat, prickly art that many respectable punters will find pretentious.
Unsurprisingly, Kostis is as reluctant to be pinned down on his art as he is on more personal matters. Asked about ‘Direct Democracy and Informal Debate’, for instance, he demurs that the titles of paintings often have more to do with the conditions under which they were painted than the content itself. Titles are important; sometimes he’ll finish a piece and not come up with a title till two years later, “and every day for those two years I might devote five minutes to trying to come up with a title”. (He usually spends four to five hours a day in his workshop, but of course ideas come unbidden at any time.) “What I do often feels like a substitute for poetry,” he muses – meaning, I assume, the way poems find a single expressive image to stand in for complex ideas (and hours of brooding on the part of the poet). Theatre is important too, in the sense of dramatic activism, but it’s mostly poetry. “Maybe I’m a talentless poet,” smiles Kostis, “who found a way of expressing himself through fine art.”
Poets seldom find a mass audience, of course, especially poets who express themselves through minimalist paintings and modern sculptures. Who does he make them for? Who’s his ideal viewer? But Kostis Velonis shakes his head. There are all kinds of viewers, he says with a touch of sadness: “There’s the suspicious viewer, the viewer” – he pauses, not wishing to offend – “who is negative, the viewer who’s positive but can’t understand, the one who wants to understand everything but understands nothing.
“The only certainty,” he concludes, “is that in reality – as an existential, shall we say, statement on my part – I don’t ultimately care if the viewer is interested in the work. As long as I was interested, and ended up creating it, whether the viewer chooses to follow or not is his problem… That’s to say, I am interested in the viewer’s opinion – but then also, at the same time, I’m not interested at all.”
You can’t base your life’s work on what people will think, says Kostis. If he’s “problematic” – and perhaps has always been this way – the least he can do is embrace it. “You have to be honest with yourself. Even if that honesty isn’t enough, even if the work is bad, it doesn’t matter.
“The most important thing of all is to be true to what we believe. Whether there’s an audience of 500 people for that, or 1,000 people, or a million people, makes no difference.”
