Chryssa's Cycladic Books
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Introduction to a code of personal semeiotics

by Katerina Koskina

The entire oeuvre of Chryssa is based upon writing. It is not only inscriptions, newspapers or Chinese ideograms but also the letters themselves - the A, the Y, the N, the T, or the S - which inspire her to create works. Among these are the Cycladic Books, an older series from the 1957-1962 period which, although at first sight completely different from her other works, reflects the artist's interest and concern for the issue of communication through writing.

Taking the opportunity of this presentation of the Cycladic Books that belong to the collection of Alpha Bank, and aside from of what has already been written by eminent art historians and scholars, it would be interesting to examine the relation between this early period of Chryssa's with the subsequent works which established her in the international art scene as one of the outstanding artists of the second half of the 20th century. If would also be interesting to track down, as much it is possible, the existence of objective cultural references, as well as the personal psychological and mental functions which allowed her oeuvre, despite her experimentation and her constantly renewed writing, to maintain a rare coherence and recognizability.

Chryssa herself, as well as many scholars of her works, such as Pierre Restany, Barbara Rose or Donald Kuspit, give special significance to the deep ties that govern the relationship between the artist and her works. Chryssa's works are characterized and are, indeed, self-referential inasmuch as that they are partly determined by her mood, her instinct and her gender. This impression is reinforced by her lack of any desire or aim either to place herself within any specific group or to consciously follow any standard discipline that would not allow any leeway for emotional or psychological influences. Chryssa's works, however, do not belong in this category. There have primarily been discussed as especially successful examples of supporting individual expression, the development of a personal idiom, as well as the creativity of the female nature. All these allowed her to juxtapose to the dominance of a male world a female artist's arguments and persistence to exist on equal terms in an unfavourable world, without being forced to join combative minorities in order to achieve recognition of her indefeasible right to personal expression.

Much has also been written about the form of the letter S, the two versions of Clytaemnestra or the "Sacrifices" of Iphigenia. However, if femininity - in the sense of being different, of the other version and identity - has concerned Chryssa and probably reinforced her in her work, this is expressed on the one hand through a dynamic tranquillity of structure and mass, and an intensity and aggressiveness of form and movement on the other hand, proving that there are no male and female traits in the field of artistic expression. Moreover, in many of Chryssa's works the male and female element coexist. As Donald Kuspit puts it in his analysis of her works on the letter A: "They are powerful symbols of the assertive female, vaginal and phallic at the same time; open and receptive at the lower end, closed and despotic at the top".

However, any symbolism apart, Chryssa's sculptures maintain a procreative and unbreakable relationship with writing. This is most evident in her hieroglyphics, where, in many instances, meaning/writing and shape/form coincide. In these works the meaning does not depend so much on the interpretation, since the code she uses is not recognizable, as it does on the power of the form and ifs own message. How are all these references and allusions to the functions of communication, identity and reasoning expressed in this series of Cycladic Books? How do these severely minimal sculptures - which Chryssa decided to "transcribe" from the original plaster to one-off pieces of marble only around 1996 - link up with the rest of her oeuvre, which is complex and technologically advanced in its construction? These works were named Cycladic Books by Chryssa herself, but only after they had been made. Although they deserved the thematic title the 'earned', it does not reflect the artist's intentions; it came up coincidentally, almost as a revelation, through the affinity of their form with the archaic Cycladic sculptures. The series was 'born' as a sequel to the plaster reliefs she started working on when she first arrived in New York. Just as those reliefs, with their simple, usually geometrical forms and their quest for motion in light, the Cycladic Books are moulded in the easiest and cheapest material she could find for a cast at that time: packaging cardboard. As the liquid plaster hardened inside the opened cardboard boxes, it showed up all the unevenness of the cardboard, registered like an illegible or half-erased writing on the plaster. It is possible that Chryssa would not have made the connection, if she were not a Greek, or if she had not seen some recently excavated Cycladic idols on the islands. She might not even have thought to name them "Books" were she not trapped in the silence of the mute visual communication imposed to her by her insufficient knowledge of the English language. If is also likely that we would not refer to any issues of fecundity which, again, connect creativity with the female nature, if the great majority of Cycladic idols, for all their austere, minimal form, did not depict female figures, themselves no other than goddesses of fertility and thus, semantically, the very notion of mother nature, the formalized perception of creation.

In any case, the formalistic coincidence between the beginning of the history of sculpture and the starting point of her oeuvre, which constitutes an important chapter in the course of contemporary Western sculpture, is a fact. According to Barbara Rose, "the Cycladic Books do not represent but literally are a tabula rasa... They stand for a new beginning, specifically the existential condition in which Chryssa found herself...". It is at that moment that one should place the emergence of a personal code and style, as well as Chryssa s decision to use these two elements to claim her position in America's contemporary visual reality, at a time when American expressionism was in decline and the first objections appeared which were to lead to pop and minimal art.

The relations of this early stage in her oeuvre with the subsequent and better-known ones is, I think, clear. The theme of writing - merely a hint in the geometrical shapes of the early plaster reliefs which indicated or pointed to something, like signals or arrows - by the time of the Cycladic Books it had become a mode of expression, which gradually evolved into a personal language consisting of forms, ideograms, letters, incomprehensible words and phrases and, above all, symbols which attest to the artist's - more to the point, the female artists - ability to give birth, both literally and intellectually. From that point on the communication system the artist chose evolved, as if was expected, through the enrichment of her visual experience, the influence of the new culture and the expansion of her abilities. The non-recognizable writing in the Cycladic Books, which derives from the irregular surface of the cardboard, is as incomprehensible as the text in her newspapers of the 1960s with the randomly set printing characters. The same logic governs her three-dimensional Chinese inscriptions in metal and neon from the 1980s. Thus, if is evident that Chryssa is interested in the whole archetypal meaning rather than a specific part of it. She is interested in the formal rather than the practical aspect of writing. This explains the use in her works of individual elements, letters and randomly arranged syllables, by which she finally achieves the abolishment of conventional meaning and the emergence of a code of internal expression that recalls the instinct and the collective sub-conscious.

Chryssa's works offer a contemporary answer to the old problem of the two categories of semeiotics: representation and semantics. She is not, of course, the only person to have tackled this problem. In the twentieth century, the entire field of visual arts was turned into a true laboratory of combinations, additions and removals, images and words. Chryssa's opinion on this matter seems to be in line with that of Ferdinand de Saussure (and, later, Ludwig Wiftgensteinj: "the element of writing is a picture or a self-contained form". In other words, the signifier may be self-sufficient and independent from the signified.

Chryssa corroborates this theory, allowing coincidence and the accidental to influence her work while consciously maintaining a relation - which is more evident in her drawings and the preliminary sketches for her later works - with surrealism and especially with automatic writing; a legacy, perhaps, of her brief stay in Paris in 1954. All this points to a coherence between the planned and the accidental, vision and memory, the subconscious and the articulated artistic expression.

Based on this communion, Chryssa creates her own semantics, that is equally relevant with both the premeditated and the accidental. However, for the things we call accidental, Aristotle urged us to look for a hidden determinism, a rule which we have yet to find.

In her text on the Cycladic Books, Maria Kotzamanis attributes to Chryssa "the ingeniously visionary power of the great masters" which we call instinct and through which they discover secret relationships that they use to remodel the world.

I do not know whether Chryssa's artistic vocabulary reveals an unknown determinism. What is obvious, however, is that her vocabulary constitutes a version of the multi-semantic, mystic yet commonly recognizable and accepted speech of poetry; the speech that can be either audible or silent, intangible or corporeal. Chryssa's works of this second category are those which, despite their lack of homogeneity and their modernizing tendencies, maintain, as we said before, their coherence and recognizability. For all their hinting at illegible writings, the Cycladic Books are not inarticulate. They are, in fact, articulated on the canvas, where today is intertwined with yesterday; in a space where the work constitutes a record of the artist's experience and soul, but also reveals the link which connects if, in an intuitive, cellular or visionary way, with the chain of works that document the history of the artwork. This non-temporal and Utopian space, brings info coexistence forms, sounds and silence but also the ideas which cannot be realized without the creators' intervention, as claimed by the Neo-Platonists. However, irrespective of any particular philosophy and theory, it seems to be commonly accepted that language, vocal or visual, is ultimately based not only on the cognitive function of learning a specific code: it also requires the existence of another, commonly understood code that stimulates both senses and emotions. Chryssa enlists both old and new elements, her visions and impressions, exploiting the accidental as well as the ready-modes of modern civilization (electrical resistors, neon lights, etc.) in order to present, as a real Greek, works which consciously balance between Aristotelian rationalism and Platonic idealism. Add to that the fact other emigration to the US and the problem she shared with many Greek-Americans or other immigrants, irrespective of origin, of having to fuse two cultures info one, and one may realize the difficulties Chryssa had to go through to find her way. She came close to, influenced or perhaps even preceded such historical movements as pop art or minimal art. But she opted for the solitary way. She exploited whatever she considered interesting from today and the past (historical and personal] and she managed to drastically enrich the universal vocabulary of art. More importantly, she was successful in tracking down in time and raising from within, using her topical, contemporary idiom which links her work with two of today's major forces - popular culture (signs, advertising/ and the media (books, newspapers, magazines) - one of the major problems of our times: the danger of losing ones specific cultural identity. Against that she juxtaposed her personal semantics, which brings together elements of the past and the present, the personal and the universal. A semantics expressed through a comprehensive oeuvre whose constant axis is made up of the issues of communication, the timelessness of visual expression and the relation between form and writing. This is the reason why her oeuvre, for all its many artistic manifestations, maintains its coherence and automatically points to the particular artist .

The language spoken by Chryssa s works brings to mind the answer Michel Foucault gives through Stephane Mallarmé in Words and Objects to Friedrich Nietzche's question: "Who is talking? That which talks through its loneliness, its throbbing fragility, from nowhere, is speech; not its meaning, but its enigmatic, unpredictable nature".

I think one would be hard pressed to find a better illustration for these words than Chryssa's Cycladic Books. Their silent writing becomes euphonious thanks to their very image, justifying Simonides of Chios who called artworks "silent poems".