about the exhibition
Hudson (Show)Room
Swap Meet: Artpace and the Dikeou Collection
Denver, CO
September 20–December 30, 2012
ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONArtpace: You founded The Dikeou Collection in Denver
with your brother Pany Dikeou. Can you describe the
overall vision for your collection?
Dikeou: The Dikeou Collection came out of my artistic
practice that has involved the varying different degrees
that art is viewed-from the perspective of the viewer, the
artist, the critic, and the collector. As an artist, I became
aware of these perspectives during an internship at the
Tibor de Nagy Gallery in NYC. There, while organizing
their old Artforums, I came across this project by Lucas
Samaras that featured three double-page spreads of
neo-abstract expressionist paintings of skeletons. The first
DPS showed the full skeleton and underneath it the word
“Artist”; the second DPS revealed the image of the
skeleton zoomed in, and only showed the skull of the
skeleton with the word “Dealer” underneath; and third
DPS magnified the skull even further, so that it just
showed the teeth of the skeleton. This time the word
below was “Collector.” I was beginning my life as an artist
then, and the Samaras project in Artforum revealed the
various roles and what their roles exemplified. This dawned
on me as an important and telling moment.
Since then, I have had the opportunity to revisit the
project, and I realized my memory changed the written
experience of the project: “Artist” was not originally part of
the triumvirate-“Critic” was. And since, then my work has
considered all these contexts: artist, audience, critic,
context (dealer, collector, magazine, gallery, museum,
street). These various positions in the art world, these
roles their interactions and distances, their interconnectivity
and singular divisions, have been the driving force of my
artistic practice, including artwork and installations and
founding/editing/publishing zingmagazine with its multitude
of contributors, as well as collaborating to create a
contemporary art collection with a sibling.
So The Dikeou Collection came from this unique perspective
of my being an artist and editor/publisher of zingmagazine
and from these perspectives. The Dikeou
Collection collects artists in full, completely, and to represent
their vision to fullest possible extent. To paraphrase
Walter Robinson, a great artist and the former editor of
artnet, “The Dikeou Collection is zingmagazine come to
life.” And I suppose that’s true.
Artpace: For the installation at Artpace, you chose to
highlight spaces not typically visited by the public. How
was this decision inspired by your time as an International
Artist-in-Residence in 2011?
Dikeou: Artpace emailed that I was among the finalists
being considered as part of the Texas residency, and that
visiting curator Heather Pesanti from the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery would be coming for a studio visit. At that time, I
was a fairly new resident to Texas, and I was trying to
reconcile just how I would make the “studio visit” work
here in my new Texas terrain, and also struggling because
my work is very resistant to a traditional studio visit. A
studio visit intrinsically implies a glimpse behind “Oz’s
Curtain” so to speak, and my work often plays with what
that “Curtain” might actually be. With that in mind, I blurred
the “Curtain,” making the studio not one hidden room, but
many rooms, any room. I organized the studio visit around
the concept of the house and each room, starting with the
garage and laundry room and going through the kitchen,
dinning room, bedroom, bathroom, den, and living room,
conducting the studio visit like a house tour, showing
different works/installations in each chamber. This change
in how to conduct a studio visit was a significant change
for me as an artist and in my practice, and it came about
as part of applying for a residency at Artpace.
Of course, who knew that beyond having the great fortune
to be an Artist-in-Residence, I would be able to further
curate a show in Artpace’s Hudson (Show)Room. As it’s
the case, I culled from my experiences and time as a
resident-and one of the most influential moments as a
resident is the preliminary visit, an essential part of the
Artpace orientation. One of the first things that happens in
the preliminary visit is a tour of the entire campus of
Artpace. It is a totally impressive and inspiring tour of
resources, spaces, environments that each visiting artist
may have access to, but of which the visitor may be
completely unaware. And these incredibly beautiful,
creative, and unused spaces are very much part of the
everyday use of the staff and the residents, and I wanted
to make use of these spaces in terms of exhibition and not
just utility, making this exhibition much like that resident
artists’s campus tour-and in turn, a reflection of the
house tour that I gave as my studio visit-that made my
residency possible.
Artpace: The artwork installed at Artpace represents a
small number of the total works in your collection, can you
share a little bit about your choice of the specific pieces
for installation at Artpace?
Dikeou: The Dikeou Collection has just over 35 different
and completely diverse artists working in myriad mediums.
I tried to choose works from The Dikeou Collection for all
the specific spaces I was hoping to utilize at Artpace and
show the artwork from The Dikeou Collection within a
different context in San Antonio, by reinterpreting their
viewing contexts, and further, if they shared the space with
other artists or viewing contexts at Artpace, that these
dialogues be different than the dialogues at The Dikeou
Collection.
Artpace: The Dikeou Collection is currently housed on
the fifth floor of a historic office building, just steps from a
popular thoroughfare in downtown Denver: 16th Street.
Are there any similarities or stark differences with regard to
its home setting versus Artpace?
Dikeou: Well in a way Denver and San Antonio are similar
as cities. Both have downtowns that are becoming again
sources of creative and enterprising energy. The downtowns
are being reborn. Both have a touristic vein that
draws visitors to their heart: San Antonio’s is the River
Walk and, as you mentioned, Denver has the 16th Street
Mall. And Artpace’s building and The Dikeou Collection
building are themselves sources of inspiration in that each
holds an intrinsic history that, in the end, is part of the
artistic installation. And while the historic nature of the
buildings is similar, they are fundamentally different. The
Artpace building was originally designed as the Hudson
Motor Car dealership, including a showroom and repair
shops, within a very industrial model, and its spaces reflect
that industrial feeling. The Colorado Building where The
Dikeou Collection is housed is a pastiche of styles and
additions from Beaux Arts and Art Deco, to ’50s midcentury
modernism. And the Colorado Building’s primary
use was and is office, creating a different artistic setting.
So the spaces that house the works in these two places
are indeed very different but each reaches to give the art
and artists a sanctuary for viewing and creativity while
relating to their downtown surroundings.
