APOTHEKE
Alexandros ConstandinouOH SHIT!
Alexandros Constandinou
OH SHIT!
4 - 12 December 2009
Narcissism lays between voyeurism and surveillance. The self-portrait as artistic genre is an equally mythological pathology of our general understanding of the artist. Famously executed in frugal grandiosity it often signifies the artist's resistance towards 'still lives' and arrested landscapes phantasmic or realistic and his / her attempts to instil life into art through his/ her image and liking. A precursor of the performance relic the sui generis self-portrait does however come short from the libertarian philandering of interdisciplinarity it verges on . Transfixed at the shores of its practise it persists in making eyes to none but itself. The dissemination of image-capture technology and its tagging dispersal notwithstanding its shared position with the narcissism of the portraiture, introduces into such a genre the body. Taken at arm's length, most currently circulation self-portraits, take our eyes away from the iris, the lips, the cheekbones. Freud -or Caravaggio- might be outlining the boy Narcissus but the narcissistic body actually enters the frame as a glimpse of a camera-bearing arm, an unwitting cleavage, a dancing crotch, a surprised torso. The surveyed body replaces at the core of self-portraiture the subject-as-object. The looking glass, the peeping hole, the watchtower is replaced by the overseeing camera.
At the climactic cross-section of all these theoretical underpinnings comes Alexandros Constandinou's solo show at APOTHEKE, titled OH SHIT!. Part of a series of self-portraits taken over a long period of time, the photographs on show are revealed and concealed, in equal measure, behind an element of humorous surprise and an almost juvenile fascination with the body. Delving into the most closeted pronouncements of the depicted self however, OH SHIT! is an attempted reflection on the cult of the artist and its morbid grip on the work of art while at he same time being an examination of the canons of the self-portrait vis-a-vis historical and contemporary technological advances. Consequently, the photographs of Alexandros Constandinou appear to be a rewriting of the desire burdened myth of Narcissus via the folkloric Brother Grimm's mirror for a grown up, post-technological art-world.
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