Yorgos Sapountzis - a Statue Has Remembered Me

Description

In his work, Yorgos Sapountzis appropriates public space and the statues, monuments, and memorials that inhabit it. The Athens-born artist concentrates less on their historical-political meanings and much more on their function as a medium of recollection. Sapountzis consciously tries to ignore historical information about the sculptures and instead allows them to "speak" through their gestures, poses, and ornaments. Like an anthropologist--or parasite--Sapountzis hunts the urban, figurative myths by night or sounds them out for days on end with his camera. He then stages a confrontation, a dialogue, and a "dance," in which the preceding expedition is consolidated to form a theatrical choreography. Sapountzis drapes scarves, makes plaster casts, and builds constructions out of aluminum rods and tape, ensnaring his stone or bronze protagonists, whom he tries to involve in his seemingly futile, exhausting activities. His video camera also records this action. The performance is therefore just as much part of the artistic strategy as the video material produced during the performance. A statue has remembered me gives an in-depth survey of his work in ten chapters from 2000 to the present. It is published on the occasion of his two-part solo exhibition, "Videos and Picnic" at the Ursula Blickle Stiftung (May 19-July 8, 2012) and "The Gadfly Festival" at Westfalischer Kunstverein Munster (June 16-September 2, 2012). Copublished with Ursula Blickle Stiftung and Westfalischer Kunstverein Munster

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.