lecture given 9th of july 2009, castle Marquardt

It is surely no coincidence that the word Atlantis first appears in the context of a dialogue namely that of  Plato's Timeaus and Critias – and nearly two and half thousand years later we are still talking in and of the same literary form of dialogue. Perhaps, the only but greatest mystery then is that the notion of why Atlantis "continues to float across the human imagination and the far horizon of the modern world." For what is a dialogue? It is a conversation between two or more people. It is also vitally (note that I use the word 'Vital' as in derived from life) a literary and/or philosophical form in which two or more parties engage in a discussion. Thus what we are talking about is a type of posed and pre-proposed philosophical - literary – cultural-social conversation, And it is surely what we will be doing here today, though whether in full agreement is another matter. For that is the very point of the word, as dialogues suggest different points of view, precisely like the speculative Atlantean set against Athenian positions that Plato comparatively conjoined whence the word first emerges.

Dialogic-Binarism is at the very centre of Western philosophical epistemology (subject versus object, leads to perception and phenomenology; good versus bad, right versus wrong, black versus white, 'theos' versus 'atheos') leads to questions on the numerous issues of ethics and moral philosophy. It is interesting therefore that Atlantis or the 'other' appears precisely within this binary frame. Its adaptable use as an idea closely linked to the binary counterpoint, thus Atlantis is both past and future, a folding mirror of interfaced reflections and ideas. Witness its influence on being at times both science fiction and science fact. As fact at the time of installing the exhibition the Space Shuttle Atlantis was making repairs to the Space Station and Laboratory above our heads. Dialogic binarism was everything to the construction of the either/or of Greek thought, the 'theos'or 'atheos' (theist or atheist), Eros or Agape (sexual profane or sacred-spiritual love), are mere commonplace examples. However...

Self and Other – Most obviously form of our human adoption of binarism. Since the Berlin Wall came down the plurality of difference and new recognitions of the role of 'self' and 'other', have become important distinctions operating in the post-communist world. In this context otherness far from being alien has come to be seen (or must come to be seen) as a pre-requisite for understanding the construction of personal identity and the increasingly complex formation of self. The 'me' is no longer the Cartesian 'cogito ergo sum' of the singular subjective self alone, something that has been corralled into a prevailing dominant ideology, but the 'me' (or self) that is always formed in relation to the 'not me'. The other being that which we are not, but that nonetheless at the same time gives the meaning to the unique singularity of our individual identity. In consequence modern democratic societies have increasingly become (or should become) societies of plurality and/or inclusive of ethnic difference. However, as to whether these differences have been subsequently commodified and turned into illusions of difference within a triumphant Late Capitalism remains clearly open to dispute. Similarly as to who is included and excluded is opened up to serious debate, and particularly so in the context of the democratic (or otherwise) changes that have happened in the last twenty years. This will be fundamental surely to today's conversations. But what does remain apparent is that contemporary visual artists continue to play an important and substantial cultural role in both recognising and assimilating the different social shifts and new identities (the cellular subjectivities) that are currently being formed within post-communist Europe. The fundamental premise of this exhibition is that of identity distilled through a changed world of self and otherness.

The classical Platonic binary of Demos – Aristos (emblematic of the party of the Democrats (governance by the many) and the alternative party of the Aristocrats (governance by the few best fitted to govern) in ancient Athens) serve as our leit motiv of what will be a two part exhibition of Atlantis- Hidden Histories – New Identities. This year is more focused on DEMOS and touches directly on issues of how to integrate heterogeneity and democracy after the collapse of grand narrative thinking, the one ideological system fits all that operated in the context of national communism(s). I will return therefore to ARISTOS later.

It is surely significant that Plato's use of the term was quite precise expressing the term in the context Logos and not Mythos (the distinction being quite clear in Greek thought). He also cites as authority through the mouth of Timaeus the source of the Early Greek poet-lawmaker Solon, who as we know has been attributed an traditionally understood as the founder of Athenian democracy. Thus the Atlantic story acts as a real event and metaphor of place –  does it exist? Does it not exist? Where is it (like the Holy Grail) something not fixed and seemingly to be found, but to be searched for, an imagined set of identities (appropriate directly to our context  today). In this way ideas of Atlantis becomes a meditation on the lost and found, both on the formerly existing and the subsequently imagined. This it seems is the very reason why Atlantis has served and continued to serve as the basis for all sorts of identities and mental spaces of the post-classical and modern world. Thus quite literally it has a hidden history whence new identities can be imagined and created. It is the power of the future-past and past-future, that is central to Atlantis. And, it is not merely so as arcane philosophy and/or literary history.

It seems then particularly relevant to Central Europe 20 years after the wall came down, to a Germany reunified and the New Democracies of the former Eastern Europe that have emerged. Note that I use the word 'Central', cities like Prague, Budapest, Warsaw were never understood historically to be Eastern Europe prior to the advent of Communism. Atlantis of course ended in cataclysm – appropriately destroyed by Zeus, the Supreme God of 'Destiny', analogies perhaps to the Fall of the Wall (Cataclysm for the one party Communist system), though clearly and thankfully less violent than that the island and civilisation of Atlantis experienced – being destroyed and submerged beneath the ocean. And, as Barack Obama observed the other day as regards Iran post-election violence, quoting Martin Luther King's famous "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice." Derived ultimately from the non-violence ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, let's hope this is a substantive truth, of a post-Communist Europe.

The literary sources of Atlantis are numerous and web-like running in many different directions both secular and metaphysical. Not least of which was if it did exist where was it located? Plato's Timaeus locates it beyond the Guardian Gates of Hesperides, traditionally thought what we call today the Straits of Gibralter. This seems logical given the word, since this was thought in the myths of Ancient Greece as the 'Ends of the World' where the sky (some say Earth) was held aloft by the punished Titan and son o Poseidon Atlas, hence Atlantis like Atlantic Ocean derives from his name. The dominant return of the word and idea Atlantis, is in the seventeenth century with Sir Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (written 1623, published in 1627) and was part of the tradition of 'Utopia' literature started by Thomas More (1516). The New Atlantis is a perfected society of Bensalem, where empirical science and questioning leads to human development and enlightenment. Solomon's House being presented as the ideal college of learning.

The re-engaged Renaissance search for Atlantis is contextualised within New World colonialism, and a whole welter of island discoveries and colonisations dating from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Hence  America as the New World became a vital focus and consideration as to a re-imagined Atlantis (Alexander von Humboldt). In the wake of its destruction the colonised Canary Islands, Azores, Madeira (1490's on) were first described as the remnants of the catastrophically destroyed ocean island civilisation. Indeed, the obsession with finding Atlantis has intensified over the last four hundred years. Sites of catastrophe like the destruction of Santorini (considered the largest explosion in human history) just one of the many proposed locations. Sometimes connected with the abrupt end of the Minoan civilisation. There are quite literally dozens of others, not only as a search for the location of Atlantis but the residual traces of its people called the Atlanteans.

Bacon is a very interesting figure insomuch as he represents the new English 'empirical' science but also the esoteric, occult, and alchemical side of the seventeenth century scientific revolution. Bacon was also a freemason and affiliated to Rosecrucianism (just like some members of the Bischoffwerder family who originally owned Schloss Marquardt), the involvement of the Atlantis myth and occult spirituality is a central thematic to the Rosenkreuzer Ordens. Indeed since that time Atlantis narratives have always somehow become associated with New Age religions and cults. Empirical and rational, ideal and imagined Atlantis has served and filled in for all their mental peregrinations.

The Atlantis narrative (location and people) is enormously implicated in Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy, both in terms of its imagined descriptions, and the hundreds of fantastic projections brought about by Symbolist depictions (both artistic and literary). The Atlanteans become one of the stock races (Caucasian) of her pantheon. In this way nineteenth century theories of heredity and Eugenics (Galton, 1861) became attached to Atlantis. This was taken further by the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, who links it specifically to the Teutonic of German race(s). Hence a National Socialist involvement emerged in books like Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), and racist novels like Hans Dominik's Atlantis (1925), and Edmund Kiss's The Last Queen of Atlantis (1931). But just as easily and at the same time Antonin Artaud saw the Tarahumara people of Mexico as the direct descendents of the Atlanteans (Essay: The Rites of the Kings of Atlantis, 1936). Whether talking of Romantic or Expressionist literature or poetry, be it of love, melancholy, yearning for death, doom, apocalypse, parallel worlds (Novalis, Hoffmann, Rückert, Gertrud Kolmar, Hauptmann, Stephan George, Heiiner Müller) all have Atlantis narratives. Conversely, journeying and the quest, looking for lost worlds are another type of literature (Conan Doyle, W.H.Auden, and Konstantinos Kavafis) Fantasy and Science Fiction, wherein fantastic worlds abound serves everything from its inception in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand League Under the Sea, where Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus dwell at times among the ruins of the undersea Atlantis, through to Star Trek, and the huge film and written literature of imagined space travel. Atlantis has been found in the Sahara desert (Pierre Benoit's Queen of Atlantis, 1919), in alternative world like Tolkien's Silmarillion (which explains the mythology of Middle Earth), begun in 1917, but published after his death. The literature is quite simply enormous.

What this brief synopsis portends is only an indexical pointer to the breadth of the concept that is being opened up, but more specifically focused here today in: ATLANTIS – HIDDEN HISTORIES – NEW IDENTITIES.

The artist's in the accompanying exhibition touch upon some of these ideas, seen as it were in the context and related to their personal responses to the newly re-configured identities of the now Central Europe. The fact that the exhibition is deliberately heterogeneous is a mirror of the new realities of an aspired for inclusive sense of difference. As intimated the focus 'demos' self and otherness read through the primacy of the Atlantis myth of legend (distinguish). Democracy traditionally presumes freedom, equality and fraternity (the last three Rohkunstbau's were devoted to the these themes in Drei Farben Blau, Weiss, Rot) and these find themselves foregrounded in the post-grand narrative world of Eastern, now to my mind again Central Europe. Next year perhaps will pose an even more complex question that of Aristos, and a provocative modern questioning of the origins of the aristocratic principle.

The word derives from the Greek Arete. What means doe we have to speak of in its basic sense, namely that of "goodness" "excellence" or "virtue" in today's world. This notion of excellence was originally and ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function; the act of living up to one's full potential, or creating something that fulfilled its potential. Arete in ancient Greek culture was also representative of courage and strength in the face of adversity, as struggle and it was what all people were supposed to aspire to. Should and can art pursue, goodness, excellence and virtue in today's world? The question adresses the core and literal function of visual arts in modern culture.

The root of the word is the same as "aristos', the word which shows superlative ability and superiority, and "aristos" was constantly used in the plural to denote that which possesses its own nobility. Hence the word aristocracy derives from it. The Ancient Greeks applied the term to anything: for example, the excellence of a chimney, the excellence of a bull to be bred, or the excellence of Man, his culture and a society. Is there a place for such an aspiring excellence in art and culture today, and if so what does it mean and what should it be? Should societies strive for excellence? How do you incorporate excellence and higher artistic virtues while retaining a democratic sense of equality in culture and society? It is clear that the meaning of the word changes depending on what it describes, since everything has its own peculiar excellence; the arete of a man is different from the arete of a horse. This way of thinking comes first from Plato, in whose famous "Allegory of the Cave" it can be seen. Similarly it is found and explicit in Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean. Both texts being fundamental to the founding of Ars Poetica, and hence the basis of aesthetcis.

But now I think I should return to the more pragmatic concerns of the day, namely whence this conference today will focus. What does the division during decades of Eastern and Western European art mean for its social perception and its influence? What was and is the role of art in Eastern Europe and its relation to politics before and after the fall of the iron curtain? Which opportunities and means are providing art to support democratic development?

Thank You!