Hoi Polloi

Mark Hadjipateras’  Band of Uncommon Commoners

by Maia Gianakos

A city is nothing without its inhabitants, and it is both the metropolis and those denizens who form its life and core that make up the focus of Hadjipateras’ exhibition at the Hellenic Foundation for Culture, Berlin. Here, Hadjipateras brings to life a city that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, a fictive everyman’s land with architecture and characters that have been worked and re-worked into various combinations, synthesizing ancient, modern and futuristic civilizations.

In the new and recent works presented in Berlin (notably the artist’s first solo presentation in Germany), the whimsy and sense of humor that have shaped Hadjipateras’ oeuvre since the early 1980s continue to play a strong role. His works are almost always characterized by a particular levity, conveyed through exuberant colors and animated forms or, in more subtle instances, through suggestive connotations and innuendos. Yet, this immediately apparent comedic element is balanced by a more deeply inscribed seriousness—an homage to the Modernist and Minimalist traditions from which Hadjipateras emerged as a young artist, a nod to other art historical legacies, an interjection in the daily rhythm of life, or a comment on the human condition.

At the center of Hadjipateras’ exhibition are his City Dwellers, freestanding creatures cast in fiberglass and coated in a broad spectrum of glossy auto-body paint. Now factory-finished silhouettes, the characters were first presented in a permanent mural Hadjipateras was commissioned to design in 2002 for New York’s 28th Street station on the N/R subway line. Ranging in appearance from anthropomorphic to robotic to entomic, the City Dwellers form the metropolitan population that inhabits the rest of Hadjipateras’ work, an ever-expanding community with a particular unity not unlike the singular citizenry of any major metropolis (the hoi polloi of London, New York, or Athens, for example—each of which has been home to Hadjipateras).

The sculptural City Dwellers are set apart by physical idiosyncrasies—a pitchfork arm or teardrop torso, among others—which become recurring tropes throughout the exhibition, most notably in a series of large-scale sculptural works that Hadjipateras refers to as “totems.” Here, the City Dwellers become signifiers of their own culture, assembled into seemingly impossible vertical arrangements and thickly coated in coarse, black tar. At times, the City Dweller characters are stacked in combination with solid geometric forms, primary shapes that have appeared in Hadjipateras’ past projects, including the large public installation Sections at Athina by Art (on the occasion of the 2004 Olympics) and Building Hope, an interactive puzzle work installed in the Zappion Playground in Athens. Austere in color, the totems marry the precarious, minimal imbalance of Richard Serra’s stacked steel work with Jean Tinguely’s playful sculptural dynamism or Louise Bourgeois’ paradoxically delicate oversized structures (the latter of which is overtly referenced in the totem work Bourgeois).

Among the City Dwellers, the more human individuals are identified by the occasional gender assignment of a bulbous phallus or cinched waistline. Their faces are completely featureless—calling to mind the smoothly carved Cycladic heads of the third century B.C.—and singularly defined by a cylindrical Pinocchio nose. These heads, recurrent throughout Hadjipateras’ work, appear most recently in a new series of costume sketches by the artist. Here, each blank face elevates the clothing as the primary focus (a tactic not uncommon in historical folk museums, where featureless mannequins often direct the viewer’s attention to the traditional garb on display). Hadjipateras’ linear sketches explore a range of cultural traditions, from African to Turkish to Arthurian. Presented alongside the City Dwellers, these drawings and watercolors become the multicultural ancestry, a potential immigrant lineage from which the imagined futuristic cosmopolitans have sprung.

Though carefully rendered, the sketches capture a spontaneity that the more labor-intensive sculptural work intrinsically prohibits. Indeed, the works on paper betray a thought process, a serial imagining that also comes through in Hadjipateras’ black and red monoprints. In these studies, the corporeal language of the City Dwellers is explored in more detail, yet with rapid execution. This quick output and buzzing, mechanical imagery were also essential to an earlier scroll work, Glance upon a time, measuring seven meters long, which presents a series of unfurling urban vignettes that Hadjipateras produced successively on a single roll of paper.

The potential environments that appear sporadically throughout Hadjipateras’ works on paper emerge as fully realized urban plans elsewhere. In the installation Sand, the childhood challenge of building a sand castle proves productive for erecting a landscape of minimalist architecture. Similarly, an untitled piece composed of glazed ceramic modules presents a futuristic skyscraper utopia, the gleaming white counterpoint to Oz’s emerald city. As architectural abstractions, these two works stem from an earlier installation Hadjipateras created entitled Terrain, which magnifies the patterned grid familiar to centuries of urban planners while resurrecting the conical, white-washed walls of Le Corbusier’s Modernist architecture. These serial structures and square arrangements are foundational elements to Hadjipateras’ work as a whole. Since the ’90s, the artist has used Hydrocal cement to solidify everyday forms—egg crates, chocolate molds, and other quotidian objects—rendering them abstract, soothingly minimal, and familiarly geometric. Ranging in scale, the “Hydrocals” (as Hadjipateras has dubbed them) read as miniature topographies or three-dimensional catalogues of Modernist form. Recently, they have begun to take on an anthropomorphic form, leaping from the wall to the floor, supported by two legs and—despite being armless—having undeniably sprouted a head.

In a work made especially for the exhibition in Berlin, Hadjipateras has stripped the Hydrocals of their uniform veneer, presenting a vibrant selection of found objects: colorful candles, circular labels, building blocks, electrical plugs, clothespins and other everyday things that are governed by repetitive patterns or simple geometry. Carefully categorized, they are arranged in a slightly more spontaneous and happenstance version of the serial grid that dominates the Hydrocals. Resurrecting the Dadaist ready-made tradition, the found objects also continue Hadjipateras’ 2007 work, Affordable? Solutions for a Better? Living, which consists entirely of mass-produced items from IKEA. Acting as a visual glossary, these new found objects reference the forms and colors that have come to define Hadjipateras’ work. Yet, they also serve as an archeology of the civilization that Hadjipateras has built, residual traces of the city-sleek hoi polloi and their everyday affairs that will once have been.