Viktor Rogy’s work unfolds as an anarchistic blend of life and artistic practice that corresponds directly to his biographical details and should be located within the dissident artistic tendencies of the sixties. With his artistic statements, for which he used the entire range of media – and himself as a performer -, he was directly involved in the circumstances and trials posed by his environment. Viktor Rogy’s approach to art was indissolubly connected with an understanding of life that embraced past, current and utopian elements. In the phrase he coined, »Ad Welten«, he interpreted life and death as spiritual space, which he provided with a basic concrete formal vocabulary of archaic elements such as triangles, squares, circles, wedges etc.

His career was extraordinarily diverse: Viktor Rogy was a shoemaker, bricklayer, plasterer, stonemason, football player, tap dancer, artist, performer, architect, poet, philosopher and activist. In his last years he preferred the more compact description »office«: he carried all necessary equipment in his clothes’ pockets and used his lap as a table.
His last film, »Das Leid is das schnellste Pferd« (Suffering is the Fastest Horse), was made in 2004 in the Villach District Hospital. In it, Viktor Rogy, a dying man, acted with the few resources still remaining to him, and gave the doctors who were looking after him the chance to speak. In summer, the Galerie Stadtpark in Krems showed the last exhibition he designed. In it, Rogy once more very clearly presented his universe of play, dance, music, mysticism and poetry, including some of those figures who accompanied him throughout his life: the dancer Harald Kreuzberg, the Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno, the football player Mathias Sindelar, Hölderlin and Enrico Caruso. For Rogy, who like to be photographed with boxes of detergent of the brand »Genie« [Eng: genius], passion and admiration were »noble wine for noble spirits« (quote from August Rodin’s will). Bella Ban Rogy, who sometimes also worked with her husband on artistic projects, integrated a neon sign she designed bearing the letters »ANDROGYN«. This word, which contains »Rogy«, became charged with symbolic meaning for Bella Rogy after her partner’s death. In nearly life-size freeze frames dedicated to Kazuo Ohno and Mathias Sindelar, Rogy was shown as a mortally ill, naked Butoh dancer and football player. Rogy’s signature forms an emblem in the shape of a five-pointed star, with which he also artistically juggled. He accompanied his own identity with many doppelgängers. In Galerie Stadtpark, he left behind a very personal, fragile trace in the form of a huge, calligraphic »Ich« printed on a tarpaulin; he had originally noted it casually in a receipt pad. In his use of language, Rogy was close to the Wiener Gruppe with his onomatopoeic poetry, which took on a pictorial character in connection with its graphic presentation. Taking this as a basis, in his (reading) performances he developed paintings in sound that sometimes departed from communicable channels, but at the same time implied an extension of expressive possibilities: using a glass ball – moving it in his mouth as a mobile prosthesis – Rogy changed during the performance into a speaking sculpture that he called – in allusion to Castle Hochosterwitz - »Hochosterwitzbärtchen untersockelt«. In Viktor Rogy’s works, concreteness and purism, comic elements and spirituality lie close together. He developed the spectrum of the real and fictive figures he admired from film, sport, popular culture, dance, theatre, music, literature, religion, esotericism and philosophy in a fragmentary way, and without regard to the traditional canon of education and culture. These subjective focuses of attention are not derived from anti-artistic strategies, but from a fundamental scepticism towards apparently coherent forms of presentation that, by avoiding and preventing disparate correspondencies, try to gain supposed control over cultural productions. Rogy clarified and summarized the form and content of these conglomerations of »found objects«, which made the complexity of the references tangibly denser.
The collection of material in Viktor Rogy’s work goes against sanctioned values. In this regard, a comparison with Dieter Roth would seem appropriate; they are also connected by their excessive way of life. Up to now, these similarities have not drawn any response in the reception of Viktor Rogy’s working methods. Whereas Dieter Roth’s work in the course of the Fluxus movement was received accordingly, Rogy’s work slipped through the usual patterns of reception owing to the close ties between his working practice and his life, and the complex ramifications that resulted. Comparisons with Dadaism, neo-Dadaism and Actionism would seem even more appropriate. It is however per se difficult to change into labels the tangential points of contact with artistic practices of the sixties that worked on the abolition of the borders between artistic practice and practices of everyday life. Instead of this, a continual and sophisticated engagement with the processual work concept that Rogy developed - inseparably connecting practice and theory, and sometimes in close collaboration with his wife – would have been needed. The workbook »Viktor Rogy. i love you. »PRIVATFILM«, published in 1998 by Selene, provides insights into his artistic practice and the enormous difficulties he had with local politicians in Carinthia. These problems intensified when the ÖVP-FPÖ (Austrian People’s Party - Freedom Party of Austria) government came into power in 2000: FPÖ and ÖVP politicians undertook criminal proceedings over several years in an attempt to stop the politico-cultural activities of the two artists as owners of the OM café. The city exerted enormous pressure in its function as lessor and considered refusing to extend the lease: when the rightist conservative government was sworn in, a poster installation featuring photos of government members painted over by Rogy was displayed in the front window of the OM café, which Bella Ban Rogy was in charge of. The politicians were shown in the guise of Nazis with side partings and toothbrush moustaches and the portrait of Haider had reversed swastikas painted on it. The FPÖ brought charges on the grounds of »Wiederbetätigung« (revival of Nazi ideology) and behaviour damaging to tourism. Opposite to the OM café, in the Sandwirt pub, where Hitler gave a speech in the forties, the guests were not to feel disturbed by the sight of these »defamatory« posters.
Rogy’s artistic practice was one of participation and the active shaping of reality, and drew its material from everyday experiences. The paths ran at first from practice to theory before merging imperceptibly into one another: Rogy distilled artistic forms of perception from precise observations - gleaned among other things from the skilled trades he practised - that, defunctionalized or transferred to other functional contexts, were able to release spiritual qualities. These were always bound to a radical purism, without ever dissolving into auratic transfiguration.
Rogy also spontaneously engaged in political and culturo-political issues – often employing his own person. In his efforts on behalf of local, disregarded buildings such as the bus terminal halls from the fifties in Villach and Klagenfurt, Rogy resorted to activist methods that were articulated in minimal interventions. Measurability and literality – in the form of literal twists as well – play a large role in understanding the dramaturgic conditions that Rogy demanded for his sculptural, performative, poetic, architectural and activist works.

By means of precise dramaturgical instructions, he developed free spaces that created scope for self-presentations without stage directions. In pubs like the »Rote Lasche«, the »Geist« and the OM, awarded the Carinthian prize for architecture in 1998, the guests react(ed), even without stage directions, to the minimalist design, which makes (made) necessary a ritual form of behaviour. Whereas the first two pubs no longer exist in the form conceived by Viktor Rogy, the OM still represents a sort of gesamtkunstwerk even today. The café is situated in a former business bar with a glass portal. No sign is there to indicate its presence, no music is played there, and beer is puristically drunk from bottles; everyone has to hang up their coats. The furnishings in the white room consist of a single table of chrome-nickel steel, chest-high, about 60 centimetres wide and 2.5 metres long. The guests gather around the table well in view of each other.
Viktor Rogy designed OM as a homage to Adolf Loos. It is an example of local resistance. Its name is a mantra whose meaning can be discovered on the spot – in the »theatre that plays at being a café« (Bella Ban Rogy). In the film »Stille Zecher mit Élégance« (2002) (Quiet Boozers with Élégance), Viktor Rogy performed – as if to say farewell – in the OM as a Butoh dancer: he plays the harmonica, we hear music by Schubert, and Rogy declaims the sentence »It can happen«.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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