What is left from the things and man’s actions is transfused within the city’s particular space, which, like an image of the most personal and individual reading of all that that takes place in its urban landscape, refers to the common belief that man’s different universes are inexorably interwoven in a way that redefines the categories and the notions that they contain. Urban space is already marked by that which in the common conscience is in progress and whose imprint signals the identification of the individual with its space. What is exhibited as a public “good” and disseminates itself as a socially charged, collective memory, reintroduces itself in the form of a return and becomes the most intimate experience of personal significance. This act transposed in the notion of art (public art), whose ritual texture re-baptizes the categories of the things as well as man’s identity (both the individual and the communal), embodies through juxtaposition rather than transgression the continuous oscillation of the boundaries. For transgression is always another form of utopia that is never certain whether it will be realized or not.
The urban memorials and statues represent not just the refined need of public expression that systematizes the space it occupies. Rather they acquire the qualities of that particular urban space in which a more immediate necessity develops next to the individual body that communes, assimilates and in general renders these memorials as an indispensable part of its own ritual. In this case the role of art does not only reflect a mere presence that defines this process from its observatory. On the contrary, art stirs up in its own transformations these dynamics inherent in the individual subconscious, which makes up a certain kind of equilibrium whose result, nevertheless, is impossible to predict. Moreover the element of night, at the same time the space where the game of boundaries is discussed and the time that reveals the changing motion of those boundaries, becomes from its very beginning the anthropological element which like a blow or breathing banks on its particular texture. Thus substantiated, the nocturnal walk in the urban space does not represent a sensorial stimulation; it also brings forth the subjective and impulsive components which, by unnailing the petit-bourgeois concept of a communal aesthetics that exorcises the burden of responsibility, they are identified again with their conflictual grounds.
Antonis Mpogadakis for the solo show in gazonrouge
Art’s Struggle
If there is a common thread running through my work then this could be the aesthetic engagement with damaged objectivity. The more our cultures deny to objects any significance, other than serving as fodder for established abstract-rational procedures, the more the social need for objects rages, becomes insatiable. My interest in kitsch, in this respect, lies in that such a category simultaneously indexes a need that cannot be satisfied and serves as a tool of the falsification of such need, pretends it can satisfy it. Kitsch, thus, represents something that is denied and serves as the form of its denial. That “something” is what society both craves for and denies to itself: enchanted objects.
Kitsch applies not only to the domestic realm, the little objects found in every glass cabinet, but spreads to public monuments where it takes its more ominous form. Most public monuments stand for an aesthetic relation to a past, a form of immediate transmission of events, and the connection of generations, taking for granted both. Public monuments that celebrate rather than reflectively undercut the culture that makes them possible, suppress the very question of memory, the very question they were supposed to raise. This is where my artistic interventions take place. I want to force such monuments to show their hand; rather than stand as objects, bearers of a common memory, I want to show them as artifices without an audience, artifices that belong to a structure that cannot lay claim to a common memory. It is not their character as artifices (forms of human making) that is criticised, far from it, but the fact that such monuments legitimate the unreflective engagement with the life-world. Art’s struggle, I submit, cannot take place as a carefree production of new forms. Burdened by the triumph of unreflectiveness art can only bust open the forms of such unreflectiveness. My projects take their orientation from this conviction which makes me think that new aesthetic forms can only be produced as mute inabilities, aborted promises. Artistic impotence is the result of the continuing domination of unreflective structures and their monopoly over the articulation of the life world. My commitments, in this respect, are with forcing reflection upon unreflective forms.
Yorgos Sapountzis
with the collaboration of
Harry Marandi
The artistic universe representing
Yorgos Sapountzis contemplates a permanent transit between the form as his main goal and the message as his last goal. The primary mission of this transit is to develop the movement that will probably put an end to the limits concerning private and public places. Along that path -mainly in two of his videos-, the author can either become an living piece of art (knock knock monument) or feel happy when he intrudes on someone else’s property (night life).
Due to his interest in the exemplary form, the performance offered by Sapountzis tries to explain Tony Cragg’s works. Along that inner journey concerning different artist’s works, Sapountzis seeks a form with a previous existence, but he does not succeed. Therefore, there is a double lack: on the one hand, that different artist as his main arts topic and on the other hand, his own arts attempt. To sum up, Sapountzis confirms his sarcastic attitude regarding arts success.
Miguel von Hafe Perez David G. Torres curators: 28 biennale Pontevedra
Yorgos Sapountzis
1976 born in Athens, Greece
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Education
2002-04
Berlin University of the Arts, in the studio of Rebecca Horn
1998-02
Athens School of Fine Art, in the studio of George Lappas
1995-98
University Conservation of Antiquities and Works of Art, Athens
2006
Für die Ewigkeit , Was Wäre Wenn #6 ,Jet , Berlin
Urban Appearances , Rosa-Luxemburg-Str , Berlin.
Contemporary, Magazzio d’arte, Rome , Italy .
100 Tage = 100 Videos, Kunstverein Heidelberg ,
10 videos selected by Anne-Catharina Gebbers
Crossing-a contemporary view , Fort St Angelo-Malta, Malta.
An outing: Beltsios Collection, Matsopoulos Mill , Trikala, Greece (catalog).
Arrivals-Albania, Vangjush Mio, Korista, Albania.
Crivelli’s Nail, Chapter Gallery, Cardiff, U.K.
Nikos Alexiou Collection, Mac Gallery , XXXII International Festival Sarajevo, Sarajevo.
BLACK AND WHITE , American Hellenic Union, Athens.
GREEN NIGHT , Espace Croisé , Roubaix cedex , France
2005
THE GESTURE. A VISUAL LIBRARY IN PROGRESS
Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki,
Quarter, Center for Contemporary Art, Florence, Italy. (Catalog)
THE MIND IS A HORSE (Part 2) Bloomberg SPACE, London
LANDMARKS gallery Chantal Crousel , Paris
2004
The 2nd International Video Biennial Tel Aviv, Israel
Plain Sight Bloomberg SPACE, London, UK
In the beginning there was the journey
28 BIENNAL OF PONTEVEDRA Pontevedra, Spain
THE SNEEZE 80x80 Gazon Rouge, Athens
Breakthrough! GRECIA 2004: Contemporary Perspectives
in the Visual Arts ARCO, Madrid, Spain
2003
A DOG NAMED GARAGE- FIRST COLLECTION
(concert with video) Oslo Sinfonietta .music by Øyvind Torvund, Oslo
SCOPE Group show, Dylan hotel New York, US
Selected Performances
Around the Clock, June 2006, liste Artfair with Isabella Bortolozzi gallery, Basel
FICUS-FLORENCE ,2005,The gesture, Quarter, Florence , Italy.
Architecture- Thessaloniki ,2005 , Protaseis (Version IV:935m) Thessaloniki, Greece.
3 times tragic, 2005, 7 PERFORMANCE & A CONVERSATION ,Athens, Greece.
West, 2004 , Loewenpalais, Berlin
LECTURE/Cragg class, 2004, music by Øyvind Torvund, Pontevedra, Spain
3Bfountain, 2002, 2nd Berlin International Festival of Literature, Berlin
