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 The Silver Age. For some Pēteris Bankovskis, Art Critic Book The Nineties. Contemporary Art in Latvia. Compiled and edited by Ieva Astahovska (Riga, 2010) | |
| In a century or two, when a panoramic description of 20th and 21st century history as a grand narrative will be possible, it may be that the 1990s will be highlighted in some way. Perhaps even some event or person’s name will assume special significance in the random-access memory of those writing this history. What will it be? Something from what is known as ‘grand politics’? The surname of a writer, a fighter, or maybe the Pope or the surname of some philosopher, along with an aphoristic saying? A work of art, a technological invention? We, the people of the present, don’t know and will die without ever knowing. So, here we are, each carrying around or hauling along our own version of the Nineties. We can sense this acutely from Pauls Bankovskis’ introduction to the major volume published by the Centre for Contemporary Art, which reads like a kind of sketch of the context of his youth. And the same can be sensed in the simple, human statements by the artists in the interview section of the volume, the part printed on yellowish paper. Here, too, we can sense that each has their own view of that time. A personal view. Yes, of the Nineties, but of all the others as well, of course. When I myself think of this decade, my memory presents me with the following scene: a sunny August day in Riga, at the far end of Gorkija iela, where it almost becomes Duntes iela. It’s hot and dusty, and the canopies of the lime trees are inert in the windless calm. A silence so intense that I can hear the alien sound of blood rushing in my veins. In both directions along the whole length of the street there is not a single person, not a single car. No buses or trolleybuses are running, no sparrows twittering, no pigeons cooing, no ants crawling. I’m walking in the direction of the suburb of Sarkandaugava , stepping carefully so as not to push out of balance this observation of acute silence. Then, unexpectedly, increasing in volume and in the range of low-pitch tones, a noise encroaches on me, shaking the asphalt, and with it a dark object comes into being. As it approaches, it turns into an armoured car. Closer still, and I can see the soldiers of the special operations unit of the USSR Ministry of the Interior perched on top of it. Now their faces can be distinguished: some are laughing, others are pensive. I can hear them conversing and as they pass by, one of them waves and calls out to me, but I can’t hear him above the engine noise. Then the moment has gone, the sounds and noise die away, and the armoured car and the soldiers on it recede, until at the end of the street behind me there’s nothing more than a dark object, a spot, a dot and then nothing. And once again the silence is such that I can hear the blood rushing through my veins. To my mind, the volume assembled by the Centre for Contemporary Art is about the same thing. Perhaps that’s why I read it practically from cover to cover. I read some chapters carefully and others decidedly more casually, and I did not read the English text in the main section at all, because it seems to have been printed in such a way that to read it you’d need special lighting and special glasses. The book is about art, no – rather, it is about the conditions in which creative expression is possible and significant. It covers a handful of the more than 1000 artists who existed ‘officially’ and were registered in Latvia in the Nineties: the artists themselves, their activities and their work. However, first and foremost, the book is about how the ‘theoretical thinking’ of the first decade of the 21st century, this abstract extraterrestrial being, strives to concoct something about the ‘Nineties’, of which we each have our own view, seeking to construct some kind of showcase of meaning, some kind of display cabinet of artistic values. It’s a book about how a group of people strive to freeze a brief episode in the lives of a relatively small group of other people, and turn it into an admirable mummified museum piece. The tools put to use are ones that were not in circulation amongst the Latvian milieu back then: “communication strategies”, “aesthetics of relationships”, “concentration of trajectories” (p. 87. Sic!), “traumatic experience”, “feminist discourse”, and so forth. Theory that speaks through the mouths of a string of art commentators and regards as art a corpus of actions, relationships and “strategies”. Theory, whose visible expressions in terms of progression, the dynamics of influence, etc., are formulated in the institutional minds of curators and gallerists, and can be traced through a series of art journals and exhibitions such as documenta and the Venice Biennial. You could say that the book ‘The Nineties’ is a successful attempt to inscribe a chain of transient (past) events into just such a particular system. Into that system about which Miervaldis Polis (p. 357) says: “... I don’t like it when decadence is described as art. The Greeks didn’t call it art, and in the Renaissance it wasn’t called art, but nowadays we’re in a system that starts with modernist speculation.” The book makes sad reading. It’s sad to trace how ‘theory’ seeks, by all possible means, to correlate what certain Latvian artists were doing in the 1990s with the international style of that time, but is forced to admit, repeatedly, that the Latvians were incapable of going beyond “local content”, a “romantic viewpoint” or the “masterful craftsmanship of material expression”. It’s painful for ‘theory’ that Latvians are quite unperturbed by “the absence of a tradition of critical discourse” in their work, that their work is “non-ideological”. ‘Theory’ presents the reader with a range of quotations, but these serve only to show that elsewhere also, in the eastern part of Europe, things have been or still are similar, that there, too, artists “are undermining the message”, “destroying iden¬tities”, and, following the Zeitgeist, “studying the traumas of a totalitarian past”, either striving to earn a pittance by following the trends of ‘Western’ markets, or else doing all of the above and more only in the wishful thinking of ‘theory’. The book is most certainly of great interest to all those whose surnames are to be found in the list of persons, and to those who are or were personally acquainted with those described in it, as well as to the many people who were in various ways close to the exhibitions and other events of those years. But it will also be fascinating and illuminating for anyone who tends to think about the way history comes into being, where it comes from, how it is written and subsequently read. ‘The Nineties. Contemporary Art in Latvia’ is bound in silver covers. A witness to a Silver Age, one might say. Are we talking here about the Silver Age described by Hesiod, when the children of Deukalion and Pyrrha lived for a hundred years as children, and then grew old and died in an instant? Or maybe the creators of the book wished to compare expressions of Latvian art from the nineties with the famous Russian ‘Silver Age’ – this brief flash of movement that began with the Symbolists in the 1890s and collapsed into oblivion following the catastrophe of 1917? Omri Ronen’s famous study, in which the historian of literature discovers that the term ‘Silver Age’ was first used with reference to Russian poetry by a certain Gleb Marev, seems most instructive, if I may say so: “Whenever this age, described as the Silver Age, actually ended [...], the name ‘Silver Age’ was no more than a dissociated nickname, a name thought up by the critics, at best as an apologia and at worst as abuse. The poets themselves, the still living representatives of this age, used the term rarely, and imbued it with a sort of ironic submission, without descending to the level of open argument with the critics. Nowadays the name has remained in use among historians and critics of art and literature as a hackneyed, sanctimonious classificatory term that has lost its original significance, or rather, that has lost any axiological meaning whatsoever, used when there’s nothing else to put in its place.” Of course, we are dealing with more than just terminology. /Translator into English: Valdis Bērziņš/ | |
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