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| ??? + style = lifestyle Dita Birkenšteina, Art critic Review of Ugnius Gelguda and Neringa Černiauskaitė’s a.k.a. Pakui Hardware’s The Metaphysics of the Runner exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, 26.06.–17.08.2014 | |
| “move, follow the runner. 321. from the future to the past. 123... Remember the last time you ran in a park? the sound of a branch cracking under your foot?”1 The air is warm and fresh, there’s no wind. you can hear an exhilarating melody, the city is just awakening, and you are running. pleasant, isn’t it? to be quite honest, it seems to me that there’s nobody who really likes to run, perspire, count the minutes and metres, and measure their pulse. plus, before all of this takes place, there’s all of the getting ready and psyching up, and it also takes energy to even get to this stage. but, no matter how burdensome it may be, nearly everybody runs today. Surprisingly, even those who could, breathlessly, barely even squeeze out a wistful “pass” mark in lieu of a more satisfactory mark at the school’s 5-km run. Sports gyms are more crowded than ever in the early spring, and the city streets and parks are full of resolute wannabe-sportspeople in their new Nike running shoes. but, even though it appears as if all of these sportspeople really care about their health and physical fitness, something in all of it doesn’t completely convince me. if you ask me, i’d say that it’s a fashion thing, a cult, and quite paradoxical at that. you maintain an active lifestyle to be healthy and in good physical form, but at the same time this lifestyle brings with it a lot that’s synthetic. the running process itself becomes the only more or less natural element in this cult. every self-respecting sportsperson also needs his or her must-have technical equipment, with mp3 players and watches that measure not only the time, but also the distance and the runner’s pulse. Starting from the polyester sporting costume and finishing with the protein cocktails for one’s diet, it doesn’t sound all that natural, especially if the runner prefers training in a sports gym. Now and then (usually at some time around the start of the marathon season or when recounting the hamburgers i’ve burned up in my Endomondo account) i think that all this has become a cult, although the reason why i’m talking about it is due to Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda’s The Metaphysics of the Runner exhibition at the contemporary Art centre (CAC) in vilnius, where i discovered that they, too, share quite similar reflections. Gelguda and Černiauskaitė’s collaboration in bringing a common idea to fruition has been going on for about five years now, and, living between brooklyn and vilnius, the duo has been able to hold a number of exhibitions on both continents. one exhibition, another, the next one...but with The Metaphysics of the Runner it’s a little bit different than previously. the difference is hidden in the fact that The Metaphysics of the Runner is a kind of pilot project for their new brand, pakui hardware,2 which in future will be the identification sign for Černiauskaitė and gelguda’s joint projects. to a certain degree, it seems that this metamorphosis was a natural result of their successful collaboration or something of a prophylactic restart. will the new brand also significantly change their joint interests and thinking? we’ll find out over time. As a creative group, they have their “statement”, which postulates that since their first project the artists have followed the social life of objects, how they participate in human history and activities, and how objects relate and perform to one another. when ideas that gave birth to the objects that they focused on became obsolete, their material presence was carried into new political, cultural or economic contexts. imagination and experimentation was merged. the objects narrate human history through their perspective and in their language and play various roles, both as backdrops or as main characters in the stories made up by gelguda and Černiauskaitė.3 one cannot sense significant departures from the “statement” in The Metaphysics of the Runner, because the collated works in this exhibition reflect on the human post-organic sporting cult, too. | |
 View from Ugnius Gelguda and Neringa Černiauskaitė’s a.k.a. Pakui Hardware’s The Metaphysics of the Runner exhibition. 2014 Photo: Ugnius Gelguda Publicity photo Courtesy of the artists and Alex Ross | |
| Pakui hardware has transformed one of the halls in the contemporary Art centre into a sports gym for the period of the exhibition. the first things to attract attention are the improvised body building weights and the delicate, electronic melody. it’s a sound track that was composed on the legendary Kurzweil K2000 synthesizer for the video work After Effects, in the darkness of which moving 3d graphics of the texts ORGANIC and DRONE HARMONICS float just as cosmically as the accompanying melody. the sound track’s polyphonic zing interplays with another video called After Nature. in it, images of flowering trees alternate with interpretations of the 21st-century “mother’s milk”, Soylent4. the synthetically violet colours, together with the insipid synthesizer melody from After Effects, create a lightly euphoric mood, which in a slightly ironic way reminds us of the heightened feeling of satisfaction after sporting activities, when the body is properly loaded up on endorphins. At the centre of the exposition is a photo of the main hero of the story,5 about whom the objects in the space are arranged,6 which reflect in a fragmented way on what are features of the cult. Sports shoes with easily recognisable brands on her feet, wearing ultramodern Jeannine Han designer sporting wear – only the best – and a few fragile tree branches made of porcelain representing the last link with nature. they are all trophies, a collection, a kind of necessity for identifying with the urban sporting group. Black Out is the third of the three video works, set up in the furthest corner of the hall. watching the screen, it is possible to simultaneously observe the whole exposition with one eye. the approximately 90-second-long video is, in the most direct sense, a getting lost in the dark, as a column, window, chapiter, advertising placard, window and column emerge in the light of a weak pocket torch. the disorienting “blackout” loosens the exhibition’s self-satisfied sports advertising mood a little and also the rather overly correct exposition, and that’s not a bad thing at all. through this work, thoughts of all of the contradictions between a healthy lifestyle and all of the artificial trifles that stimulate it only just begin. just to be sure, i looked up various explanations, of which i accepted as the most useful the one that said metaphysics is a method of thinking that looks at things and phenomena in a state of rest, as complete and unchanging and independent of each other, and denies internal contradictions within them. even though no-one gets openly criticised, i cannot really agree that The Metaphysics of the Runner is a neutral observation. the content, which is topical for just about every city resident, and, even more, the glossy and quite insipid aesthetic in which the exhibition is presented, as well as the few frivolous accompanying lines of text, make one think that we’re dealing with a considerable dose of irony here. And, if irony is foreign to the viewer, then The Metaphysics of the Runner opens up opportunities for further discussions, which, with a good sense of humour and a small dose of fantasy, could extend a lot further than what’s visible at the exhibition. we’ll see whether i was right at the third showing of the exhibition at the kim? contemporary Art centre this winter. Translator into English: Uldis Brūns 1 fragment from the text accompanying the exhibition. 2 the Pakui Hardware brand is the creative property of curator Alex Ross. 3 www.ugniusgelguda.lt/index.php?/projects/artists-statement/ (viewed july 4, 2014). 4 Soylent is a new-generation food drink that can provide all of the nutrients a body needs (in advertising campaigns, it has been especially highlighted that the product can be classified as a valuable source of nutrition and not just a nutritional supplement). 5 the photograph is from the series that came about in collaboration with daniel terna. 6 the items in the exhibition were created in collaboration with dovilė gudačiauskaitė. | |
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