“(Orchestra) Uncredited: four violas, four cellos, double bass, two piccolos, two flutes, two alto flutes, two clarinets.” [1] / On the Work of Peter Eramian By Evagoras Vanezis Peter Eramian’s practice develops through the creation of constellations - critical encounters of differing reference points that engage with and shift the probability distribution of cultural potentialities. Art history, pop culture and the expanse of the everyday create the conditions for a practice whose main tenets are collaboration, extended mediations on spaces as semantic markers of defunct oppositions and the extension of works into series. For the series of sculptures Minimal (2016), Eramian developed a methodology to sculpturally inscribe the use of irony as a tactic of engagement with absurd vestiges of the present. Eight blobs of white concrete, solidified on custom-made rebar cages, were extracted from holes dug by Eramian and Rumen Tropchev. A material engagement with a present that reveals the incompleteness of presentism as an all-conquering frontier of consciousness. The process of creating “orphan stalagmites of debris from land art and site-specific traditions” [2] amalgamated in a materiality of accumulation (as the sculptures were embraced by the land that enveloped them) and an aesthetic of decay. The sculptures were presented in a solo exhibition entitled Hopelessly devoted to you (2016), which also featured a large neon sign placed on the roof of Thkio Ppalies (an artist-run space Eramian runs with artist Stelios Kallinikou) looking out into the city of Nicosia and bearing the title of the 1978 hit song that lend its name to the project. The process-based demystification of the commodity status of the art object and the declaration of the sign facing the city created the conditions for Eramian’s mediation on the site of the gallery as an intersubjective laboratory, embracing a variety of seemingly incompatible flows and spaces. In the installation Queer Little Gods (2016), part of his larger project Here’s to my sweet Satan (2016), the dislocation of sixteen tons of rocks was connected to the exploitation of the ubiquitous nature of real-time sharing of documentation, process and labour across social media and the press alike. Four writers were asked to contribute texts on the probabilities of four differential references. Dislocation, real-time sharing of documentation and collaboration are tactics through which the process of demystification finds its coordinates into a process-based elaboration of the effects of making, presenting and circulating art within the current biopolitical rendering of neoliberal economies. These economies thrive in generating cultural and political processes that affect and traverse the experience of creating by excluding the experiential contours of necessity from its enunciating principles. ‘Can language capture hardship?’ is a question Eramian often grapples with, prompting us to look at his practice as an effort to express the conundrums of cerebral, emotional and physical processes and the effect they have on a bulging consciousness. In the ongoing 1 Percent series Eramian uses leftovers and accidental materials: 1 Percent (1) embraced the leftovers of Minimal and 1 Percent (2) the soil that dripped when the rocks of Queer Little Gods were painstakingly washed one by one by Eramian and Tropchev. Fusing together concerns ranging from the consequences of capital accumulation and political discourse on the world’s wealthiest, to an effort by an association of Cypriot artists to effect a disregarded law concerning the allocation of one percent of the budget of all public buildings to the commissioning of new artworks for each building, known as ‘The Law of 1%’, the works create a cultural echo that points to Eramian’s preoccupation with seeking and sharing a sincere rhythm for all those things
that feed the circulation of bodies, ideas, sense and senselessness. The uncredited orchestra must raise the demand to be credited. Similarly, in Business Plan (2017), a collaborative project between Eramian and Tropchev, plaster tiles are accumulated in piles that index via surfaces of encounters the very work that goes in producing them while the function of the body in the public sphere as a site of lived truth is put to work. The visuality and circulation of bodies, and specifically of the working body, becomes the main problematic of an examination on the current state of society, where ‘to make a living’ and ‘living body’ are intertwined and feed into a loop of necessity and desire that furnishes how we come to understand our efforts and the labour that goes into realising them. The functions of bodies are involved in a politics where they become performative loci of experiences that cannot yet be adequately expressed in common language. Perhaps the best way to describe it is in Eramian’s own words: “In a sense we [the collaborators] are a band improvising together within a set framework and instrument/concepts. It’s not just the words, it’s the play between the words, myself as an ‘artist’, the ‘artwork’, the texts, the context, etc.” [3] [1] From the Wikipedia article on the Beetles’ Here comes the sun, a song used in Eramian’s installation Over and above just play; over and above mere curiosity (2016) [2] Hopelessly Devoted To You exhibition text by Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra: http://www.petereramian.com/Hopelessly-devoted-to-you [3] Eramian, quoted in Kiriakos Spirou’s review of Here’s to my sweet Satan: https://kiriakosspirou.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/peter-eramian-heres-to-my-sweet-satan/