Interview “Transparent Spaces” by Syrago Tsiaras, 2003
Syrago Tsiaras
Mr.Tsiaras, we would like to know…
Philip Tsiaras
Syrago, excuse me for interrupting but please do not speak to me in the formal polite, it makes me feel old and as if there is someone else in the room you are talking to.
ST
O.K. then, Philip I think one of the questions that comes immediately to mind is– what is going on in that head of yours? You make paintings, drawings, sculpture, glass, photography, print works, you even write poetry. So many things– who are you then for us?
PT
Well, if I were a tree!
St
Yes?
PT
I’d be an olive tree.
ST
And if a fruit?
PT
A persimmon.
ST
Please continue.
PT
If I were an animal, which I sometimes am,
I’d be a unicorn, blue nosed.
If I were a planet– I’d be Plutonian.
If I were a fish–I would be a Tiger Shark
Who dreamed of being a butterfly.
PT
You get the picture?
ST
Not really, but your combinations make you
sound like a human Rorschach exam.
PT
Ink blots, that’s good, Warhol would approve. Maybe what I am saying is that
all probing leads to labyrinths.
ST
Let’s try to be uncomplicated if that’s possible. You are a Greek born in America, with a cultured Anglican education. Why photograph Greek immigrants?
PT
This is what I like—a plausible question which deserves an improbable answer!
OK, let me try to explain a few things.
Pablo Neruda, when asked why he wrote poetry about Spain instead of the “great volcanoes of the country that bore him,” Chile (he lived in Spain during the civil war) said,
“Come and see the blood in the streets, Come see the blood in the streets, Venire a ver la sangre en las calles”
What am I trying to say by this?
I don’t know but it sounds good!
No, I do know. I am trying to say that
the urgency to create is overwhelming, addictive and blinding,
and when one connects with that energy-urgency, everything becomes about that. It obscures the ability to see the Reason, the Why of doing something which is usually unknown to us at the time anyway. It takes sometimes years later to discover that instead of painting the majesty of the Grand Canyon we needed the therapy of disrobing in public!
ST
Does that mean then that the Family Album was a kind of Gestalt therapy for you?
PT
No, more Pavlovian. I had to subliminally condition my family to act out fantasies whenever a little invisible bell rang! And yes, artists save money
by bypassing psychiatrists and exorcising their demons in art. Modern Greeks, I suppose do the same by going to the Bouzoukia, I mean release anxiety, break things or throw flowers–though I don’t think that they save any money!
ST
Let’s leave the Bouzoukia for a minute and discuss painting.
You love color.
PT
Yes I do. Is it a crime here?
St
No, I say this with all enthusiasm that you love color with a passion
though I would not consider you a colorist. How do you see yourself?
PT
I love color enough to want to eat it. But the wart hogs in contemporary art
seem to love the color gray. As far as being a colorist– I’ve been called that, I have also been called worse things!, but it doesn’t really describe me. For me, a colorist is an artist who is less about subject matter and ideas and more about the formal and abstract power of color. It would be hard not to consider Rothko a colorist. A colorist is not mischievous enough for me. I’d rather be considered
an imagist, a hypnotist, a prestidigitator!
ST
Are the Sandwiches a kind of slight of hand then?
PT
You know sometimes you have to turn something on is head
to see if there is change in the pockets. When you think about all the energy
that went into the millions of 2- dimensional flat paintings, in an effort to make them look 3-dimensional—it seemed to be a natural (go to the head of the class) invention to stack and combine paintings into a hybrid object. A new kind of painting, rich enough in surface 2- dimensionality, but automatically a sculpture too. Calling them sandwiches
gave them instantly an American pop-ularity. Besides, I like eating sandwiches.
ST
Me too.
PT
I guess then that we have more in common than just our last names. (Laughter)
ST
Let’s talk categories, something you don’t want to be put into, and yet you give us plenty of them. White Paintings, Sandwiches, Ceramics, Glass, Bronzes, Topologies. The Topologies, there are many in the exhibition and they span all of your primary subject matter, Horses, Airplanes, Vases, Heads.
What about them?
PT
The Topologies are my smart paintings. They have their internal engine. They speak several languages, some unknown even to me! They have everything in them and the kitchen sink.
Conceptually they are about stratified levels of depth in the picture plane. They play with layers of spatial information. Like looking at geometric farmland through clouds from an airplane at 10,000 meters. They also have a rational component of grids and architectural markings that combine with the emotive, gestural painting. They house my subjects in a transparent shell of moving information.
And they are also nice to look at!
ST
Is it an effort for you to arrive at such a language?
PT
For me all artistic forms are connected to my character and personality. Moving from one form to another is natural for me. But although it may be made to look easy—it never is.
Artists struggle always to find original ways of rediscovering an image, as mathematicians look for a model to explain the universe. The pressure to be original in our global-instant-communicative time is disproportional to the search
for quality. Truth and Beauty, ancient Greek concepts, have suffered at the expense of trend and gimmick.
But I live in this time and accept the challenge to be modern without allowing my
zeal to compromise me. It is difficult to stick to your guns, a cowboyism but true, in the lure of the new.
Being true to yourself as a young artist is itself difficult, as
part of your nature is meant to be open to new information, your time, and the ideas of your generation. To what extent an artist stays true to his own course,
while still being open to the energy of his era, truly open, is that which will define him ultimately.
ST
I see in all of your artwork a rich freedom to explore and experiment
without traditional fear. I feel this naturalness combined with irreverance very much a part of your power when you move from one medium to another. Can one learn this?
PT
Having been self-taught in the visual arts was a gift without knowing it. Schooling tends to magnify tradition, it has to in order to preserve a body of knowledge and a format for understanding it. While creating codes and systems of awareness it simultaneously thwarts a certain creativity that must survive by subverting it. This is not anti academic. But sometimes you have to burn down the barn to discover the beautiful forest behind it.
ST
Philip let’s talk some more about the Family Album photographs, after all you have a captive audience here in Greece for them. They have recently been published as a book by Contrasto in Italy. They are a series of photographs which took ten years to produce; and as a body of work, they are as bizarre and passionate as they are ironic. But, as a mother myself, I find them equally tender.
PT
I’m glad you do. Yes, these pictures now make me aware of the fact that when you are loved enough, anything is possible. And although my family was never really intellectually aware of the psychological dynamics of these photos, their open participation, their shared enthusiasm for my interests, even if it was embarrassing to them, was a bolder intelligence.
ST
Bold yes, and as a concept they are emblematic, it seems to me, of the immigration of all peoples, though they are so very Greek.
PT
Yes I think it’s true, but apart from that, this body of photographs returning to Greece now, to an important national institution, has a personal significance for me. That the son of a leftist guerrilla, whose family was chased out of Greece for political reasons after the war, could return as the invited, honored guest of the
government of that country, shows that art transcends politics, that it is purer than people, and that Greece can still reach out and reclaim its lost sons.
ST
Yes, and it has. And how do you feel about that?
PT
I feel that it is now my time to be here. I am honored, of course,
but feel more the responsibility of giving something back.
I think all Greeks, outside of Greece, feel this nostalgia in some way or another.