ACTORS

Stefanos Tsivopoulos is a relatively new artist. We definitely know him as a visual artist, because his work has been exhibited in spaces where visual art and exhibitions are presented.  His language, though, as a means he uses in an almost exclusive way � so exclusive that it becomes his own -  is film, cinema, video, screenings, the space between darkness and light, between movement and stability,  performance and enactment, between  specific and alternate timing. Tsivopoulos is not a film director, in the sense that he doesn�t make films to be screened in theatres or on TV, although his works unreel on film and face the structure of the film. Nevertheless his works remain suspended between physical, real and historic space on the one hand and the conceptual, notional or imaginary space on the other. In the same sense they suspend between the architectural space of the exhibition and the perspective space created by the screening and this of the visual experience. Their essence hovers between the beholder and the image thief, between the image thief and the thief capturing reality.

In the above art works, roles alternate, in a way that is now typical of his approach, not as a function incorporated in the evolution or the writing of a script or fiction, but by transforming the viewer in the master of the work, in an active and bewildered writer of his story and operator of his procedure, while simultaneously turning the director into a viewer, whose facts constantly and unexpectedly change. Who�s watching whom? Who�s pointing whom? Who talks to whom and who addresses to whom, are constant questions that the art work poses with perseverance as a dead-end that stands before us. Both the artist and the viewer are on the edge of a cliff, which can even be real as the case may be (e.g. his work �Land�) but in all of his works it consists the internal or basic structure of the work, the break-through where the work is born and carried into effect. This cliff is linguistic � as a break-through in the cinematographic language itself- as it is spatial � as an image of the break- through and the function of the rupture on his work and his writing, as well as inside the story and its space-. This is obviously the achievement that gave the artist�s work the accessibility and recognition it enjoys.  Letting the theory and practice blend in the work�s and the viewer�s language and space, he manages to fulfill an entire work on an abeyance.  The ambiguity remains suspended. It divides or rends, in order to shift its� hovering position in the abeyance in which our contemporary civilization waves aside the relation between speech and image. It�s this abeyance that Tsivopoulos brings to the foreground as a break-through, with contemporary visual, as well as cinematographic, aesthetics and processes.

Fictitiously or visually as much as constructively or literary , this abeyance in Tsivopoulos� work is the subject and reason or to be more precise, subject and reason are the ones that consist this abeyance and still remain suspended� In all of his works, from Actors (2004) or Stunt (2005), Land (2006) and Play (2006), Untitled (Remake) (2007) and Interview (2007), to Untitled (in Plato�s Cave) (2008) and Reverse (2008), the abeyance always composes the reason as a break � through while saying and pointing, decomposes at the same time every standard that predetermines him, for the film itself as well as the people, the rhythm, the story, the fictional line, the space and time, the narrative and the concept of truth, the function of speech, the rhetorical figures, its dictum and its flow, its rhetorical spaces and the position of the camera as well as the director�s, the actor�s and the real person, the viewer, and the viewer�s oration which calls him or challenges him to stay out of space and time, on the instant, being part of the process and retaining consciously suspended the limit of it�s effectiveness.

This suspension Tsivopoulos shares with all the contributors of each of his works and this sharing activates, not the small story of the film, but the large story that carries cinema and visual arts as an indiscrete unity, that no commercial or academician protocol can separate. The relation between cinema and visual arts in the bottom line is possessed and determined primarily from the conventions of a chained production and distribution. It is urgent, to understand the relation between the �artist� with the work group or the number of functions and interventions that characterize the range of conception, the structure and the unfolding of the speech that is called �work�. Up to which degree is the artist able to interfere and decide the stricture and the realization of the work in as many levels and practices as possible that consist it? To which degree does it manage to reduplicate as a conceptual person and multiply in a series of physical persons that construct the entirety of the proposition that is the work? This is what Tsivopoulos poses as a question because usually in cinema �and probably with ways more indirect, but equally binding in visual arts- despite the fact that the appearing name is that of the artist�s, the final touch, call and responsibility belong to the producer.

But beyond this sociological differentiation, the fields that would have allowed more material or technical differentiations of an artistic specificity of cinema are rudimentary.  Photography and video are self-existent material means that coexist equally with film and experimental cinema as they do with visual arts, the same way speech belongs equally to theater and literature as in any other human procedure. So, it is rather hard and pointless for one to search to which point and with what way the visual is aesthetically distinguished from the cinematic part of the work. This distinction is not a major concern of Tsivopoulos�s work and does not rank in a way that enables one to distinguish the photography, the story, the narrative and its writing. In most cases, if something stands out, it is because the viewer gives it to someone out of the play or if he still remains inside, acquires its� own dimension and entity from the moment it means the break-through of speech. The moment in which we are referring to here, is the one that truth becomes his own, the viewer�s, inscrutable and inconceivable from the procedures of the enactment and whichever technical or artistic ability or script. This way Tsivοpoulos�s work seems to be defined from Actors (2004) to the compelling Untitled (Interview) (2008). Every time, the artist�s role is to break the chain of meaning regarding the valorization of producing a meaning and also regarding the value of producing the work itself, thus putting every immediate perception within a relative perspective an array of questions, transfers, destabilizations it entails. And what becomes a question, transfer, destabilization is exactly that certainty and effectiveness of these categories, that in the end, make cinema look more real and direct as a revealing spectacle or as a documentation of, or as propaganda tool or as neutral work of art. From one work to another remains a pendulum between the viewer and the creator suspended between question and doubt.

Tsivopoulos through multiple horizontal and parallel lines and vertical compressions of different points, which resonance together, either by position or nature, systematically and complementarily composes his work. And his work consists of a conceptual apperception of that, which either does not exist at all, or does not exist yet, or exists only in context as an association, a hypothesis, an inkling, a suspicion. Therefore it consists out of either non specific time or through modifications of the context or the surrounding space as resonances and assonances. So what can we say in the approach of a filmic work, so that we don�t fall in the trap that the artist so systematically avoids by constantly separating complexity and entirety? How can one compound the non specific time and bilocations, the resonances and the assonances that establish in a work like the one Tsivopoulos has, combined with his distinctiveness, his writing and character? To say that he is better or different is not essential, even if we believe so.

We must underline the consciousness that the truth does not belong to the artist nor to the work, but these two combined provoke the viewer and clear the ground for the truth to stand on its own. A kind of consciousness that rarely works anymore and we can see it in Tsivopoulos�s work as a clear hypostasis of the artist�s speech and attitude. The tragic question of a society and a culture where image substitutes speech more and more, without knowing how and where, when and why it constists the horizon that activates his work. This question activates the form of the work and the substance hypostasis of the speech through an empty point: the one we called a cliff in which�s edge we are standing overall as subjects and objects, suspended. 

At the same time we are facing the fracture of speech and image, its meaning and its recording within the world. Then Tsivopoulos, by touching the boundaries of some teachers and friends, rebels or poets, he touches the crevice, running over the surface of the mirror. He touches the fracture that makes truth simultaneously material reality and something so fragile the minute you move its new crevices appear in or on it (it is impossible to distinguish the inside and the upper side in film or in any image, memory or speech, place or language).  So this inconceivable moment, when everything can utter claims to validity and simultaneously precipitate in the fracture that remains wide open underneath them as well as inside of them like an abeyance of the truth, Tsivopoulos exposes us so unexpectedly. And because, the truth is not projected but exhibited, his screenings are cinema as much as they are visual art and instantly carry the abeyance of the image between space and time, in a bidirectional way towards the strains of the break-through.