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| JUKAS 2005 : TRADITION OR AMBITION? Māra Traumane Sometimes, nuances are significant. Thus, Jukas could imply "real mayhem" or else just "polite confusion". Owing to a few articles in the press, the feeble exhibition stand at Riga City Council and the exhibition at the State Museum of Art, the term jukas (turmoil, disarray, confusion) has become associated in my mind with historical events: "a time of turmoil" and the Revolution of 1905 - a time when anarchy threatens to rip open both form and people's minds. The title Jukas for the event held at the Arsenāls Exhibition Hall undeniably is a decorative one - a kind of badge of restlessness on the breast of institution. What was the task of the exhibition? The Latvian viewer is rarely treated to exhibitions of this kind with such a large number of participating artists, on such a scale and with such a high standard of display of the works, so the Jukas exhibition may be regarded either as revealing one section of the rarely-viewed creative scene of young artists, or else as showing its "parade stance". | |
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A unique exhibition!
The overfull, superbly arranged rooms of Arsenāls, the shimmering screens and lights and the intensive sound background give an impression of freshness and dynamism at Jukas, as befits an exhibition by young artists... But - here the difficulties of appraisal begin, since the organisers have not formulated very clearly the "weight category" of this exhibition. The works are not united under any one theme or any declared "common thinking", and only insiders will know that these artists are students of the Department of Visual Communication, many of them still studying. This is not made clear in the descriptive accounts of the exhibition, so the uninformed visitor might view as the common denominator the "smart" technical approach, i.e. the screen or projection. At the same time, the size of the projections does not always correspond to the significance of the content of the work, which is forgivable to students, but is annoying if we were expecting to find independent work. Perhaps unwittingly, by their secrecy, they have made themselves appear overly pretentious. After all, the promise that the exhibition will consist only of "new works of art", although very moving, is in itself somewhat naïve and suspicious. Indeed, some clarification is required. Thus, Jukas is in a sense a continuation of the Latvian section of the "2 Show" exhibition, a presentation by one particular "school" - the major tradition maintained at the Visual Communication Department. At the same time, it certainly does not represent all the young artists working with digital technology. So long as we do not allow Jukas to pretend at representing all new art, it actually appears as a very respectable achievement, perhaps worthy of comparison with the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy or Goldsmiths College in London, attended even by the city's veteran galleries in their hunt for young artists. A painful difference lies in the "uniqueness" of the Jukas event, since the elementary shortage of "black/white cubes" and related resources of production in Riga means that we'll probably have a chance to see the further work of these artists only in a year or two, and most probably in a group exhibition again. In the diluted Latvian art scene, a "unique" event such as Jukas serves to disarm the critics, since it is virtually impossible to speak of creative success and failure any more, but, at most, of individual styles. "Only new works of art!" From the Marxist or Frankfurt School perspective, the exhibition might draw harsh criticism as a clear manifestation of capitalist values. We see the work of art as product for consumption, with entertainment and individualism. But let's leave Marxist dogma aside. Of course, we're seeing at this exhibition independent Latvia's first generation of professional yuppies - the products of the free market - and it's interesting to view them (and maybe ourselves, too) from the outside. The impression is a vivid one, there are numerous works, and each has a message about something, presented in quite complete form: presumably about things significant to the author. However, after viewing a couple of dozen works, one is forced to conclude that these young people of the information age, just like 19th century Romantics, appear to be living in seclusion, exploring existential conundrums, doubts and fears, dealing with eternal and not very original themes. The dense layers of the cultural setting and the media: the codes, cliches and information flows of cinema, TV and the internet, appear distant as the stars. Politics exists in a different galaxy. Reflection on developments in the cultural setting is vividly presented in Jukas only by two artists - Katrīna Neiburga, with a elegant expression of digital kitsch entitled "Spam Song", and Krišs Salmanis, attaching the very apt neon brand "Mainstream" to the whole exhibition. Like a hooligan tying a rattling tin can to a cat's tail. Jukas reveals a vacillation in Latvian art between projects and processes. I'd like to draw a scale (perhaps a teaching aid) showing the correspondence during an extended period between creating art and living. In my view, few succeed in reaching a certain threshold of permanence and contact, one such artist being Miks Mitrēvics, whose static "light pictures" are in my view precise studies of the language of cinema, involving light, space, mood and a frozen event, building on the laconic aesthetics of his 2002 video installation "Motel". Likewise, the poetic paintings of Kristīne Plūksna, although conceptually constrained, appear saturated with emotion like long-cherished secrets. The works of Katrīna Neiburga, Krišs Salmanis and Ģirts Korps also seem to manifest creative thinking over a period of time. Humour and self-irony serve to include in this circle the video works of Reinis Pētersons, Beāte Bērziņa and Renārs Krūmiņš, although the "disappearing act" in Renārs' film seems somewhat too predictable. Symptomatic in my view seems the common perception among the artists represented in Jukas of a work of art as a single, complete, generally isolated presentation of a story. The vividness of this kind of work of art seems to reduce the spectrum of creative approaches. The exhibition demonstrates that artists know how to package art in an "international" form, while their knowledge of the equivalent language falls somewhat short of the mark. How can the codes of life be translated into the language of art? The exhibited works may be compared with a volume of essays by young, inexperienced writers, with predictable endings and repetitive themes. It must be admitted that in the international arena, by adopting the arsenal of modes of expression from other branches, along with documentality and a more analytical view of private and social life, contemporary visual art offers more incisive and profound messages. Several exhibits, including works by experienced artists, make a very simple-minded appeal to a childish reaction from the viewer, to their empathy and desire to believe. Thus, the ADD karaoke model "The Musical Serpentine "Daddy"", in my view, would better have functioned in an event specially dedicated to this work, in an informal setting or in the frame of some major celebration, as a positive, democratic platform for general merriment. In the stiff exhibition setting, where the viewer is prepared for much more stunning contrasts, the work loses its attraction and possibly deserves to be included among a string of sincere, but infantile efforts. "Dark Bulb", by the F5 group, apparently one part of the installation intended for the 2005 Venice Biennale, is a characteristic endeavour by this group of artists - in the realm of the grotesque. The combination of a sham popular science theory, presented in Jukas, along with the promise of catastrophe, is eclectic and instrumental, and I can't shake off the feeling that the artists are simply creating an illustration for a mystical story-poetic fiction they have written themselves. But - time will show. From technophilia to the epistolary genre The island of anarchism remains in my memory as a small biological refuge within the technological encirclement of the exhibition. Oh, the pre-1905 underground prophets, Darwinists and masterminds of mechanics, who idealistically transformed into explosive weapons the scientific achievements of their century. I've just been reading in a volume of memoirs of Russia's radical left-wing movement Obraz Žizni about intelligent people trying to brew TNT from garden fertilizer and re-programming a Chinese alarm clock into a timer. Extremes, I agree. Nevertheless, one of the possibilities of technology and the media is to serve as a weapon, as a strategic, tactical or ironic instrument, rather than simply being used for show, as has happened in almost all cases in Jukas. Yes, these artists "use digital technologies", but it seems that virtually no member of this "third generation of conceptualists" oversteps the limits of passive consumption of these technologies, and this, in my view, does not indicate conceptualism. Instead, the digital media per se seem to offer academism. Somewhat too early on, digital video technologies have changed in the hands of the young artists from a medium into a form of fine art equivalent to sculpture or painting. This is the case with the work by F5, or in Kristīne Kursiša's vanitas show, where the rich formal approach unfortunately produces only a weak reflection of a dance macabre. The basic ability of digital technologies to emulate and synthesise the language of other genres has recently been classified by American researcher Lev Manovich. Distinctive in terms of creativity in this context was the psychological-physical-technical wing of the exhibition: Ģirts Korps & HKSO (Alfarmania / Survival Unit) and his five-screen video installation entitled "T", an audiovisual 360-degree "broadcast" of the perception of panic, and Martins Vizbulis' "participation work" - an acoustic "Communications Interference" generated for the audience. Delving into topical themes in the sphere of new media, Linards Kulless strives at innovation in the field of urban mapping, although I'm still puzzled as to what message, apart from the claim of revealing a link between psychogeography and musical rhythm, already made explored by MTV, should be read from the disjointed projection that forms part of the work, showing the artist dancing. The stumbling block of the Jukas circle is that they have come to know technology in isolation, without appreciating it as a medium, so their attempts at communication emulate the conservative forms of easel art, remaining oblivious of the arsenal of media language and DIY culture. "Learn to read, smoke and maintain the conversation." Unexpectedly, the hallmark of Jukas - the exhaustive annotations to the works - delighted me, in some cases serving as a quintessence of ideas less easily read from the work itself (Maija Kurševa), or, in other cases, as representing a continuation or extension of the work (Kristīne Plūksna). All in all, the debut of this group of artists in the epistolary genre does seem unusual. Possibly, these texts represent material for an exhibition catalogue, but their sheer density in the exhibition gives rise to the suspicion that the artists are transferring some of the conceptual load of the work onto this "external" ancillary text. In the exhibition, the descriptions serve as an instruction, and, characteristically, they are superfluous in the case of several good works. Thus, Martins Vizbulis' "Communications Interference", Miks Mitrēvics' "7 Scenes" and Katrīna Neiburga's "Spam Song" only gain by retaining their ambivalence. I like to think that these strings of "unintegrated" texts will in the future be expressed less in the form of a description of the idea, but will develop into a basis of critical reflection, as part of the composition or scenario of the work. And perhaps one day a student's work will even include some indirect reference to the ideas of Bakunin, Hakim Bey, Foucault or other thinkers. Jukas in 2005 is an exhibition of "outstanding pupils", in many regards a faultless exhibition, with top marks for behaviour. In this regard, a comparison with the scandal-raisers of YBA is not entirely appropriate. The art of the artists participating in Jukas is for the most part friendly to society, emotional and strives to be intelligible, important aspects being humour, light irony and interest in elements of popular culture. One section of the Jukas generation of 2005 is ready to "dig deeper" only in their own little field, and "revolution" is not part of their vocabulary. True, most of the analysis in this article is devoted to the overall impression given by the exhibition and the tendencies it displays, without discussing the qualities of individual works, which are in many cases most laudable. It should be borne in mind that the artists of Jukas do represent one of the centres of development of young Latvian art, a cell of professional higher education in art. The exhibition manifests the massive influence of digital technologies on our consciousness, and the sensitivity of artists towards the models of form and content offered by these media. Perhaps this is a subjective view, but Jukas seems to me a fitting successor at Arsenāls of the "Trespassers" retrospective of 1980s art. This sequence of exhibitions marks the spectrum of artistic expressions during the past 20 years, revealing breathtaking changes: the presence of the moving image, the role of the plot, the absence of static iconography, etc. Like photography in its day, the "user friendly" digital media have colonised the structures of thinking and perception, stifling the strategic instinct and continuing to cultivate the pleasure of consumption. But I have to admit that, after seeing Jukas, it's pleasant to recognise that we are on the "tuned in" side of the digital divide. Our present situation still leaves open the possibility of relinquishing the role of the user and considering whether it isn't worth transforming the flow of electronic pixels into a tool for a provocative "poetic terrorism"(Hakim Bey). | |
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