Manipulations
Art as a Means of Communication
Athens, Greece 1970-1983
Member of the public listens to the record played in Aspen - Colorado, 19 June 1973.
“Theodoros work in the 1970s and early 1980s (the Manipulations series) brought sculpture into dialogue – or even into a clash – with media such as television, theatre, recorded sound (vinyl), text or music. Its aim was to explore the extent to which the public could relate to the work though fundamental properties of materials – durability, touch, taste, sound – and perceive it as something more than images.”
“Messages in the streams of history: A dialogue with sculptor Theodoros” by Lydia Papadimitriou & Mark Durden, Journal of Greek Media & Culture, Volume 4, Number 1, 2018
Anti Spectacular Theater :
Two Sculptural One Acts - Elegy for Homo Faber
Marietta Rialdi Experimental Theater, 1976
“Theodoros presented the “Anti-Spectacular Theater: Two sculptural one act plays – Elegies of the Homo Faber, 1976″ before the audience of Marieta Rialdi’s Experimental Theatre. The event consisted of two parts, which had been partially developed and performed during the period 1973–1974. During the event Theodoros focused on the structural characteristics of performance: through a succession of ritualistic gestures and their didactic explication with chalk on a blackboard, the artist compares dialectically the sculptural act to the practice of performance and the passage from the creative act to the produced object, making a critical comment on the institutional conventions of perceiving and presenting a work of art.”
Stamatis Schizakis, text from the permanent exhibition guide ENTER EMST : Collection & History, A short guide, 2020
The work “Anti-Spectacular Theater: Two sculptural one act plays – Elegies of the Homo Faber, 1976′ is part of the EMST collection and currently on display at the permanent exhibition.
Theodoros in the U.S.
“A self-defined homo faber, Theodoros (Papadimitriou) was a multimedia artist whose work spans installation, performance, vinyl records, magnetic tapes, ‘anti-spectacular’ theater, writing and sculpture. He became acquainted with US art during his stay in Paris where he came across Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and John Cage. In 1972 Theodoros went to the USA as a visiting professor at California State University. In 1973 he was invited as an IBM fellow by Jack Roberts at the Aspen International Design Conference, to do a performance that he would later repeat in New York. To some extent Theodoros had already developed his personal idiom before going to the USA: the conceptual character of his work, involving participatory strategies and institutional critique, was already manifest in a 1970 show at the Goethe Institute Athens.”
“Towards a Geopolitics of Reception: Responces to US Art and Culture in Greece (1945 -1989)” by Elena Hamalidi & Stamatina Dimakopoulou Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1960, ed. Claudia Hopkins and Ian Boyd Whyte, Routledge, 2021
EXPO, Bari, Italia, 1977
MANIPULATION XIII, 1974-77
Manipulation of the muscular Power-Energy of the Spectator-Buyer of Art
Manipulation of the muscular Power-Energy of the Spectator-Buyer of Art
Gallery Desmos 1977
Manipulation XXX, 1981 - 1982 One - Man Scupltural - Musical Show
In the Nieuw e Kerk of Amsterdam during the Greek Art Festival (1&2) and at the Palais Royal des Beaux – Arts Brussels, EUROPALIA – Greece Art d’Aujourd’hui 2×10 ( variation B’) (3).
