Like Wild Horses Running Away Over The Hills

For me art has in some way or another always been an integral part of my genetic makeup – the child I was, the person I am. I have come from a long line of master tailors. They came from Egypt to these Antipodean lands and they brought with them their passion for life. My father, grandfather and mother all worked in creating beautiful garments.

They instilled in me from an early age that all aspects of creating a garment was important. I still remember my father showing me how to prepare and complete a buttonhole. A small part of the total work but one that could not be neglected.

I realised that the artistic process, the creation, encompassed everything; that art existed in the very air that I breathed, the food I ate that was magically created by my mother and grandmother, by the clothes I wore that were made with love by my father. Even the language we spoke in our household moved across Greek, Arabic, French and Italian as guests came in to discuss this and that, to argue, to laugh, to watch rugby.

These images were later developed into the work The Tattooed Tailor that was exhibited at the Melbourne Fashion Festival in 2005. This is an ongoing work in progress and is continuing as a short film.

I was never to please my father and follow in the tailoring tradition but my father and mother gave me the strong belief that ideas are to be chased down. They are like “wild horses running away over the hills” and so you need to be very determined to catch them.

For me an artist is someone that knows nothing and is continually searching. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “an expert is a person who has stopped thinking; he knows.”

Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last

In a recent article in The Guardian newspaper the question was asked - can art save the world? As idealistic as I am it would be hard for me to think that this, on the face of it could be possible and yet I have always had my suspicions that there may be some truth to this. Could John Lennon’s song, Imagine, in some way make all the ‘people live life in peace’? Maybe.

What I do know is this: that the people who will be able to change the world in a positive way by finding cures for cancers or designing better surgical procedures, develop sustainable food sources or new forms of energy-saving devices – people who sustain and nurture life - will come from communities and societies that nurture the arts, nurture the creative process. Communities that are filled with art, architecture, music, with theatre and with public sculpture. Art doesn’t exist in darkness.

Art is the creative cauldron, the creative fountain that opens the mind to the possibilities and opportunities that are infinite. John Lennon’s songs will not change the world but the person who will perhaps move the world forward will be inspired by his lyrics and be open to the boundless beauty of those words.

Art is not the answer but art frees us to imagine the answers, to imagine infinity. We have, all of us, the potential to affect and change our environment. Art is above all about ideas; often ideas that are untethered, wild and frenzied. Some will come to fruition and change our lives forever.

Art frees us and allows us to dream. It frees us from being afraid to fail and when we are unafraid to fail, unafraid to fall and rise again, and again and again, then in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. “ Free at last free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.”Konstantin Dimopoulos

Black Parthenon 2009 Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia Commissioned by Robyn Archer, Director, Festival of Light 6m x 4m x 5m Lights, scaffolding, black cloth

Black Parthenon is a repatriation art action, a public light installation highlighting the issue of the appropriation of cultural and sacred objects. The work not only addresses the increasing call to repatriate the Parthenon Marbles back to Greece, but also issues of cultural appropriation and repatriation globally that we need to address as a society.

Black Parthenon uses various levels of scaffolding around which black perforated cloth is used as cladding to create an architectural imprint, a silhouette of the Parthenon. During the day the installation is a black funerary altarpiece that reflects a sense of loss; a void in the national psyche of countries which have had cultural icons and treasures taken from them.
At night Black Parthenon explodes into vibrant white and blue light, the Parthenon’s iconic simplicity illuminating the surrounding darkness.

Appropriation provides the acquirer with just the objects devoid of their emotional context. The void it leaves in the psyche of the nation from whom it is appropriated can be immense. Whether religious, spiritual, decorative or practical, we link ourselves to objects as individuals, as a community and as a nation.
There is a growing tide for the repatriation of cultural and religious objects to their rightful countries. Black Parthenon voices these concerns and asks governments holding foreign cultural objects to act with integrity and return them to their places of origin.

Konstantin Dimopoulos

.

A Handful of Dust – the intrinsic flaws in art

As an artist I have always searched for the imperfection in an artwork. Perhaps imperfection isn’t quite the right term to use – let’s call it the ‘flaw’ or ‘fault’ in a work of art. The ‘intrinsic flaw’ in the nature of the work that defines it – its actual character.

Plato suggests that this “flaw or weakness” is the hardest to achieve. Too often works of art are overworked and in doing so they remove all traces of the flaw – “lose the spontaneity and vibrancy in the marble.”  Often it’s in the material itself, in my case the way that some of the rods in my kinetic sculptures bend in one direction, while others fall another way. The way that colours change in the environment that they occupy.

Robyn Griggs Lawrence wrote recently about the Japanese tradition called Wabi–sabi (no not Wasabi !) that celebrates the beauty in what is flawed. “The singular beauty in something that may first look wrong or flawed. Wabi-sabi reminds us that we are all transient beings— which our bodies, as well as the material world around us, are in the process of returning to dust.

Nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and erosion are embodied in frayed edges.  In Wabi-sabi we learn to embrace both the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time.”

By embracing imperfections in our lives we come closer to understanding ourselves, our environment and our end.

Konstantin Dimopoulos
February 2009

Antony Gormley –The 007 of Public Art – Stirred but not shaken

Antony Gormley is an exceptional sculptor who I greatly admire. When reading the responses to comments made by him on public art a few weeks ago the lyrics and music of Leonard Cohen’s Everybody knows came to mind.

Antony Gormley knows what should be flushed down the toilet and what should float up to the surface; we to know what’s good, we know what’s bad and we know what’s crap. Nobody has to tell us this, because we know.

Everybody knows.

That’s the problem. Everybody knows or believes that they know what’s good and what’s not in the world of public Art. Art committees know, curators know, art expert know, café patrons know, the general public know. God knows.

We all know.

Because everybody knows and few agree, Public art will always have one foot in the WC and the other on a wing and a prayer. Public art will always attract controversy because everybody knows.

Now in my opinion that’s just fine. Lets just embrace it all and let time take care of the rest. History has a tendency of straining crap out and discarding it. It just takes time.

Time knows.

Whilst trolling through these responses I saw a tribute to Norbert Lynton who died recently. Probably most of you would not have heard of him and although I did not know him personally I was very sorry to hear of his passing.

Norbert Lynton was an art historian and art critic whose writing I found to be very incisive. He was a truly exceptional social historian who was not only a highly perceptive commentator on art but also had a strong humanist sensibility and common sense.

In his The Story of Modern Art (Phaidon Press1980)
He concludes by stating:

“We need all art as we need all nature; there is a balance in both. We need easy, ordinary contact with art. With ordinary art; we must stop talking as though only masterpieces mattered. We must altogether stop speaking of art in terms of war.

Individual artists may improve their work with experience and keener understanding, but art as such does not progress and least of all does it triumph over other art.”

Norbert Lynton knows.

What people forget about sculpture, especially public sculpture, is that by its very nature we are dealing with a physical entity. It occupies and alters space.

In order to secure visibility in the urban landscape, sculptures tend to be large and (in most cases) immovable. People walk up to them like sumo wrestlers stepping up to their mark.

They sway gently on their heels measuring their opponent. They prod and push trying to find some weakness in the body of the work.

The first time you see a new sculpture it may well have encroached upon your daily walk – for years you have walked this path with no obstruction. But today it is here. It blocks you. You will not pass without engagement.

This is a physical confrontation. It is the first meeting of a human and something that may well be from outer space. An alien nation has landed and deposited a totem that is in most cases unreadable, unfathomable. What are they trying to say?

The response is often one of indignation and bewilderment.

I believe that public art is not so much about understanding what the individual works mean, but more that the society in which it resides is one that is open to creation, open to bewilderment.

Public sculpture and architecture is the face of a community; a society that is strong and certain about its own identity, willing to embrace diversity.