Debris (Enlightenment Panel no 2) by Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni

Sculpted and painted wood, combined with treated rusty objects. Duct tape with boat paint models for metal sheet sculptures, 2020. Digital drawings, 2021, 2023. Dutch steel sailing boat part-restoration and renovation, Amsterdam (with Sean A. Hladkyj), 2019-20. Relief and improvised sculptures made with industrial paints, as well as found objects, were exposed to weather conditions, including heavy rain and wind, over a few months on a floating timber raft. Working with the changes the weather was causing to the ad hoc studio, I made changes until the painting was finished, photographed, then dumped. The relief was collected. I applied the colours from those available in a symbolic manner, abstracting the view of a ghetto in a large city. The objects stand for the landmarks. The pieces would comprise of the scenography for a theatre performance, informed by my conversations with a theatre lighting technician. The event would also include a donation event of the art objects. See external link for the theatre play, based on the tradition of the philosophical dialogue and employing the idea of performing philosophy to make it accessible to a wider audience. Political asylum is offered to people who flee from their countries of origin, because of violations of their dignity, which is a human right, for the political beliefs and personal lifestyle. Drawing on the philosophical notion of impossible objects, the works also attempt an indirect postcolonial critique.

Relief with found objects, boat and house paint on wood, A0

collected, 2020

Digital drawing, 2021

enlightenment panel

number 2

2020-21

The relief was conceived with reference to the totem, which in primitive cultures demarcated one tribe from another. Freud offered an anthropological interpretation of the totem's function as a prohibitive symbol of incest; that is to prevent intermarriage in the same tribe. He further explained the modern phenomenon of neurosis that occurs amongst people perceiving themselves to belong to the same clan. I view the primitive totem to serve a double therapeutic function: by delimiting the area of a clan, it reminds of the primitive prohibitive function that has no longer the purpose it had in primitive tribes; on the other hand, it encourages social interaction with a wider societal context.

Building monuments that become the city's landmarks, where reality and symbol come together, is a characteristic of many early civilisations. The landmarks would stand for the monuments of these past societies, around which communities were formed and expressed in a symbolic language. Today, we are surrounded by mass produced objects; these are our modern debris of artefacts, creating a new material-symbolic language.

The physical process of making the works allowed me to express a painterly vision of landscape as an expanded assemblage, where the figure is an active element in making the artworks. This also remined me of painters working with performance techniques. For example, as Kristine Stiles (1996: 17) notes, Carolee Schneemann was inspired by Cezanne, in the work of whom she saw "a craving of the human senses for 'sources of maximum information'":

"Her early drawings, paintings and constructions transparently reveal how she took her cue from Cezanne, especially his "Bathers" paintings. But in her use of materials that cover the body, especially the shreded and collaged newspapers she used in so many Happenings and performances, Schneemann vastly expanded on Cezanne's technique of passage by translating and transforming its static patches of interlocking pigments into the moving elements that she became and described in Schlaget Auf".

Schneeman's aim was to "draw the eye back to the body that sees: both to the body's inextricable connection to what is seen and to its role in determining the nature of the seen" (Stiles, 2002: 11). This allowed her to exploit the act of drawing on paper to invent a different method "for translating feelings, intuitions and sensations into communicable information where instrumental reason, the scientific method, and logic-based epistemology have failed" (Stiles, 2002: 11).

Kristine Stiles, "Schlaget Auf: The Problem with Carolee Schneemann's Painting", Carolee Schneemann, Up To And Including Her Limits, Dan Cameron (ed.), New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996, pp. 15-25.

Kristine Stiles, "The Painter as an Instrument of Real Time", Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects, Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press, 2002, pp. 3-16.

I made a relief pattern by removing layers of the chipboard, then I combined found objects, later treated. Adapting the artistic practice of the combined in painting, I addresed the modern and ongoing question of depicting an object in the visual arts. I applied the colours from those available in a symbolic manner, abstracting the view of a ghetto in a large city. The objects stand for the landmarks.

"To repeat, what art has in common with logic and mathematics is that it is a tautology; i.e., the "art idea" (or "work") and art are the same

and can be appreciated as art without going outside the context of art for verification.

On the other hand, let us consider why art cannot be (or has difficulty when it attempts to be) a synthetic proposition."

"Works of art are analytic propositions."

From Joseph Kosuth's Art After Philosophy

Roy de Maistre was an Australian-born painter, occasional furniture designer and decorator. His main gifts as an artist were more analytical than imaginative. For his paintings he worked thematically, concentrating on landscape, portraits and religious imagery, in that order. He infamously remarked that "In one's life one ought to be gentle and forbearing, but in one's art one should conduct themselves quite differently. It's often necessary, for instance, to give the spectator an ugly left uppercut."

MIchael Peppiat, Francis Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma, Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2008, p.61.

the longest Dutch pedestrian and cycling bridge

Own private boat during renovation, 2019 - 2020

Private marina with membership, for members to repair and restore boats, including industrial and communal facilities.

Own private boats (1, 2), 2018 - 2020

The thriving Dutch boating culture depends on the country's highly engineered water infrastructure, but also on the economy of buying, repairing and selling boats that are treated as tax-free commodity objects. License is not necessary to sail your boat in the Netherlands. Basic construction understanding is useful for the hands-on sailing and repairing boats. The Dutch marinas are vibrant spaces for keen amateur sailors, craftsmen and tradesmen alike.

2019 - 2021

Although imbued with an element of interpretation in the approach required to understand, explain or express an aesthetic matter (Wiitgenstein, 1958: 202, 219; 1989-2009: 3, 6), Wittgenstein's descriptions of aesthetics as practical knowledge are closer to presenting forms of knowledge than the interpretative socio-anthropological and psychoanalytic practices. This is possibly why Wittgenstein (1974: 6.421, 71) equates aesthetics with ethics despite not adopting a definite position on whether knowledge is gained or presupposed in the aesthetic case.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philsophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D.F.Pears and B.F.McGuinness, London: Routledge, 1974.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Lectures on Aesthetics", C. Barrett (ed.), L. Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, London: Blackwell, 1989-2009, 1-37.

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