kryographia_catalogue.pdf

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K R Y O G R A P H I A

Y I A N N I S M E L A N I T I S

K

T H E C O N D U C T I V I T Y O F W R I T I N G


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Kryographia was performed at ABOUT,

Miaouli 18, Athens, Greece, on October 14, 2010

Kryographia installation: 14-30 October 2010

www.aboutt.gr

Catalogue and lecture by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayeskindly supported by:

The Embassy of Ireland

Christa Lerm Hayess lecture How Joyce Plays Into

Contemporary Art, based on her book, Joyce in Art.

The Kryographia installation is supported by:

ABOUT:Counting Art A.M.K.E

BACACOS

The hellenic version of the text

The Act of Writing, by Evi Vogiatzaki,

is an excerpt of The body in the text / James Joyces

Ulysses and the Modern Greek Novel, Lexington Books,

2002, USA.

Thanks to: Caoimhn Coigligh (The Embassy of Ireland forChrista -Maria Lerm Hayes invitation and cataloque), Chris-ta-Maria Lerm Hayes for her lecture How Joyce Plays IntoContemporary Art, given during the opening of the exhi-bition, Myrto Digoni (art historian), Maria Aloupi, AndreasDiktyopoulos, Maria Boucaouri (photos), Jim Apostolakis(glasswork), Anna Gamarian and Sotiris Karamanis (assis-tance performance artists), Rhea Thoenges Stringaris, Klonis(Bacacos), Vassilis Charalambidis, Anastasia Mamali (pottery),

Christina Katsari

texts: the authors

catalogue: Y. Melanitis, 2010

photos on all pages by M. Boucaouri

except photos on pages 13 and 20-21 by Y. Melanitis

catalogue designed by Y. Melanitis

In memory of my father, M. N. Melanitis, ( 2009)


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On the entropy of the artistic process

An exhibition space is often a model of the universal space and it may contain,

analogically, equal entropy. In physics, there is no way to know the total energy of

the universe (nor its total entropy).

The artist may produce energy that is, like any situation, irreversible in time. In

a certain manner, a work is non re-executable (further more, it should not be re-

executed). Ice, placed in the installation of the exhibition space, serve as a container

of energy losses and also as an inhibitor of the of the entropic increase. No action

(nor energy) should escape that space(-time) of the performance. That space is also

the writers internal space.

All energy used to activate the performance and its paraphernalia, will remain inside

the timespace of the ending act (better: all energy is kept in a certain spacetime). The

writer is inside an insulated container and redesigns nature. (Even an evolutionarybiotechnologist that changes nature ontologically is unable to overpass its total sum

of possibilities).In a way, a technically perfect text has to be out of language.The writer produces an entropic loss and there is no way to equilibrate the nal

texts (state) with his/her initial energy state: the writer always fails. The initialenergy of the writer remains insulated and isolated inside the enclosing space, as

a drip on ice that in the process of its fall is being solidied by the surrounding

temperature...

Yiannis Melanitis

Ithaca, 2010

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, 2010


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K R Y O G R A P H I A T H E C O N D U C T I V I T Y O F W R I T I N G

Wofr wir Worte haben, darber sind wir auch schon hinaus. In allem Reden liegt ein Gran Verachtung.

We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. In all talk there is a grain of contempt.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man 26.

I felt that as a painter it was much better to be inuenced by a writer than by another painter.

Duchamp, The Salt Seller

Kryographianeologism, as an allegory that brings about the demise of live speech through writing, corresponds to

a writer that renders himself dead. The author is dead since he writes. This platonic notion of logos as a dead body is

found in Phaedrus: Soc. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of

the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.(Plato, Phaedrus,

D60)

Kryographia starts backwards, from the act of death. The last paragraph of Joyces Finnegans Wake (initially appeared

by the titleA Work in Progress), sets the coldness of the fathers body, short before the text is completed without any full

stop and seems to get narration back to the start of the book...[. I am passing out. O bitter ending! ...... I go back to you,

my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, .....makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your

arms....End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A

way a lone a last a loved a long the ]

The god of writing is the god of death. Everything we say becomes a dead corpse since it is written, and in this sense1, a

dead takes the place of the writer. The installation- performance Kryographiapresents writingas a metaphor for absolute

coldness... As the texts were written in advance, the calligrapher has the role of the anatomist who rearranges the body

of the work... [In future editions, the authors may write their own excerpts in a public place, so the act of mortalizing

the text should happen in front of us ...]

The concept of absolute coldness in physics is considered as the denition of absolute zero (0 degrees Kelvin scale,

or -273.15 in Celsius). In this situation, all actions, metaphorically take place at temperatures close to absolute zerowhere matter exhibits quantum effects such as superconductivity and superuidity and space-time continuum acquires

new meanings. (Lead and mercury are considered as the rst known superconductive materials.) In physics, temperature

affects processes and material properties more than any other variable, such as pressure, magnetic eld, electric eld, etc.

The lowest part of our thermodynamic ux is absolute zero,a temperature marked by a 0 entropy conguration. It is the

coldest temperature theoretically possible and cannot be reached by articial or natural means, because it is impossible

to decouple a system fully from the rest of the universe.2Nor is possible, by any process, to reduce the temperature of a

system to zero in anite number of processes. This indicates the writer at a succession of unlimited approaches of the

absolute text... It could be argued that the author needs, theoretically, innite necessary actions to reach a conclusive

document. Meanwhile, in a similar way to the behaviour of matter at absolute zero circumstances, the author cannot

write the perfect work because he/she can not be completely isolated from the environment. 3

In the performance, the penman4(he also acts as an iceman), activates a valve, using the existence of vacuum to initiate

water movement; the whole procedure is only possible during the act of writing. At the end of each line of the text, a pair

of electrodes captures the movement of the writer and switches on an electro-valve, releasing the liquid. After moving

through a system of glass pipes, the liquid is frozen. Generally, the installation functions as a cryomachine.

Vacuum can be dened as a volume of space without matter. The pressure of this area is less than atmospheric pressure.

The ideal writer is also one that creates an entirely empty space. During this action he dematerialises space, triggering

the intellect to produce a potential difference, so the mental constituents move instantly...

During the performance, Yiannis Melanitis will write the text The Act of Writing,by the writer Evi Vogiatzaki. This will

be the rst Greek edition of the text. (Original title: The Act of Writing, Lexington Books, 2002, USA).The excerpt t is part of The body in the text / James Joyces Ulysses and the Modern Greek Novel. The Greek version of

the text is translated by the author from the English prototype.

The Kryographiais an issue for the theory of arts in the form of handwritten text. The unique copy, once completed

will be accessible through the About library. The rst issue examines the concept of The Body as a Text, the Text as a

Body.

1. Derrida, Platos Pharmacy

2. [Source wikipedia]

3. During the writing of In search of the lost time, Marcel Proust insulated his room with cork sheet. Special space created, also with the addition of double

doors and heavy curtains, aimed at complete detachment of the author by the sound, light, dust and noise, which through quarantine to capture the expanding

world of the novel. [http://www.studiocleo.com/librarie/proust/mainframe2.html]

4. Shem the Penmanis a character that Joyce revisits the problematic of artistic autonomy through the trope of self-reexivity and self-portraiture in whose

name he stepped into modernism with thePortrait Of The Artist As A Young Man... Margot Norris, Joyces web: the social unraveling of modernism, University

of Texas Press, 1992 .

Performance materials: Ink on paper, blown glass, clay hydriai, cast lead, parafn, cloth, ice, electrovalves,water, cast lead, aluminium foil.

Yiannis Melanitis


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wake[ trans. ] dialecthold a vigil beside (someone who has died) : wewaked Jim last night.

noun

a mourner at a wake VIGIL (Hellenic=), watch; funeral.

The Old Norse vaka relates the etymology of the word wake

with ice:

wake

nouna trail of disturbed water or air left by the passage of a ship or aircraft.

figurativeused to refer to the aftermath or consequences of something : the

committee was set upin the wake of the inquiry.

ORIGIN late 15th cent.(denoting a track made by a person or thing):

probably via Middle Low German from Old Norse vk,vaka hole oropening in ice.


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instructions for A Work in Progress

1. search for the word ice in Finnegans Wake

2. define each and every reference

3. analyse and explain all inexplicable issues and meanings of the text

4. create new words

5. conceptualise all terms


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...funnish enough, in a doorway under the blankets of homelessness on the bunk of iceland,pillowed upon the stone ofdestiny colder than mans knee or womans breast...

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

The word icelandappears

An artists task- to find all possible anagrams (word doublets) betweeniceand land

ice- dice- dies- dead- lead- lend- land

Contained concepts: dice=unpredictability, death=the step before lead, lead=first superconductive material known.

Define all contained concepts sculpturally.

Execute sculpturally a rock from lead, starting from ice,with unpredictability.

Indicate death in the final artwork.


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ice dice dead lead landdice drop dead dice(game) penalty hazard Dicelanddead nekromanteia Hades radioactivity dead whether by land whither by water (FW)lead Balkans sound insulation merging superconductivityland treadmills Nekya mine nationalism

an artists task- to find all possible crosswords between ice and land

ice- dies- dead- lead- lend- land

An example with possible outcomes:


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ice thermo machine lead mouth landthermo desertification timemachine thermometer fever iceland/ geysermachine machinery of time war dentistry literature factorizationlead evaporation plasticity merging greyness superconductivitymouth logos politics abuse kiss opennessland nostalgia agriculture mine lunch nationalism

possible crosswords betweenice and land with other intersections


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Qualitatively, ice and land can be also substituted by the words Kryo (cold) and Thermo (warm)

an artists task- to find all possible anagrams (word doublets) between Kryo (or Cryo)and ThermoKryon-Krymn (), Kremo-Thermo-Thremma()-Thermo

Cryon-Crymn-Cremn-Cremo-Tremo-Thermo

or

Kryon- Krymn-Krypt-Thrift-Theft-Theme-Thermo

Intermediate concepts arise. For example, energy row fromkryo to thermogives a first word Crymn or Krymn(=rock, mountain).

Define all contained concepts sculpturally.

From Liddell-Scott lexicon we may note the word =ice cold (from `Hippocrates on his work Peri Diaitis).


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a first word Crymn or Krymn(=rock, mountain) is cast in lead


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Kryographia : A self-cooling machine that slows down itself till ending


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Kryomachine is s suggestive machine,a machine for successive suggestions,on every word-point given. Every text line

written, leaves a drip of water which proceeds to be frozen.Ultimately, the machine cools down and deactivates itself.

This resembles to a lexicon that cannotreally defne any word, producingsuccessions of possible explanationsand meanings.


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the machine falls down with a noise

ice- lead


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Suggestive machine falls with a noise of cold mourning, the wake still i wait. Fatherbedandcoldheartrestandwake.


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maths

A or B

not A nor B


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arts

A to B

B cold


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C O M A T I M E T A B L E

five hours and four minutes of sleep, three

hours and thirtyeight minutes of wake,

six hours and thirtynine minutes of sleep,

twelve hours and fortyeight minutes

of wake, two hours and eleven minutes

of sleep, one hour and fiftyone minutes of

wake, three hours and SEVENTEEN min-

utes of sleep, one hour and eleven minutes

of wake, sixteen minutes of sleep, one

hour and fiftyone minutes of wake

fathers timetable during his last night, Laikon Hospital, Pathology Clinic, Athens, October 30, 2009


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I M M O R T A L I T A SKryon-Krymn-Krypt-Thrift-Theft-Theme-Thermo


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T O C A S T A W O R D

A word is thrown. It colonizes the page. It is formed to a specic shape, is trimmed,

stretched, conjugated, elided to create a recognizable / readable signier. A shadow

is cast. Then, metaphorically, it exits the page. Another word is thrown, and another,

infusing the paper with scents and snatches of reality. The mold may be the same, but

the meaning and this is especially true if the word is a concept is elastic. The concept

evolves, merges various components, which may be variations, each variation making

its presence felt as a bold stroke. There is an undeniable plastic quality to it. Also a

distinctive spatiality. One needs to nd his bearings in a word. One has to navigate within

it. The word entails movement; it also claims movement. Mixing words, casting words is

brain gymnastics. Which, one should acquiesce, can be a dangerous exercise. It propels

us into the poetic anarchy of the sensible world.

One way to probe and reassess the world is to play word games. Creating metaphors. Or

playing the same games Lewis Caroll used to play: making word ladders or inventing

portmanteaux. In the rst instance a player is given a start word and an end word and has

to progressively morph the start word into the end word, using at each step of the way

an existing word. To do so he can add, remove, change a letter, or use the same letters

anagrammatically. By doing so one can stumble on his unconscious and learn more about

how he thinks and feels; for one is essentially working by intuitive leaps and linkages. In

the second instance the player / writer blends various words and their meaning into a newword. The coinage expresses a singular choice, reects ones unique way of experiencing

and rendering a situation. It also reveals the associative and metaphorical movement of

thinking. In his novel Ulysses, James Joyce associates what he calls his 8 am scene The

Housewith the color orange and kidneys, the 11 am scene The Graveyardwith black and

white and the heart, the noon scene The Newspaperwith red and the lungs, etc1. In Joyces

case the mind is beyond a doubt metaphorical; his metaphorical thinking is grounded in

embodiment, on mans bodily experience of the world. He uses a synesthetic approach,

in which stimulation of one sensory / cognitive pathway leads to experiences in a second

sensory / cognitive pathway. As synesthetes go, letters put together do not solely equate a

word that resonates with a single meaning; they also equate colors or evoke odors.

But sometimes, when the word actually exits the page, literally being cast or molded into

a work of art, it denies the metaphor. Conceptual artists create neon sculptures of words

that are thought out as tautologies. They transform words into visual objects actually

they remind us that words are primarily shapes and forms, before even being signiers.

Joseph Kosuths artworkFive Words In Orange Neon(1965) is effectively composed of

ve words in orange neon. What you see is what you see. But is it? The temptation is

strong to see beyond, see an allusion to color-graphemic synesthesia, look for personal

resonances. The form forming and jointing capabilities of the human brain are endless.

We always tend to create connections, search for lost correspondences. There seems to be

no escape. Ultimately to cast a word means to search for a lost scent as in hunting with

hounds2.

Myrto Digoni

1 Around 1920 James Joyce drew the Linati Schema to help a friend (Carlo Linati) understand the funda-

mental structure of his novel Ulysses, an epic of two races and at the same time the cycle of the human

body. In this schema different episodes are associated with different parts of the human body, mythologi-

cal heroes and colors.

2 This being one of the denitions of the verb to cast


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