Onassis Foundation’s quest to spread the words of CP Cavafy

I am talking to Laurie Anderson, sprite-turned-grande dame of New York’s contemporary arts scene, about her previous night’s performance in the imposing gothic surrounds of Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. It nearly didn’t happen, she says disarmingly. “I had this headache all day before the show. I didn’t know what it was.” A doctor located the source of the trouble: a tiny piece of an earbud which had somehow remained inside her head.

Fortunately for a capacity audience, relief was instantaneous, and allowed Anderson to give her enthralling rendition: a setting to music of one of the most famous poems by the Alexandrian Greek poet CP Cavafy, the brooding “Waiting for the Barbarians”. The text describes a community which has suspended its normal business, preening and procrastinating, in anticipation of the impending arrival of the “barbarians”, only to find out that they will not be coming after all.

A heavy choir-and-backbeat combination supported Anderson’s matter-of-fact delivery of her lines. And then she delivered Cavafy’s bombshell of a final couplet: “And now, what will become of us without barbarians? Those people were some sort of a solution.” The backbeat continued, however, and Anderson added her own line to the poem, repeated three times: “Unless we ourselves are the barbarians . . . ”

It was, she tells me the following morning, a moment of “last-minute improv”. Anderson (for the record: still sprite-like, and not in the least bit grand) says she chose the poem for its political implications. “I wanted it to be about January 6 [date of the 2021 attack on the US Capitol], but didn’t want to do it overtly.” Hence the embellishment at the end. “I didn’t know until the last second that I was going to do it. We put it together very, very quickly.”

Anderson was joined for the evening (“a sprawling, one-night-only exploration of love, loss, lust and longing”) by more New York favourites — singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, composer Nico Muhly — offering freshly commissioned versions of Cavafy’s poetry as part of “Archive of Desire”, a week-long festival celebrating his work, on the 160th anniversary of his birth, and the 90th of his death.

It was, by the standards of commemorations of foreign poets who have been dead for nearly a century, a major affair: more than 80 artists, working in multiple art forms across 10 venues, paying homage to a figure of whom many admit they had scarcely heard. (Like many of her generation, Anderson’s encounter with Cavafy was through Leonard Cohen’s song “Alexandra Leaving”.)

But that is neither a surprise, nor a disappointment, to the Onassis Foundation, which conceived and sponsored the festival. Spreading the word on one of modern Greece’s cultural giants is an end in itself, says its cultural director Afroditi Panagiotakou. “We are not so megalomaniac as to think that if we bring Cavafy to New York, everyone will be talking about him the next day,” she says. “It is more important to raise some sense of curiosity. If 5,000 people come, and each one talks to someone else about it, that is enough.”

The foundation has become a major force in promoting contemporary Greek culture in its home country, but increasingly it is active on the international stage too. It plans to open a Cavafy Archive space in Athens later this year, and is restoring the poet’s Alexandria apartment. Its existing contemporary culture venue in the heart of Athens, Onassis Stegi, has established itself as a showcase for “restless, daring Greek artists” since its opening in 2010, and is committed to running a programme that is both idealistic and experimental.

That has been enabled by the foundation’s unusual funding model: it does not have an endowment, but is split between business and public benefit sections, with 40 per cent of the profits made from the business section earmarked for its activities in culture, health and education.

“That gives us an immense amount of freedom,” says Panagiotakou, co-organiser of the festival with the composer and curator Paola Prestini. “You have to do things that other people cannot do — not because you have the money, but because you don’t have to apologise if something is not good, if something goes wrong.”

And with that freedom comes a sense of responsibility. “If you are an organisation with power, you have to speak up. For us, culture, education and health are not just about creating great productions, they are about creating better conditions for democracy, for social justice, for human rights. And I’m not talking about art that is out there and telling you [those things] in your face. I’m talking about supporting artists, letting them do their own thing, telling them they are free to fail.”

The funding model was the brainchild of Aristotle Onassis, the renowned shipping magnate who left instructions at the end of his life for the creation of a charitable foundation in memory of his son Alexander, who died in a plane crash in 1973 at the age of 25. Onassis himself died two years later.

“He was a smart man, with a very strong personality,” says Panagiotakou. “He knew how to combine things that other people thought could not be combined. If you look at the library in his yacht, ‘Christina’, you will see Céline, you will see Winston Churchill’s dedication to him, in his book about the second world war. These were the people that were around him.

“And then, back in Greece, he would go to the bouzoukia [clubs] with [Greek popular singer] Stamatis Kokotas and Maria Callas. He was a man of this and that.” She flips her hand from side to side. “That made him a much more interesting persona. It wasn’t the money, it was him. And then, you get to the sunglasses and the hair. There was also that.”

The mingling of New York’s contemporary artists with the epigrammatic texts of Cavafy’s poetry, sometimes stern, sometimes sensual, makes for striking results. On the wall of the National Sawdust arts centre in Brooklyn, a large mural by artists Nick Cave and Bob Faust uses a line from “Hidden Things” as forward-looking agitprop: “Later, in a more perfect society, someone else made just like me is certain to appear and act freely.”

“We live in an age where there are quotations everywhere — in social media, out in the world,” says Panagiotakou of the foundations’s eclectic approach to culture. “When you create an open event, with a pop aspect, about poetry, you also create better quotes for Instagram.” In “Ekphrasis”, at ONX Studio, come more renditions of “Waiting for the Barbarians”, this time its text fed into an AI machine which produces images from the lines. Artists Matthew Niederhauser and Marc Da Costa describe the piece as an “interrogation” of the visual languages of today’s machine-learning tools.

It seems a long way from Cavafy’s Alexandria. “But he was living in a city where times coexist,” explains Panagiotakou. “He knew he was walking with pharaohs and kings and slaves. There are cities in the world which you don’t measure in terms of square metres. You look at their depth.”

Highlights of ‘Archive of Desire’ will be available to view online on the Onassis Channel this autumn, onassis.org