An important chapter in the history of the coexistence of speech, writing and image is the artistic field called artist’s books. It is interesting to note that this genre was practised in remarkably inspired ways even by artists whose main oeuvre unfolded in physical space. In an urge to go from macrocosm to microcosm, from the diffusion of thought around an external space to condensing it in an internal one, artists such as Stephen Antonakos and others, younger and worthy, such as Theodoulos, Maria Loizidou, Dimitris Tragas and Yorgos Tsakiris, have provided some excellent examples of treating books like works of art. Furthermore, Despina Meimaroglou’s work on the interaction between aesthetics and social and political conscience, using photography and contemporary printed matter as its main tools, has produced very perceptive and highly sensitive books/artworks which mainly refer to issues of social violence and of humanistic interest. The versatile artist and writer Nikos Houliaras cultivates the union between the realm of thinking and narrative within the world of the image in an ingenious way and under the spirit of a logographer. Leoni Vidali’s unwavering dedication to exploring new models on the relation between art and printed matter has made an important contribution to higher education, introducing new design and engraving techniques in book production.

The multifaceted personality of Demosthene Agrafiotis has approached the relations among speech, writing and art from many angles. As writer, theorist and publisher he has gone down in history for the issues of the important magazine/bulletin Clinamen; in his capacity as artist he participates in the exhibition with the soundtrack of his vocal work The ABC Books (2000), with music composed by Dimitris Kamarotos, and the 1993 video 24 Pidéo, Voésie (a pun on the words Video, Poésie).

The field of artist’s books has been boosted by the well-researched study, the theoretical interpretation and the poetic approach of Kyrillos Sarris, whose views on artist’s books are included elsewhere in this catalogue. In the exhibition itself he presents a video-installation and can be heard reading a theoretical text on artist’s books by Ulises Carrión, introducing the reader/viewer of his masterly books/artworks as well as the visitors to the exhibition into the enigmatic realm of the relations between books and artists, the interaction between the areas of knowledge and poetry.

The selective assembly of contemporary Greek artists under the arbitrary critical viewpoint of "Mythologies of the Book" serves a twin purpose: on the one hand, it presents a vital contribution of Greek artists to the fertile discourse of contemporary art around the way modern art was transformed from an international language to a world code for communicating cultural diversity. On the other hand, this issue in itself does not cancel the older theoretical assertion of linguistics according to which a people’s character, mores and interests influence their language. Throughout history the visual arts, as languages of different cultural systems, had provided a wealth of diverse forms of expression and enabled the continuity of artistic creation, functioning both within and beyond the norms of a specific culture and exposing its earlier elements to admixture with other elements from dead or living civilizations.

Yet historical circumstances prevented Greece, just like many other peripheral countries of the Western World, from following this law of evolution. The establishment of the Greek State in 1830 brought about an identity crisis of a nation whose only ties for centuries had been language and religion. A significant fact in researching and understanding Greek art is that the identity crisis went together with a crisis between spoken and written Greek; between the language of the people and the purist one. A roughly similar dichotomy occurred in visual language and prevailed for about the first one hundred years. Folk tradition –inspired by Eastern and Western archetypes, Byzantine-style and post-Byzantine types of painting, recorded in the paintings of (Panayotis) Dimitris Zografos and dictated by General Makriyannis, and evident in the famous Theophilos paintings– was a most powerful counterbalance to the academic Munich School which prevailed as the paradigm of ‘high-brow’ art.

However, it is equally interesting to point out in this brief look at the complex history of Greek art that those truly original painters in the history of the nation used the image as a formal symbol in a new alphabet. Images depict thanks to the explanatory accompaniment of words, thus adopting the tradition of mythological narrative which must assume the form of historical fact. The artist exchanges the image’s time and space with others in order to colour it according to his/her own subjective evaluation with the particular character of the myth which surrounds it. This much more complex treatment of the relation between speech and writing, speech and image –which could be seen as precursory to the later trend of a more intellectual processing of the figurative system that evolved to become a central axis in the work of Greek artists– has yet to be examined in depth. In fact, it even escaped the special attention of the champions of ‘Greekness’, from the 1930s onwards.

This exhibition presents the various approaches to the fundamental issue of language-image / thought-form / idealistic perception of culture and art as a form of its representation, as processed by the Greek artists who recognized (each from a different viewpoint) the need to bridge the dipole ‘individuality of thought’ and ‘universal codes of communication’.