Walking through Highgate on a clear Thursday morning, it is very easy to forget that you are in London - and even more difficult to imagine that you're only moments away from the bustling centre of Camden Town. I walk down the leafy green streets, past beautiful Victorian houses and finally (after it feels like I've lost all contact with the outside world) I reach the studio of Miltos Manetas, where we sit down to talk about the Internet, Kate Moss and avoiding reality.
MZ: How Long have you live you lived in London?
MM: "I used to live in America before, then Paris for a while and then I moved here. I like this area very much, Highgate".
MZ: Is this a permanent move for you?
MM: "Not much in my life is permanent. For me, space is not local. A large part of me lives in the Internet. I don't even believe that such a thing as "the town of London" actually exists. What really exists is what we have in front of us at any given moment, on the spot. At this very moment, this isn't London, this interview could be taking place anywhere; maybe eventually we could go down to Oxford Circus and then it may become "London" for a while. I don't trust locality neither do I believe in origin, we are from nowhere and we are suspended over the world. Occasionally we visit places and we do not have any national identity left, not at all".
MZ: Do you think that kind of attitudes is in a way escaping from reality?
MM: "No, the opposite: it's when we pretend we live in "London" or in "New York" that we try to escape from reality. If we want to confront reality, then we need to come into terms with the fact that we are not local anymore, and this hurts sometimes. It's hard to not be local; you are like a liquid that is not in a pot and neither in a cup. Can you imagine some sort of Cola floating around the room; it would have some problems. It would be nice for the Cola to feel like it belongs somewhere, to feel that is a part of a body. But it isn't. So, that is reality, not escaping from it".
MZ: How would you describe 'Neen' to someone who has never heard of the movement?
MM: "Neen is something I still know very, very little about, and that is exactly the reason I am pursuing it. It is like with a woman or a man, when you fall in love and you know everything that there is to know about them, it cannot be love. That is what you call a relationship, which is also cool. But with Neen I don't have a relationship yet. From time to time, I help it to exist, but I'm not doing much for it. It's really a movement in terms of the fact that it 'moves'. People become part of it, people drop out of it, it gets smaller or larger all the time.
It started back in 2000 when I was very unsatisfied by what was available in terms of ideas and aesthetics. The art around me was cool but it was still the art of our parents. All these beautiful things you still see in the Tate, The Serpentine, and all these great places, these are all OK, but unfortunately they don't belong to our generation.
They go back to the time that people were discovering that they could make art by using their bodies, using objects, using concepts. It's been over one hundred years that people have discovered all that. So I was bored. From the other side, I would look at these links on the Internet, computer art etc, and it was good but still it wasn't sparkling, it wasn't "diamonds". So then I thought to myself "Ok, how do we do this? How do we make a new type of art?" And of course, I had absolutely no idea, I didn't even know if that is still possible. But I knew that any new thing will have a name, it would be called something. That's how I eventually contacted a California Branding Agency called Lexicon and I commissioned the name to them.
I had to find one hundred thousand dollars first, because that's what they were asking for a name and I was lucky enough to work on this project with Yvonne Force and ArtProduction Fund who came with that money. Lexicon came up with "Neen", which I presented at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. That's how I suddenly found myself with this name which is palindrome. Names are like machines, sometimes they do something. Most of them do nothing of course, most names are like yoghurts, they are simply pathetic. But a few names have a destiny and that destiny doesn't always depend on us. Neen started off this way; it has its own life. I can't really describe Neen, we use to say that "Neen is a frame of mind" but then, sometimes it's a Mind in a Frame, the meaning of a frame of time, the beauty of a snapshot. And of course Neen often feels like art. But what is "art"? Art isn't something "beautiful", "expressive" or "significant" but something that stays in your mind, something you don't forget and still you don't know exactly why and you will never find out. It can be a picture, an object or an attitude or it may even be fashion. For example, punk clothes still have some sort of beauty for us but still we don't know the reason why we like them so much. Or why we get this subliminal feeling from punk clothes, we just don't know. The same happens with certain things in reality. But usually with reality you either like or dislike and in most cases you know why. Your brain analyses and finds a reason and it says you like this because of this. But with a few things, you don't know at all. So this is art. So when this happens with the Internet, I mean with electronic things, with things from our days not from the days of our parents, and you look at them - they somehow fit with the word Neen. You will say "Ah, this is Neen!" and when you do Neen, you feel like a Neen-star, a star of Neen".
MZ: Was the creation of Neen a completely conscious decision for you or did it come about on its own?
MM: "It absolutely happened on its own. For a whole year I actually forgot about it. After Gagosian, my producer suggested that we put Neen in all the magazines, diffuse it into the world and make it really big. But I didn't want that. I felt that by doing that it would work in reverse, it would become a Big Nothing. You scream something, you make it big it can disappear and withdraw. Instead, if you leave something small it can evolve, and it may survive somehow. So if it does become big, it does so in its own rights. And this is exactly what I am doing with Neen. I don't touch it too much, ok I do interviews and talk about it a little but I'm not really pushing it onto the world".
MZ: So wanted it to grow organically?
MM: "Yeah, I help it grow organically if you can say that for a concept. I often think of myself as a man who is sitting in a garden in the night and it is completely dark and he has only a spotlight. The man knows that there are some beautiful animals around but he doesn't search for them, he just turns on his spotlight and he illuminates a spot, he simply waits. If the man will do that right and if he is lucky, the animal may pass in front of his eyes. This is my philosophy. The world is this huge, empty place with nothing interesting. But you decided to illuminate a spot and in some point, a big amazing thing will show up. For me, this was Neen".
MZ: So is that one of the messages that you are trying to send to the art world, that you are bringing something that we can really call our own, from our generation not just our parents?
MM: "That is just one of the messages I am sending to the art world not trying to send".
MZ: So what are the other messages?
MM: "I don't really know! That's also one of the reasons we do this kind of thing-Art. We definitely send messages but you we know exactly what is their content. Before you have completed something, you can't know. For example, Punk sent messages that you couldn't really think up in the 70s. Later, you found out what they really meant. It was the same with all art movements such as Dada and Surrealism.
One of the things that I do with my work as a Painter is taking things and turn them upside down. I take for example a PlayStation and I paint it on a canvas. It's kind of a silly thing to do but anyway, the whole idea of Painting is a silly thing.
One of the things that I am painting is the Internet itself. I start doing that in 2002, a series of large paintings-the first two were bought by Saatchi- that go on forever. I paint many websites on them, one over the other and they will become like a really huge landscape of the Internet eventually".
MZ: Who would you say is your main influence in terms of you art?
MM: "I don't know because I am constantly changing. I like thinking of myself and everything around me as Now. That's funny because in old Greek, Neen means exactly that, now -not a second later. So I cannot really say who influences me because it would be a lie. I am definitely inspired from the very few people who are doing Neen. They are the ones I consider to be the most interesting artists, people like Rafael Rozendaal and Harm van den Dorpel.
MZ: What difference do you think technology has made to the art world?
MM: "Oil on canvas is more technological than most art things you can do with a computer. In the Arts, it's the Internet is what makes the difference, not the Technology. Our society advertises constantly its relationship with technology as well as the one it has with Media but that's not exactly right, at least when it comes to Culture. Today we are even less related to media than the educated people of the past who had to learn huge amounts of poetry all by memory. Culture was used like external memory, like a hard drive that is outside your brain and it can help it expand instead today its mostly a cloud that confuse you so you are eager to accept the choices of others".
MZ: A lot of critics of art and some people in general may not accept the work you do to be art. They would point to the work of Raphael and say that is real talent, anyone could paint a picture of the internet. What would you say to someone like that? One of the most interesting things about your work is that it is challenging, so would you even want to convince someone that it is art?
MM: "There are different ways to approach art. One way is to approach it going towards the Past. In that direction, quite everything that is amazing and beautiful is art. But that becomes boring after a while. A more interesting way to approach it, is to try capture art in the Present, to use it as a tool of reality, to use art to either build or to destroy what's real. So in that sense, if we are already sure that something is art, then it can't be the art we need. Only when we don't know it with certainty and every time that we encounter it we have to decide, and we always reply yes, then this is the art we need to use for our lives. Think of it in terms of a really beautiful woman. The prettiest woman in the World is not the one that everyone agrees that she is beautiful but the one that we constantly question but every time we see a picture we agree: "Oh yes she really is the One". In fact, Kate Moss is a little bit close to that. She is exactly that type of beauty that you cannot decide. She has that very rare thing that is not guaranteed or signed on paper. That's why she is by far the most beautiful. It is the same with art. I wouldn't like to convince anybody that my art is art, because actually it's not. It becomes art at exactly the moment it crashes on the eye of the observer. That's what I am after on the Internet and in Paintings, that's my approach. Make art that doesn't guarantee you anything until the very last moment".
Next performance dates at The Courtauld Institute of Art. He will be returning to paint live on 25th-26th October, 24th-25th January 2009 and 13th February 2009. Visitors must check times on www.eastwing8.co.uk before planning a visit.