We humans are curious animals. We have a natural inclination to probe our surroundings and unearth information. And we have egos, which drive our desire to record in some form our personal and group lived experiences - not to mention our fantasies and fears - for collective viewing and posterity. Oral methods are inherently mutable, so mark-making was devised in the service of a more permanent chronicling project. As culture developed so the marks evolved, eventually into pictorial and three-dimensional representations of events and beliefs.
At some point, some of these records and representations were officially labeled Art, and their value increased. Enter the concepts of authorship - and ownership - along with the necessity to register both. So, from being the chronicler of history and the historian's tool, Art came to require a chronicler of its own, thus becoming the historian's subject. But History, particularly Art History, is a fickle business. First of all, it depends a lot on contextualization, subjective perspective and, more to the point here, the known facts at hand.
The potential always exists for new discoveries, for new information to come to light from the distant past but also from near-present day, which explains the plethora of art histories and why the histories of individual artists are constantly being revisited, reassessed, and revised.
Then there is the matter of appropriation. Appropriation in the strictest sense of the term - the use of borrowed elements in the creation of new work - has appeared in some aspect throughout visual art history. In recent decades, however, artists have made a proper art form of this endeavor, tapping into art history not in the traditional sense of mere influence or study but by taking possession of its images, forms and styles. Appropriation also encompasses the use of objects and images from popular culture or from non-art contexts. This process was introduced and epitomized by Marcel Duchamp, with his idea of the readymade, the first of which was Fountain - an ordinary urinal, in this case. The roster of modern and contemporary artists who quote, sample or borrow from existing art to make new work is huge and growing.
The enterprise of Charalambos and Vaso Sergiou merges both domains: art history and art appropriation, but in reverse practice. Instead of typically quoting from an existing, historically documented work of art (past or recent) by a particular artist to create a work of their own, the Sergious appropriate that artist's personal history and creative impulse to create a work that could be that artist's own.
Their project Unauthorized Histories in essence rewrites the (minor) history of 20th and early 21st century art through a series of apparently unrelated vignettes in the lives of twenty-two internationally acclaimed artists, episodes that generated works of art that for one reason or another have remained in obscurity. Up until now, that is. Some of these works, like Marcel Duchamp's Milk Carrier, a readymade clearly predating all his other "firsts", are historically monumental. Others, like Felix Gonzales-Torres' photographic diptych, a memento of a personal encounter with the Sergious, are merely anecdotal. The background and discovery of each of the twenty-two artworks in Unauthorized Histories is documented in a seamless weave of fact and fiction. Some of the stories, such as Joseph Beuys's Dactyl project, are conceptually complex, whereas others, like the one behind Sarah Lucas's Is Suicide Genetic? / 86 Should I Worry?, are worthy of the tabloids. However, despite the variety of styles and chronologies, all the stories are plausible - as are the resulting works.
Like versatile character actors, Charalambos and Vaso Sergiou alternately perform all the roles in the visual art theatre: historian, collector, curator, and, not least, artist. They essentially subjugate their own artistic egos to address such issues as authorship, authenticity and provenance. But their Unauthorized Histories are also moving, funny and ironic. They speak to the serendipity of life, they make us question what we call facts and stir our fantasies of what awaits discovery. Reflecting on those myriad tiny incidents that shape History, Charalambos and Vaso Sergiou wonder "What if" any of these were altered in some way.
Andrea Gilbert Athens, 2007 - 8