Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp

The series Manipulations begins in October 1970 with the exhibition – event titled Sculpture for public participation – PARTICIPATION PROHIBITED, at the Goethe Institute in Athens and continues, in numbered variations, taking the form of exhibitions and performances, until 1983.  

Manipulations are an important milestone in the evolutionary process of Theodoro’s multidimensional work as, besides everything else, they signal a special change: the passage from the clearly manual and sculptural phase of his work to a second period which could be characterized as a more intellectual one. Theoodoros of course never stopped considering himself a sculptor, attributing to sculpture through the Manipulations –and other works too- a dimension with multiple meanings. In the case of the works presented in this exhibition (Manipulations I and Manipulations III) for example, “ the vinyl records as works of sculpture, rely on the concept that sculpture as communication functions through the formation of the materials with different instruments – tools. At this present process the sound of voice carves the vinyl material, through which the sound vibrations that we hear from the playback equipment are being generated as the artist himself explains.

An important issue that the artist deals with in the Manipulations is the communication with the audience through sculpture and generally through art. Sculpture is being juxtaposed to the mass communication media, e.g. text, oral speech, image, sound and acting, with the intention to explore expressive correlations and differences between those two communication codes. The work itself is being treated as an “open aesthetical object” and is being deconstructed as an art object. Manipulations are a comment on art itself, its social function and commercialization, the artist’s role, the prevailing perceptions on art etc.

Eleni Ganiti, EMST