Stephen Riolo

As Published in Highlights Magazine

At six in the morning, a massive crowd gathered on a quiet stretch of one of Hydra’s coastal roads. Below a crew of divers is investigating the depths just off the cost, a boat with a crane waiting above. With winches creaking an object, which looks to be a deep sea cabinet of curiosities in the form of a glass casket, is freed from its watery grave and hauled up marble steps by superiorly muscled men. Passing the glare of a brilliantly white washed church, the casket is loaded onto the backs of donkeys and paraded back along the coastal road, and followed by this army of contemporary art devotees to an industrial concrete structure where it is interned. This is the Deste Foundations Slaughter house, host to Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peytons collaborative work “The Blood of Two.” A cloudy eyed shark lies motionless on a bed of ice at the entrance to this little seaside pavilion, watching work men pry the lid from the barnacle encrusted vitrine. It pops open with a burst of sea water and as its lid is removed it offers up its hidden treasure; a series of nautically themed drawings by Elizabeth Peyton. This vessel of contemporary art, patinaed a soft green during its rest at the bottom of the sea, has just been put through a series of rituals usually reserved for the sacred rites of greek orthodox epiphany (like cross diving, the progenerator of the ritual of baptism) or the parade of holy icons on orthodox christmas and easter. It is then perhaps appropriate that this Dakis Ioannou orchestrated procession of a Barney/Peyton iconic object is responsible for generating such a remarkable assemblage of the international high art clergy (a little miracle for the island of hydra, and those of us across Greece that still hold faith in contemporary art.)
The passage of the object from the depths to the slaughter house seems more than a light reference to Christ the fisherman, whose bodily sacrifice precipitated the formation of the christian faith in Greece. The waiting body of the shark, perhaps a symbolic merger of this christian mythology with the actual history of the building, which reminded hydra locals of the times when the smell of fresh blood that flowed from its drains into the sea attracted schools of sharks. With a title like “the blood of two” one can only assume that Barney and Peyton have added this massive shark to the Hydra ritual as a symbol of a prize catch, rather than a lurking danger. On ice, the shark itself was destined to be cooked later that evening and offered to guests during the remarkable going away party of Mr. Ioannou, one which featured an incredibly long, last supper-esque, banquet table that stretched off into the distance.