Michael Paraskos

Michael Paraskos

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.

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 Leeds 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.

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 Art. 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.^[1]

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.^[2]

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').^[3]

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.^[4]

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.^[5]

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 .^[6]

Publications

Amongst his books are Steve Whitehead,^[7] on the British photorealist painter Steve Whitehead; The Aphorisms of Irsee (with the artist Clive Head);^[8] The Table Top Schools of Art;^[9] and Is Your Artwork Really Necessary?^[10] He edited and contributed to Re-Reading Read: New Views on Herbert Read,^[11] 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,^[12]Key Writers on British Art,^[13] The Encyclopaedia of Sculpture,^[14] A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660-1851,^[15] 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^[16] and To Hell with Culture.^[17] He has also written several articles on the art, history, culture and politics of Cyprus.

References

1. ^ See The Table Top Schools of Art (London: Orage Press, 2009), passim
2. ^ A summary of this was published as 'The Death of Conceptualism', in The Epoch Times, 16 December 2009.
3. ^ See Michael Paraskos, The Table Top Schools of Art (London: Orage Press, 2008) 11f
4. ^ Michael Paraskos, Clive Head (London: Lund Humphries) 9f and passim
5. ^ Michael Paraskos, 'Bubbles in Space', in The Epoch Times, 3 May 2010.
6. ^ Michael Paraskos, 'Who's the Fogey?' in The Epoch Times, 31 March 2010, and Michael Paraskos, 'In Depth of Sensual Pleasure Drowned,' in The Epoch Times, 31 March 2010.
7. ^ Steve Whitehead (London: Orage Press, 2007)
8. ^ The Aphorisms of Irsee (London: Orage Press, 2008)
9. ^ The Table Top Schools of Art (London: Orage Press, 2008)
10. ^ Is Your Artwork Really Necessary? (London: Orage Press, 2008)
11. ^ Rereading Read: New Views on Herber Read (London: Freedom Press, 2008)
12. ^ Benedict Read (ed.), Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art (London: Lund Humphries, 1993)
13. ^ Chris Murray (ed.), Key Writers on British Art (London: Routledge, 2002)
14. ^ Antonia Bostrom (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Sculpture (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004)
15. ^ Ingrid Roscoe (ed.), A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660-1851 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
16. ^ Herbert Read, Naked Warriors (London: Imperial War Museum, 2003).
17. ^ Herbert Read, To Hell with Culture (London: Routledge, 2002)

External links

• Michael Paraskos's website

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Name	Paraskos, Michael
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Date of birth	1969
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