"By giving its support to these series, the Onassis Foundation wished to explore the links existing between the culture of ancient Greece and the world today." "It was never in it intention to associate itself to any opinion concerning the history and the political life of modern Greece." "The Onassis Foundation insists in clarfying that the choice of the themes as well as the selection of the interviewed persons are the sole responsibility of the director." "THE OWL'S LEGACY" "09 COSMOGONY or the Ways of the World" "An old electric powerplant near Paris isn't a bad spot to brood over creation, be it the cosmogonian Gods or creativity in men, but where to start?" "I would like you to start with the famous Cycladics, the statues which were broken up before being buried with the dead." "I wish you showed those pieces scattered around in the tomb and then, at a certain point you'd make the bodies rise from their resting places to show to your viewers that statues always mean 'Arise, the dead!" "'" "French archeologists working at the Delos site have filmed a surgical operation which makes possible for a statue buried for 2000 years to stand up right again." "Agossiaton which means merchant but sounds better" "Kaios Ophelios Pharos had himself immortalized by Athenian sculptors in 2nd century BC." "Their prototype was Hermes at Olympia." "His immortality suffered some setbacks from burial to beheading, not to mention broken testicles glued back on with pink raising." "Now he's on his feet again for a new share of eternity." "And if it didn't disappear, his head should be somewhere looking its body as they do in myths." "I believe in the burial origins of the statues." "I believe that the statue is the dead body, the resurrected dead body." "You know that at crossroads, there were stone, milestones, which represented at times a rough image of Hermes." "So, statues were used mainly to mark a site." "What is that site?" "Just like plot boundaries today." "We mark our land by boundary stones." "The statue is the dead and the site but it means the same thing." "Where are you from?" "I was born there, in Athens." "But what does 'there' mean?" "'There' is the place where my ancestors were interred." "So the statue is both the dead man and the place where he was buried." "But Cariatides of Acropolis were not originally dead women." "But statues also die and Athens' dreadful pollution could kill them." "So they too had to move for the first time since their infancy." "They were torn from Eraclion where they were replaced with the copies." "There was a statue on the Acropolis more than 3 feet high." "A large statue of an owl but we don't know where it stood." "Then, there are the travelling statues." "In 1987, for the first time, one of the Koroi from the Acropolis Museum, was exhibited at the" "Ueno Museum in Tokyo." "After listing their numerous similarities, art critic Ule For wrote" "'Since the early Greeks, no people have been so collectively art-obsessed as Japanese'." "But wait." "The surprise came from discovery of originals." "Copies were well known." "They were part of educational landscape since one's birth." "The first profile a Japanese child learns to sketch isn't a sweet curve of ?" "paintings." "It's that curve defined by Girodou, which were obtained by prolonging an imaginary line from Greek nose down to the Greek smile." "When we drew statues in art class, wasn't it the statue we saw in the art materials shops?" "Nobody knew it was Hermes." "We just drew it." "Hermes wasn't known in Japan then." "It became famous in Japan only thanks to the Hermes in the Faubourg St Honore." "MITSUKOSHI DEPARTMENT STORE" "A Tomorrow of Better Quality means our commitment to quality." "We wanted our store to bring out the novelty of the classics." "Hence we emphasised the classics." "The origins of Classicism is Greek sculpture." "So we have used that as our motif." "What is your rapport with Greece?" "Adoration." "In the 19th century, scholars would pray on the Acropolis." "In the 20th century, the artist colony meditated inside that closed powerplant near Parias." "Where did that adoration stem from?" "How strong Greek Gods were to innudate the planet Earth like a network of secret agents?" "How accute they were to touch the very plexus of creation?" "In the beginning was chaos." "Void, in its original meaning." "But also chaos as we perceive it, a fantastic mixture of everything as found in pre-Socratic philosophy." "The Greek image was a world with an inexpressible basis, a chaotic one," "over which reigns one single law and that is anangke - necessity, which Anaximander described thus:" "'From it springs the youth of beings towards it goes their destruction." "They must appear and disappear, one after the other to pay the ransom of injustice'." "It's a very pessimistic viewpoint according to which to exist is already an injustice." "It prompted Sophocles to say in the final chorus of a tragedy:" "'The best of all things is not to be born." "The second best thing to die as early as possible'." "That's the Greek viewpoint." "A chaotic world ruled by necessity and where there is also the world we live in as such, a cosmos, that is, an order, based on a fundamental disorder." "This is a very modern viewpoint." "The best of modern physics, biology, can only follow this path." "Many phenomena today can prove that chaos can bring about some harmony and consistency." "These are the latest theories, in astrophysics, as in the field of particles, or in society, or even our bodies." "It's interesting to see that these ideas germinated in the 4th century BC." "And later, in Plato's philosophy." "At one time, he speaks of God, as a demiurge, anonymous, nameless." "This demiurge, this God, creates the universe, and therefore human societies, then he drops them." "He created harmony then drops it, to let evolution take its course." "Like an automaton." "Then, this autonomaton or harmony goes berserk, and after awhile the god takes control again, puts it right and drops it again." "When harmony is built by this god time has a direction." "Man is born, grows into adulthood, gets old, dies, goes back to earth." "When the god re-imposes harmony things reverse themselves." "The dead rise to be young again and disappear - a marvelous image." "Plato was a genius mythomaniac." "This is part of our problem today, one of the answers to evolution, is the amount of matter sufficient for attraction to halt the expansion" "which we seem to witness nowadays?" "If the amount of matter is enough the expansion will stop and there will be a gradual implosion" "as if the phases of the universe were reversed." "Once matter is over-concentrated another explosion will occur, etc." "It's exactly the Platonic image of god taking control." "Whence two fundamental ideas ensue." "Harmony can only be divine and it is man, i.e. the automatism, the universe's automatic phase, who makes it go berserk." "So there is only one solution." "A god or a superior being must re-impose order." "So the Greek saw the creation as an atomic explosion." "There is the Big Bang." "But to explain it or to explain the situation at the instant of this explosion" "they must imagine today that there was void before it." "No, not void, that there was no time or space." "From that, everything was created." "Now this is a blatant contradiction." "When we say 'nothing' we can't imagine existence, being." "But if we start with existence we can't imagine nothing." "Aristotle saw this contradiction." "But all science was based on that." "Even today we ask this question, linked to the artist's problem." "We ask ourselves, if he creates, that is, if there is creation can this creation be understood by other humans?" "I remember coming here with Takis the sculptor who is a great sculptor." "He spent a long time in France where he has a great reputation." "We stopped at this panel and he said to me 'Look Spiros, this is a work of modern art'." "What artists and other must ask is 'Is man a creator or not?" "'" "We can answer this question in terms of astrophysics." "If universe was created of nothing so can anything in it be created out of nothing." "We are standing on the site of an early Greek power plant," "the Faliro steam power plant constructed in 1896." "It became one of the biggest power generators near Athens." "It operated until the '70s." "This place was chosen by workers of the National Electricity Board to establish their Cultural Centre." "When I arrived here" "I was astonished, I was amazed to be surrounded by workers who looked me straight in the eye" "saying ' We want a Cultural Centre and the State MUST built it'." "This must remain a living entity working 360 days a year, a platform for discussing art." "And there laid a mystery." "A closed plant, for which Fouli Manoulopoulis fights like a true Greek heroine, should become a modern art museum, most astonishing art museum, where all the figures of creation would be together, where a move from chaos to art would be permanently accomplished" "under the gaze of huge machines, standing there like idols." "Idols!" "This is real question." "We must start at the begining from the Greek term 'eidolon'" "which means a double, a ghost, that is to say, what the dead become after dying, their souls, their 'psikhe', which is a sort of a man's double, little doubles, little corpuscles," "little bodies, which are also images of dreams appearing on the sleeper's head and which are real." "They are god-sent apparitions." "That is, ghosts again." "That's the primitive meaning of eidolon, a double." "Then Plato and others gave the term a more general meaning - image." "A vision, something extraordinary." "We see them right under our nose, they seem real yet they don't exist." "They are counterfeits." "Eidolon has a negative import." "It's an image, opposite to Idea, but the root is the same." "Knowledge" " Eidos I know because I saw." "There is an intimate relationship between seeing and knowing." "Plato compares the human body to an apparatus allowing the head to move and the head supports the eyes." "And the eyes are sometimes the springboard for horror." "The problem with the Gorgon's look, with her monstrous face, is that in order to see her one must look straight at her." "She represents, amongst deities, a power you can only approach by looking her in the eyes." "But doing that means to be dead." "It's like taking her place, to turn into stone, that is, to enter a domain where there is neither sight nor transparency, nor luminosity." "The world of darkness." "The Gorgon's face in these positions, on vases, conveys figuratively this experience, quite overwhelming, of a supernatural power." "A fascinating power which, when it meets your eyes, always seeing you first, delivers you into death." "She is also like a mirror because when you look at her you see what will become of you, a face of death, a monster, a head encircled with darkness." "Between the Gorgon's eye and you there's a kind of mirror exchange, which makes you enter, fascinated, into her world." "You change into a kind of mask of invisibility, of monstrosity." "And the story related here is the story of Perseus." "A story which explains how a human hero, Perseus, manages to confront...what?" "Chaos, death, nothingness, unthinkable horror." "He is going to cut its head off." "And in so doing, in mastering it, he's going to make sure" "that the terror which emanates from this head and image this terror, man can turn it either against his enemies" "or, in a comic and ridiculous way, make masks like these." "So there is a way, through images and through stories, of disarming the horror of death that the monstrous faces expresses and which the image carries out so that what can't be seen" "is eventually depicted in many ways." "Imagine men living in an underground chamber like a cave, with an entire wall opened to the light." "These men were prisoners since childhood." "Their legs and neck tied in such a way that can't move or see anything that's not directly in front of them." "Light reaches them through a fire burning somewhere behind them." "A road runs between the fire and prisoners." "Imagine a long wall stretching the lenght of this road, like a screen separating pupeteers from their audience." "I can see it." "Now imagine that men are carrying along all sorts of gear behind this wall including figures of men and animals." "A strange picture and strange prisoners." "Do you think that our prisoners have ever seen anything of themselves or other fellows except the shadows cast by a firelight on the wall of a cave?" "How could they?" "If they were able to talk to each other, don't you think they would've seen the shadows they saw were the real things." "Inevitably." "If one of these prisoners were loose, he would stand up and raise his eyes to the light and he will suffer." "If he was dragged out of his cave on the light of day by foce, would he not complain about the violence done to him?" "And when he reaches the light, will he be able to distinguish a single one of those things we point out to him as real?" "He will not." "In 1940, Simone Weil wrote" "'Our movie houses are not unlike that cave'." "It wasn't meant as a compliment." "How could she accept that this inferior artform should find within the cave the power to negate the cave, to disarm the Gorgon, to tie itself to the thread of human creation and, finally, to create its own myths?"