The Triumph of Waste

The epigraph titled, The triumph of Waste,  is an inscription engraved on  a white square block of marble, that reads in Greek the  phrase “Shit on Art “. The phrase was originally written, in Greek language, with a black marker by an unknown person on the marble wall of a public building in the Athens, Greece.  A photograph of the phrase serves as an archival material to the marble epigraph which is digitally carved to accurately transfer the unique hand writing and grammar errors of the anonymous writer.

 This anonymous phrase on the wall is one of the many wall writings from various groups of people or individuals, their words stand as fragments of displaced autonomous text, often protesting against the system or in some way attempting to express personal thoughts and feelings of any kind. These ephemeral texts -markings, are vandalizing public and private property, buildings and monuments and are all over the city turning public space into an ambiguous open diary.  

 The extraction and appropriation of the street phrase “Shit on Art” chosen to create the marble epigraph, The Triumph Of Waste, is more of an artistic gesture than an elaborate work on marble, it is an ironical commentary, that fashions the formal style of the memorial marble plaques juxtaposed to the marginalized, street language of the graffiti, in order to question the role that contemporary art and artworks have in the context of our consumer society. 

In that respect the luxury which evokes the materiality of the white marble, along with its universal symbolism as the product of high culture in the works of fine art, comes in direct opposition to the very phrase that is inscribed on it, creating an antithesis which insults the very things it symbolizes. 

* Installation, marble plaque engraved, archival photograph of original graffiti wall writing, dark room, dim spot light, wooden stool, wallpaper with printed text from the essay by Helio Oiticica, Aparecimento do suprasensorial na arte brasileira., Rio de Janeiro, n.13, 1968, Rio de Janeiro, 1968. 

Exhibited at Young Artists Biennale Mediteraneo, Thessaloniki, 2011