Abstract
The oeuvre of Cypriot artist Christoforos Savva (1924–1968) is located within a transcultural-translocal, Mediterranean artistic discourse, which subverts normative narratives, especially classical modernism’s spatial and temporal foundations and avant-garde discourses. His alternative modernism and avant-gardism refuses hegemonic modernity’s binarisms of tradition versus modernity and “high art” versus “low art.” His work was enabled by his positionality in Cyprus—a space of crossings and exchanges, devoid of artistic hierarchies and grand narratives, in a “periphery” within the wider Mediterranean milieu. It exemplifies modernity in the Mediterranean: temporally and spatially contingent, yet open-ended and constantly reshaping, and always containing the embodied, lived experiences of individual agents. His place-specific modernism and non-canonical avant-gardism was enabled by, as much as it foregrounds, the hybrid and polymorphic character of cultural discourses within the Mediterranean.
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Notes
- 1.
“Geomodernisms” is another such term, proposed in Doyle and Winkiel (2005).
- 2.
The most sinister aspect of this hegemonic discourse has manifested itself in imperialism and colonialism.
- 3.
Roughly, the century that spans the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, thus, “cut[ting] off the agencies of writers, artists, philosophers, and other cultural producers in the emergent postcolonial world just as their new modernities are being formed” (Friedman 2006: 427).
- 4.
Though Clifford’s remarks here concern specifically contemporary articulations of indigenous traditions, I believe they can be applied to contemporary art production in general.
- 5.
For the emergence of “the Mediterranean” as “cartographic concept and representation” in Europe, see Armstrong (2005), Bagnall (2005). For a wider exploration of Europe’s modern construction of the (idea of the) Mediterranean, particularly regarding the relationship between geographies and modernities, see Giaccaria and Minca (2011).
- 6.
Such works include S. D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of Cairo Geniza (1967–1993); Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs (1993); Amitav Gosh’s In An Antique Land (1993); Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350 (1989). Since direct engagement with these works would have been beyond the scope of the present text, I have referred to them via Chambers (2008), Clifford (1994), Cooke et al. (2008), and Roberts and Hackforth-Jones (2005).
- 7.
In his introduction to Critically Modern, Bruce Knauft writes that “the alternatively modern may be said to address the figure-ground relationship between modernity and tradition as these are locally or nationally perceived and configured” (2002: 25).
- 8.
On Byzantine and modernist mosaics, see Bullen (1999).
- 9.
Andreas Huyssen refers to the avant-garde as the “embodiment of anti-tradition” (1981: 23–24), adding that the historical avant-gardes (now themselves a “tradition” of sorts) “fundamentally and on principle despised and denied all traditions” (32).
- 10.
A genre of urban vocal music, rebétiko is a hybrid mixture of occidental and oriental elements. Though already encountered in nineteenth-century Athens, its spread was largely owed to the influx into Greece of refugees from Turkey, mostly from Istanbul and Izmir (Smyrna), in the second decade of the twentieth century. It remained an “underground” genre until the middle of the century (for Hadjidakis’s “flexible” employment of rebétiko, see Andreopoulos 2001).
- 11.
For all the above see Dymond (2003), Ohana (2003), Foxlee (2006), Loriggio (2006), Beard (2006), Stanivukovic (2006), Talbayev (2007), Cooke et al. (2008), and Chambers (2008). Francesco Loriggio emphasizes that Mediterranean geography, more than being “one of the exemplary spaces of modern Western literature and art, ” is “implicitly or explicitly, one of the chronotopes of the criticism, of the thought by which modernity has explained—or explains—itself to itself ” (2007: 42).
- 12.
See, for instance, in large segments of the Western and Northern European press, the derogatory designation PIGS—jargonistic acronym for Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain—accompanied by old clichés of laziness, lack of discipline, and political and economic corruption, supposedly endemic in “southern societies,” which “inevitably” led to their financial crises.
- 13.
In Greek, the general equivalent of modern—in a wider sense than strictly “modernist”—is neoteros, which in the case of Cyprus usually signals the period that begins with the establishment of British rule on the island in 1878, or with the official declaration of a colonial status in the early twentieth century. I make use of “modernist” when I intend to make such specific associations (particularly with regard to art).
- 14.
There are a few artists who were born in the last fifteen or so years of the nineteenth century, who, being too few to be grouped separately, are usually included in the “first generation,” the span of which is often extended to also include artists born in the early 1910s.
- 15.
My analysis of Cypriot art largely concerns the Greek Cypriot experience. Bibliographical sources in Greek or English on Turkish Cypriot artists and other producers of culture in the twentieth century are scant, especially for the pre-1974 period. Despite the partial opening of borders in 2003, the ongoing de facto partition of the island since the 1974 military invasion by Turkey has greatly hampered any relevant research.
- 16.
As Susan Stanford Friedman writes, nationalist movements and liberation struggles from colonial rule by newly emergent nations and colonies are central to their own modernities. Therefore, “the creative forces within those modernities […] are engaged in producing modernisms that accompany their own particular modernities” (2006: 427).
- 17.
Processes of social and economic modernization had already been initiated earlier in the century, especially after Cyprus officially became a Crown colony from 1925 on. This intensified after the island acquired independence in 1960.
- 18.
Savva was born in 1924 to peasant parents, and, like the vast majority of children in rural Cyprus at the time, he only attended primary school. There are no indications that he had any early interest in artistic matters, while his first important encounter with art (possibly museum visits) seems to have taken place at some point in the mid-1940s when he was stationed in Italy in service of the Cyprus Regiment of the British Army. Taking advantage of the immigration opportunities offered to army veterans, his flight to England in 1947 probably had more to do with a desire to escape his Cypriot social predicament rather than a passion for art, at least initially. For more on Savva’s life and work, see Danos (2009).
- 19.
Soon after his return, Savva found himself at the center of the effort for Cyprus’s artistic and cultural “renewal” when he established the Apophasis [Decision] Gallery in 1960. It was the only independent, professional gallery in Nicosia in the 1960s, and it was also the focal point of cultural activity, with the organization and the hosting of exhibitions, lectures, plays (including the very first performances on the island of works by Ionesco and Beckett), film screenings, and discussions, at times with guest artists from abroad, such as Russian film director and actor Sergei Bondarchuk. Savva founded the Apophasis with fellow artist Glyn Hughes (1931–2014), a Welshman who moved to Cyprus in 1956 and lived there for the rest of his life. When the gallery moved to new premises a few months later, Savva gradually took over its entire responsibility. In 1961, he opened a tavern under the same name, and this also became a meeting place for the arts and culture crowd.
- 20.
Ifasmatografies was a term of his own invention: it was included in the exhibition’s brochure, while the invitation, which had come out earlier, referred to “tapestries.”
- 21.
My negotiation of the “avant-garde” is, of course, outside the spatial, temporal, and theoretical frameworks of the “historical” (Western) avant-gardes.
- 22.
Rozsika Parker writes that “the stitches themselves convey meaning. Linda Nochlin [in reference to Louise Bourgeois’ use of cloth and embroidery] has commented on the ferocity of the bad sewing, with large, awkward stitching, far from the tradition of professional tapestry making” (Parker 2010: xviii). In “The Savva Exhibition: Spot the Burnt Matches in a Gay Show,” a 1959 article from The Times of Cyprus on Savva’s exhibition at the time, Savva is reported to have rightfully “declined the offer of a seamstress to affix [presumably in a professional manner] the various pieces of cloth to his design, preferring to do the giant ‘saddle-stitching’ himself ” (3).
- 23.
See, for instance, Rabinovitz (1980–1981: 38–39) on Judy Chicago’s inner “conflicts,” on the occasion of her Dinner Party (1979); and Garb (1986) on Miriam Schapiro’s “need” to imbue her own work with “significant abstraction” while incorporating “the despised and decorative products of the women’s handicraft tradition” (131–132; my emphasis), which had been required by high modernism. Savva’s valuing of decorativeness can also be compared to Henri Matisse’s “goal of a modern decoration,” as John Klein (2007: 148) points out, with regard to his paper cut-outs, created in the late 1940s and early 1950s “in the Mediterranean ambience” (146).
- 24.
However, Savva’s engagement with tradition was free from the “authoritarian” aspects of Eliot’s application of tradition, which would neither forego the “superiority” of Britain/Europe, nor interrogate the “separation of the ‘West’ from the rest” (see Yúdice 1999: 57–58).
- 25.
Cassano refers to “the South” (2012: 1); of the various “Souths” explored in his writings, the Mediterranean emerges by far as the paradigmatic example of the concept.
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Danos, A. (2018). Mediterranean Modernisms: The Case of Cypriot Artist Christoforos Savva. In: elhariry, y., Talbayev, E. (eds) Critically Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71764-7_5
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