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| Tasos Pavlopoulos The Criminal A long time ago, in 1961, the American artist Claes Oldenburg wrote: “The artist is disappearing / No one knows where he has gone / He leaves his mark here and there / He appears in this neighborhood / And the next moment / As if by a miracle / At the other end of town / Actually, you sense him rather than see him / Rebel, drunkard, tennis player, cyclist / And always refusing violently to admit that he did it / Everyone gives a different description / Of the criminal”. Many years later, in 1991, another compatriot of the artist, William Nelson Copley, said that “Surrealism was something much more than a simple art movement. It was revolutionary – in the worst possible way. It was something anarchic. It put you on the edge of the branch and taught you how to cut the branch behind you. Why does the artist feel compelled to fool people, making them believe that he is respectable? Why is there this pretense of respectability? In reality, we are dangerous. Our motives are really bad. If people only knew what goes on in our heads, they would throw us all in jail. To be an artist is the closest thing to being a criminal. For both of them, society is a strain. Just think how many terrible ideas the artist gets away with, only because no one reads them carefully, believing it is art. Art is an anti-career, an anti-social experience”. In spite of the fact that Copley had, out of necessity, fought in the Second World War (as many Dadaists had done in the First), he nourished a deep anti-militaristic philosophy when he said, with humor that “the Unknown Whore is just as important as the Unknown Soldier. Both have been DECEIVED. Whoever lets himself get killed in a war deserves a monument to his stupidity. It is as meaningless as being killed in a car accident”. However, aside from us, the “imaginary criminals”, certain others have actually committed continuous crimes against humanity: in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq… Of course, they aren’t the first or the last…. In 2003, while the bombs of the “liberators” and “saviors” were killing little kids in Baghdad, I painted the work “Hollywood”. TASSOS PAVLOPOULOS  Download CV |  Hollywood |
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