Bare-knuckled winner

Award-winning installation artist Eric Demetriou talks to Neos Kosmos about his love for destruction


Inspired by his inner-rebellious side, Eric Demetriou never wanted a conventional vocation – the 27-year-old Greek Cypriot Australian found his craft as an installation artist.

He considers the pleasure he gets out of his artwork more rewarding than a large pay cheque, and finds the ‘cheeky’ perspective of artistry very appealing.

He studied for six years at the Victorian College of the Arts and is adamant that he could not cut it out in a career he has no passion for.

The multi-award-winner, who has an extensive curriculum vitae within the industry, considers his latest achievement his best to date.

Demetriou took out the inaugural 2014 Linden Art Prize, outclassing nine other competitors to claim the $10,000 award along with a year long rent free studio at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts.

His Linden award winning artwork Knuckle Song, depicted by a record player sitting on top of a dismantled piano, which has been fed through a wood chipper, was inspired by destruction and noise, and the idea that devastation births new conceptions.

“It was fun to just do the classic smash a piano and it’s a funny thing to do and it’s quite taboo; there’s a long history of destroying instruments and abuse to pianos. I was looking at that as a fad, even as a punk rock thing to do, and I was even looking at artists, the destructionists, the movement where this idea of destruction for the purpose of new creation.

“There’s the humour of it too, which is like seeing a cartoon, it’s a bit of dark humour. The record sits on the wood chips of the piano, so when you see it, it kind of looks a bit like the final song of the piano, like its last piece, it feels like a death or something.”

Demetriou is quick to reiterate that the dark element is drawn from cartoons, particularly an all time Hanna and Barbara classic.

“Tom and Jerry … that’s the biggest inspiration.

“For me it comes back to things like it’s boisterous and fun. A lot of my research recently has been making works for my teenage self, like, what would I like as a teenager? What would I like to see in an artwork? And as a boisterous teenager I was always very interested in just breaking things, which was just a bit of fun.”

His crash and smash perspective to art is an ongoing theme, which features regularly in his pieces.

“My main field of research comes from the idea of noise and what is a noise, and that’s where destruction and breaking things comes into play, so it’s kind of a physical element of noise, noise is often unwanted and so too is, often, destruction. There’s a really good quote that will put this in perspective. There’s a theorist called Paul Virilio who says that ‘the invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck’, so without inventing the ship you couldn’t have a shipwreck. So for everything that is made, there is an equal and opposite opportunity for it to be unmade or broken. That’s something that we constantly battle with. And destruction for me and breaking things is just new material, it’s just something that you can use, it kind of creates new ways to look at things, I think.”

Aside from the destructive side of things, Demetriou also draws from his mixed cultural heritage to create new artworks.

Along with his Greek Cypriot heritage, Demetriou is Maltese on his mother’s side, and it’s the healthy clash of cultures that gives him the opportunity to draw from two distinct traditions.

One of his previous pieces, which was “a bit autobiographical”, involved a large Greek Orthodox church door.

His nannu (grandfather in Maltese) used to tell him a story about the ‘village idiot’ in Malta, Jahan (or John in English).

The tale goes that Jahan lived with his uncle, who was the caretaker of the local church, and Jahan was, of course, a very stupid man. One day Jahan’s uncle told him that he was going to the local shops and asked Jahan to pull the church door behind him when he left.

A very confused Jahan, unsure of what his uncle meant by ‘pull the door behind him’, pulled the door off its hinges and dragged it through the town with ropes, infuriating his uncle.

Drawing from his childhood and his nannu’s legends, Demetriou wanted to remake the piece. So using a Greek Orthodox church door, he attached two hoists to each end of a gallery room and allowed viewers of the art piece to crank the hoists, and as the door dragged along the floor it would make an incredibly loud grating noise.

For Demetriou this piece symbolised a coming together, or a ‘physicalised’ perspective, linking his two cultural heritages.

He also explained that there are pieces in isolation that he draws on from his Greek Cypriot culture alone, including a piece called Germ Lock.

Germ Lock, he describes, is a “target thrower, like you use at a shooting range. The work will throw these discs at the wall in a kind of percussive way, and it will just be a sequence of these discs flying at the wall, and it will be a performance based work”.

This idea behind this piece comes from smashing plates – something Greeks are famous for – whilst the idea behind the name ‘Germ Lock’ comes from protecting oneself.

Demetriou hopes that the Linden Award prizes will grant him opportunities for greater recognition, so that he can continue striving to make his artistry completely financially sustainable, and importantly for him – for people to continue to enjoy his work.

“A big element of my work is that I like people to enjoy it, I like it to be thrill-seeking and I like it to be fun, something that they can engage with.”