Michael Paraskos
Encyclopedia
Michael Paraskos, FRSA (born 1969, Leeds
, Yorkshire
) a writer on art, the son of the Cypriot artist Stass Paraskos
. He has written several books, essays and articles on art, literature and politics, and has taught in universities and colleges and curated several exhibitions. He is a leading figure in the New Aesthetics movement.
and University of Nottingham
, studying at Nottingham with Fintan Cullen
to gain his doctorate on the aesthetic theories of Herbert Read
in 2005. In 1991 he established with Ben Read the New Leeds Arts Club, an art society in Leeds
based on the original Leeds Arts Club
(1903–1923), and became a committee member of the Leeds Art Collections Fund
. After teaching at various colleges and universities, and for the WEA, Paraskos became head of Art History for Fine Art at the University of Hull
from 1994 to 2000.
In 2000 he became Director of Programmes at the Cyprus College of Art
, overseeing the accreditation of the College’s programmes and the opening of a new campus in Larnaca
, and he still holds this position today. However, much of his time is spent in Britain where he is art correspondent for the London edition of the Epoch Times newspaper. He has also appeared on the BBC Radio
programme Front Row
as a reviewer of art exhibitions. He was Henry Moore
Fellow in Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Foundation in 2007-08. In 2009 he was asked to join the judging panel for the Marsh Award for Public Sculpture, an annual award organised by the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association
(PMSA) for the best public sculpture of the year in Britain or Ireland. He is also Research Fellow for Harlow Art Trust
. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2011.
. Indeed, Paraskos's critical stance is often aggressively opposed to Conceptualism, particularly in his newspaper reviews. Paraskos has given his approach the name The New Aesthetics.
Speaking to students of Goldsmiths' College (University of London) in December 2009 Paraskos argued that conceptualism in its present form lacked the intellectual and political rigour of conceptualism in the 1970s and should instead be called 'concept illustration'. The problem with concept illustration, he suggested, is that it shows a 'lack of faith in art' as a sensual, or aesthetic, medium, particularly as a visual medium, and because of that lack of faith many artists and critics try to make art act like other human activities. He illustrated this by suggesting that because artists lacked faith in art as a visual medium they try to turn it into visual politics, or visual sociology, or visual philosophy. For Paraskos, however, art is particularly bad at conveying the type of specific messages demanded by politics, sociology or philosophy, resulting in bad art and bad politics, sociology and philosophy. This inability of visual art to convey such specific messages is why so many art exhibitions are accompanied by large amounts of text explaining what the art is about.
Instead of this, Paraskos suggested that a new aesthetics of art is needed to understand and explain art as an aesthetic form, rather than as a semiotic or narrative form. In this Paraskos takes the word aesthetics back to its origins in Greek, arguing that it meant 'to feel or experience through the senses'. This, he has claimed, makes aesthetics not an issue of beauty or one of how viewers respond to works of art, but a question of the sensual and material aspects of how artists make art. Taking his cue from the theories of Herbert Read
, for Paraskos art becomes a material manifestation of the physical engagement between the artist and the world around them (called by Paraskos 'actuality').
Although this can be compared to the formalism
of earlier writers such as Clement Greenberg
and Roger Fry
, Paraskos is clear that formalism is insufficient in itself to justify art's existence. Writing on the realist painter Clive Head, Paraskos suggests that the material engagement with actuality by the artist results in an art work when a transformation takes place, by which he means the artwork is no longer a material object in actuality but a material object that creates its own world. This is most easily explained in terms of a painting, which Paraskos does not see as a picture in actuality, but as a window on to another reality fabricated by the artist. In Paraskos's theory, the reality of the painting is as real as our reality, it simply operates to a different set of parameters. Paraskos is clear that this theory owes a debt to theories in the Greek Orthodox Church
relating to icon painting
, where an image of a saint or of Christ is not seen as a picture of the saint or Christ, but as a window into heaven where you can see the saint or Christ. Paraskos has effectively stripped the concept of its explicitly religious connotations and argues that all art works in this way, and he even uses an Orthodox religious term to describe the transformation of the physical into the metaphysical, calling it Metastoicheiosis, with correlates in the Catholic Church to transubstantiation
. Only when this transformation takes place does the aesthetic experience become a work of art.
Although this theory seems to work well with paintings, which can resemble windows, in recent writings Paraskos has begun to try to establish a similar principle for three dimensional art, particularly sculpture, by suggesting that even sculpture exists in its own reality. This means that whilst a three dimensional sculpture might sit in our world, it exists within what Paraskos calls a 'bubble of space' of its own. This he describes as being like a three-dimensional picture plane surrounding the sculpture and excluding the viewer.
Paraskos also seems to be developing an increasingly strident anti-modernist approach to art history and theory, arguing that the twentieth century was reductive in its approach to art and that if artists in the twenty-first century are to establish an art of their time they must reject the values and the formal and philosophical reductivism of twentieth century art. Effectively this is an attack on modernism, but unusually Paraskos argues against twentieth century art on the grounds that it is too old fashioned for the twenty-first century. In doing so he does not differentiate between the formalist modernism of the early twentieth century and the conceptualist modernism of the second half of the twentieth century. All were, in his view, mistaken in believing you can purify art by paring it down either to simple formal values, or to straightforward illustrations of concepts .
; The Aphorisms of Irsee (with the artist Clive Head); The Table Top Schools of Art; and Is Your Artwork Really Necessary? He edited and contributed to Re-Reading Read: New Views on Herbert Read, based on a conference he organised at Tate Britain
in 2005. He was also a contributor to Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art,Key Writers on British Art, The Encyclopaedia of Sculpture, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660-1851, and a book on the British realist painter Clive Head
for the publisher Lund Humphries to coincide with the artist’s exhibition at the National Gallery, London
in October 2010. In 2010 the Orage Press published two of his books, Regeneration and A Revolution is Announced, and in 2011 his essay 'Bringing into Being: Vivifying Sculpture Through Touch' will be published in the book Sculpture and Touch, edited by Peter Dent and published by Ashgate.
He has written new introductions to several re-issues of work by Herbert Read
, including Naked Warriors and To Hell with Culture. He has also written several articles on the art, history, culture and politics of Cyprus
.
Leeds
Leeds is a city and metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. In 2001 Leeds' main urban subdivision had a population of 443,247, while the entire city has a population of 798,800 , making it the 30th-most populous city in the European Union.Leeds is the cultural, financial and commercial...
, Yorkshire
Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
) a writer on art, the son of the Cypriot artist Stass Paraskos
Stass Paraskos
Stass Paraskos is an artist from Cyprus, although much of his life was spent teaching and working in England.-Early life:Paraskos was born in Anaphotia, on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus in 1933, the son of a shepherd farmer. He went to England in 1953 and became a cook in his brother's...
. He has written several books, essays and articles on art, literature and politics, and has taught in universities and colleges and curated several exhibitions. He is a leading figure in the New Aesthetics movement.
New Aesthetics (The)
The New Aesthetics is an art movement that stresses the material and physical processes in the making of visual art.-Origins:The origin of the New Aesthetics lies in an art summer school held in Irsee, southern Germany, in 2007 and the joint class held there by the English artist Clive Head and the...
Education and Employment
After leaving school Paraskos became a trainee butcher at a Keymarkets supermarket, but after six months of handling fresh meat left, becoming a life-long vegetarian in the process, to continue his formal education. He went on to attend the University of LeedsUniversity of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
and University of Nottingham
University of Nottingham
The University of Nottingham is a public research university based in Nottingham, United Kingdom, with further campuses in Ningbo, China and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia...
, studying at Nottingham with Fintan Cullen
Fintan Cullen
Fintan Cullen in Dublin, is an Irish academic, educator and writer. Cullen is presently a professor at Nottingham University...
to gain his doctorate on the aesthetic theories of Herbert Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....
in 2005. In 1991 he established with Ben Read the New Leeds Arts Club, an art society in Leeds
Leeds
Leeds is a city and metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. In 2001 Leeds' main urban subdivision had a population of 443,247, while the entire city has a population of 798,800 , making it the 30th-most populous city in the European Union.Leeds is the cultural, financial and commercial...
based on the original Leeds Arts Club
Leeds Arts Club
The Leeds Arts Club was founded in 1903 by the Leeds school teacher Alfred Orage and Yorkshire textile manufacture Holbrook Jackson, and was probably one of the most advanced centres for modernist thinking in Britain in the pre-First World War period.-History:...
(1903–1923), and became a committee member of the Leeds Art Collections Fund
Leeds Art Collections Fund
The Leeds Art Collections Fund or LACF has been supporting the visual arts in Leeds since 1912. Founded by Frank Rutter, who was Director of the Leeds City Art Gallery at the time, with the support of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds, Michael Sadler, the LACF was established to...
. After teaching at various colleges and universities, and for the WEA, Paraskos became head of Art History for Fine Art at the University of Hull
University of Hull Scarborough Campus
The University of Hull Scarborough Campus is a higher education institution in the North Yorkshire town of Scarborough in England, as well as a satellite campus of the University of Hull.-History:...
from 1994 to 2000.
In 2000 he became Director of Programmes at the Cyprus College of Art
Cyprus College of Art
The Cyprus College of Art is a post-secondary art instutution located in the Mediterranean island of, Cyprus.-Academics:CyCA offers beginner courses in art, university-entrance programmes in art and design, bachelor degree equivalent programmes in Fine Art , and Master of Fine Art degrees at...
, overseeing the accreditation of the College’s programmes and the opening of a new campus in Larnaca
Larnaca
Larnaca, is the third largest city on the southern coast of Cyprus after Nicosia and Limassol. It has a population of 72,000 and is the island's second largest commercial port and an important tourist resort...
, and he still holds this position today. However, much of his time is spent in Britain where he is art correspondent for the London edition of the Epoch Times newspaper. He has also appeared on the BBC Radio
BBC Radio
BBC Radio is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927. For a history of BBC radio prior to 1927 see British Broadcasting Company...
programme Front Row
Front Row (radio)
Front Row is a radio programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The BBC describes the programme as a "live magazine programme on the world of arts, literature, film, media and music." It is broadcast each week day between 7.15 and 7.45 and has a of highlights available for download. Shows usually include...
as a reviewer of art exhibitions. He was Henry Moore
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
Fellow in Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Foundation in 2007-08. In 2009 he was asked to join the judging panel for the Marsh Award for Public Sculpture, an annual award organised by the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association
Public Monuments and Sculpture Association
The Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, or PMSA, was established in 1991 to bring together individuals and organisations with an interest in public sculptures and monuments, their production, preservation and history....
(PMSA) for the best public sculpture of the year in Britain or Ireland. He is also Research Fellow for Harlow Art Trust
Harlow Sculpture Town
Harlow Sculpture Town, is a rebranding exercise for the town of Harlow in the English county of Essex.On 26 March 2009 Harlow Council voted to approve a proposal made by Harlow Art Trust to rebrand Harlow Town as 'Harlow Sculpture Town'...
. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2011.
Artistic Theory
Paraskos’s theory of art is complex, but is based on a belief that art is primarily a material practice provoked by an artist’s physical engagement with the world. In this the artwork is seen as an aesthetic object, rather than the illustration of an idea, and this stance has resulted in several skirmishes with proponents of Conceptual ArtConceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
. Indeed, Paraskos's critical stance is often aggressively opposed to Conceptualism, particularly in his newspaper reviews. Paraskos has given his approach the name The New Aesthetics.
Speaking to students of Goldsmiths' College (University of London) in December 2009 Paraskos argued that conceptualism in its present form lacked the intellectual and political rigour of conceptualism in the 1970s and should instead be called 'concept illustration'. The problem with concept illustration, he suggested, is that it shows a 'lack of faith in art' as a sensual, or aesthetic, medium, particularly as a visual medium, and because of that lack of faith many artists and critics try to make art act like other human activities. He illustrated this by suggesting that because artists lacked faith in art as a visual medium they try to turn it into visual politics, or visual sociology, or visual philosophy. For Paraskos, however, art is particularly bad at conveying the type of specific messages demanded by politics, sociology or philosophy, resulting in bad art and bad politics, sociology and philosophy. This inability of visual art to convey such specific messages is why so many art exhibitions are accompanied by large amounts of text explaining what the art is about.
Instead of this, Paraskos suggested that a new aesthetics of art is needed to understand and explain art as an aesthetic form, rather than as a semiotic or narrative form. In this Paraskos takes the word aesthetics back to its origins in Greek, arguing that it meant 'to feel or experience through the senses'. This, he has claimed, makes aesthetics not an issue of beauty or one of how viewers respond to works of art, but a question of the sensual and material aspects of how artists make art. Taking his cue from the theories of Herbert Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....
, for Paraskos art becomes a material manifestation of the physical engagement between the artist and the world around them (called by Paraskos 'actuality').
Although this can be compared to the formalism
Formalism (art)
In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content...
of earlier writers such as Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
and Roger Fry
Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...
, Paraskos is clear that formalism is insufficient in itself to justify art's existence. Writing on the realist painter Clive Head, Paraskos suggests that the material engagement with actuality by the artist results in an art work when a transformation takes place, by which he means the artwork is no longer a material object in actuality but a material object that creates its own world. This is most easily explained in terms of a painting, which Paraskos does not see as a picture in actuality, but as a window on to another reality fabricated by the artist. In Paraskos's theory, the reality of the painting is as real as our reality, it simply operates to a different set of parameters. Paraskos is clear that this theory owes a debt to theories in the Greek Orthodox Church
Greek Orthodox Church
The Greek Orthodox Church is the body of several churches within the larger communion of Eastern Orthodox Christianity sharing a common cultural tradition whose liturgy is also traditionally conducted in Koine Greek, the original language of the New Testament...
relating to icon painting
Icon
An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...
, where an image of a saint or of Christ is not seen as a picture of the saint or Christ, but as a window into heaven where you can see the saint or Christ. Paraskos has effectively stripped the concept of its explicitly religious connotations and argues that all art works in this way, and he even uses an Orthodox religious term to describe the transformation of the physical into the metaphysical, calling it Metastoicheiosis, with correlates in the Catholic Church to transubstantiation
Transubstantiation
In Roman Catholic theology, transubstantiation means the change, in the Eucharist, of the substance of wheat bread and grape wine into the substance of the Body and Blood, respectively, of Jesus, while all that is accessible to the senses remains as before.The Eastern Orthodox...
. Only when this transformation takes place does the aesthetic experience become a work of art.
Although this theory seems to work well with paintings, which can resemble windows, in recent writings Paraskos has begun to try to establish a similar principle for three dimensional art, particularly sculpture, by suggesting that even sculpture exists in its own reality. This means that whilst a three dimensional sculpture might sit in our world, it exists within what Paraskos calls a 'bubble of space' of its own. This he describes as being like a three-dimensional picture plane surrounding the sculpture and excluding the viewer.
Paraskos also seems to be developing an increasingly strident anti-modernist approach to art history and theory, arguing that the twentieth century was reductive in its approach to art and that if artists in the twenty-first century are to establish an art of their time they must reject the values and the formal and philosophical reductivism of twentieth century art. Effectively this is an attack on modernism, but unusually Paraskos argues against twentieth century art on the grounds that it is too old fashioned for the twenty-first century. In doing so he does not differentiate between the formalist modernism of the early twentieth century and the conceptualist modernism of the second half of the twentieth century. All were, in his view, mistaken in believing you can purify art by paring it down either to simple formal values, or to straightforward illustrations of concepts .
Publications
Amongst his books are Steve Whitehead, on the British photorealist painter Steve WhiteheadSteve Whitehead
The landscape painter Steve Whitehead was born in Coventry, England in 1960 and studied at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, with David Tinker, graduating with an MA in the mid-1980s, before continuing his studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art....
; The Aphorisms of Irsee (with the artist Clive Head); The Table Top Schools of Art; and Is Your Artwork Really Necessary? He edited and contributed to Re-Reading Read: New Views on Herbert Read, based on a conference he organised at Tate Britain
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
in 2005. He was also a contributor to Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art,Key Writers on British Art, The Encyclopaedia of Sculpture, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660-1851, and a book on the British realist painter Clive Head
Clive Head
-Biography:Head was born in Maidstone, Kent, the son of a machine operator at Reed's Paper Mill in Aylesford. Head had a precocious talent in art and at the age of 11 attended Reeds Art Club, a social club organised at his father's factory. In 1983 he began studying for a degree in Fine Art at the...
for the publisher Lund Humphries to coincide with the artist’s exhibition at the National Gallery, London
National Gallery, London
The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media...
in October 2010. In 2010 the Orage Press published two of his books, Regeneration and A Revolution is Announced, and in 2011 his essay 'Bringing into Being: Vivifying Sculpture Through Touch' will be published in the book Sculpture and Touch, edited by Peter Dent and published by Ashgate.
He has written new introductions to several re-issues of work by Herbert Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....
, including Naked Warriors and To Hell with Culture. He has also written several articles on the art, history, culture and politics of Cyprus
Cyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
.