Non-Digital Art? That's so 20th Century

Many a Sunday brunch has been ruined when I open the New York Times—eager to read an in-depth feature about this month’s offerings at the Museum of Modern Art—but find instead a rave review about an opening in Berlin. The college student who can barely afford an online Times Select subscription surely cannot hop a plane to Paris/London/Bilbao—why must Nicholas Ouroussoff tempt me so? Like the unnaturally blue bagels left beside the toaster, so too is the Times’ Arts section rejected when they insist on publishing about inaccessible European shows.

But you, my reader beleaguered by that meandering and self-righteous introduction, are in for a treat. This review of an overseas exhibit does contain some of the smugness of the jet-setting art critics I previously scorned—but, with the caveat that all but one of the artists I tout have works that can be seen without leaving the eastern seaboard. Or even your computer for that matter.

In “The Grande Promenade,” The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) staged a sprawling exhibition of 44 international artists. The brilliant “open museum”—with indoor and outdoor sites throughout downtown Athens—showcased both newly commissioned works meant to reflect the city’s famed archaeological sites and also previously conceived pieces by world-renowned contemporary artists.

“The Grand Promenade” displayed a great variety of media, as well as a fascinating representation of artists with strikingly different national backgrounds and intent. As the exhibition opened two days after the beginning of the war in Lebanon, the photographic installation by Fouad Elkoury of the Israeli invasion in 1983 became painfully relevant and extraordinarily moving—especially when the artist himself could not be present at the opening because of the destruction of the Beirut airport.

Those who took Assistant Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of History of Art and Architecture Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s History of Art and Architecture 10 may find the name Michael Blum more familiar—the Israeli-born artist was a guest lecturer in the class last spring. Blum’s installation in Athens was entitled “A Tribute to Safiye Behar” and the nomadic museum “memorialized” the life of a fictive Turkish woman from the 1930s, raising the question of how easy it is to deify historical figures. The piece itself was more interesting in theory than in actuality, but HAA concentrators should try to catch a lecture by Blum if he returns to campus this year.

While a number of the pieces found their inspiration in international politics, many of the works in “The Grande Promenade” took an entirely apolitical approach and instead highlighted the whimsy and joy that can present itself in contemporary art.

Perhaps most representative of this are the works done by the “Neensters”—a self-described “still-undefined generation of visual artists,” lead by Greek artists Andreas Angelidakis, Miltos Manetas, and Angelo Plessas. One part avant-garde manifesto, one part reflection on the effect of the Internet on art and architecture, and one part really silly online flash animation, Neen represents a new movement that uses computers to defy traditional ideas about displaying and sharing contemporary art.

While you won’t be able to be “baptized” in the gospel of Neen as visitors to Athens were, you can go to www.neen.org and procrastinate with endless hours of animation, video, and philosophy. Perhaps the most famous—and most fun—of these is Manetas’ www.jacksonpollock.org, in which even the biggest skeptic of abstract art can try his hand at splatter painting.

—Staff writer Kristina M. Moore can be reached at moore2@fas.harvard.edu.