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| The “Butterfly Effect” and the whale bone, or Stories About Frontiers Ieva Astahovska The exhibition "Trespassers. Contemporary art of the 1980s" at the Arsenāls Exhibition Hall, 18 February to 13 March Some time ago, the seventies were in vogue, and quite recently the sixties were fashionable again, harking back to the beginnings of true pop culture, as we know it today. The "Trespassers" exhibition highlights the eighties. The main protagonist in this exhibition is the age, or, more precisely, the spirit of the age - this special, characteristic spirit, nowadays slightly dust-covered. Seemingly very familiar, but already somewhat remote, viewed almost dispassionately "from outside". For many, however, the view is perhaps not so dispassionate: for the first time in almost twenty years, works by the Latvian avant-garde of the eighties, which have chanced to be preserved (saved) in sheds, cellars and attics, have been retrieved, restored, brought back to life and presented for emotional "reassessment" after a fairly short time - but in an age that is already worlds away. Back in those days, the opening of frontiers and the world, the emotional climax accompanying it and the visions of the future, all appeared very promising to the artists, but, looking back on it all today, it remains the highest peak of recognition - part of a wave of East European art in the West, which was to surge in the first half of the nineties (but a pinnacle of achievement that art today and the youngest generations of artists can only envy.) And most of the heroes of that day have nowadays left the limelight of the art scene - like actors who've already played their star roles. | |
| The spirit of the age and the atmosphere of place
Very widespread in the West is the view that the eighties represent a "fall" after the ideas and movements of the hippies, anarchists and revolutionary fighters for freedom of the sixties and seventies. In Latvia (still Soviet Latvia in those days), the tone is a very different one. Here, it really was "the age of the frontier", with one foot in the Soviet era and the other already in "restructuring" and "openness" and in the age that first heralded independence. There was the Soviet era with its utopian ideology and totalitarian reality, isolating Latvia and the other fraternal republics within a special zone, praised in propaganda as the best of all possible worlds, where socialism had already been built and where communism was still under construction. It was a time of momentous change: the collapse of the Soviet empire, the National Awakening and the "singing revolution", when the hand of the clock has already struck the new hour.
In art, this was the time when the sensitively perceived counterpoints of the age were highlighted in truth-telling louder than ever before, sensing the pulse of the age and rooted in the atmosphere of place. The spirit of the age, i.e. the dominant cultural climate of the age, and the atmosphere of place, i.e. identity that finds expression in the culture and traditions of a particular place, are concepts discussed by Hardijs Lediņš, himself one of the "trespassers" in his programmatic article on the avant-garde "The spirit of the age and the atmosphere of place". And in their art, the trespassers not only project the spirit of the age and the atmosphere of place, but also derive inspiration from both: utilising metaphorical accents and local context, characteristic features of art in the West too at this time, applying the realities of home life and everyday myths, using quotes to reflect both on "life at home" and "the world" - Gustavs Klucis and the "harsh style", the German Neue Wilden, Arte Povera and SozArt, Joseph Boyce and Keith Herring. Also incorporating the utopianism and ideas of past avant-gardes, such as Russian Constructivism. Thus, we see the kinetic lighthouse model of Valdis Celms, Anda Ārgale and Māris Ārgalis, projecting a huge video screen against the sky (in 1978!) or the dream of global conquest put forward by Aigars Sparāns, Juris Poga and Ivars Mailītis, who imagined emergence into the world like a space voyage, where, instead of the nuclear bomb, they would bring the elation of discovering the world and being discovered by the world - planning the world's biggest screen, a roof reflecting the sky, in the design for the EXPO pavilion. Significantly, these artists were not revolutionaries, but true border transgressors: in art, where the degree of freedom is greater, they struck sparks with their message and mode of expression, or baffled and excited themselves in washing away their own inner frontiers through seemingly absurd experiments, thus breaking out of the zone allotted to art, and crossing the boundaries between the different media that had previously been so clearly defined. (This state of being "at the frontier" is most clearly revealed by the so-called "supergraphics" artists: another half-step further, they were to become "interdisciplinary", "environmental" or "installation" artists. There are virtually no paintings in this exhibition, thus indicating the moment when painting was toppled from its status as the prima donna of art, and when the Latvian art world witnessed the beginnings of the recent "war of faiths" between "the contemporary" and "the traditional". (Well illustrated through a comment by one visitor to the exhibition, a "traditionalist" who sees it as "A spiritual vacuum!!!")) Processes The exhibition curators Solvita Krese and Māra Traumane distinguish "processes" in art on one hand, which derive impulses, ideas, impressions and influences from other fields such as music, literature and architecture, and "myths" on the other hand - the messages put across through the art shown in exhibition halls. Art as a process is not a vector from point A to point B, but rather a journey and an unusual ritual, where the meaning lies precisely in the interaction with reality. Processes in the "frontier zone" are also marked by a special element - chaos - which reveals mutual dependence and interaction among various factors. An example of chaos theory is the so-called "Butterfly Effect". Namely, that the flutter of a butterfly's wings in China can lead to a chain of cause and effect whose result could be a hurricane in Indonesia. Although chaos theory is particularly important in relation to environmental processes (being applied especially in weather forecasting, where, more than in other fields, unforeseen variations, even minute divergences from the original state, can mean the difference between flood and drought), it is also utilised in tracing market developments and the human heartbeat. And likewise, for restoring non-existing feelings, dancing Doctor Essener's binocular eye dances or for the railway blues trip to Bolderāja ("we pass through all possible kinds of nature, through the city, over level crossings, then through a forest, across an endless field and finally end up in an industrial zone", as Hardijs Lediņš put it in conversation with Normunds Lācis in Avots magazine, 1988, No. 4). Or, take the event "How to find Kashchei's egg?", staged by Indulis Gailāns. Or "The Children of Staburags", by Oļegs Tillbergs, Sarmīte Māliņa and Sergejs Davidovs, in the pedestrian tunnel by the railway station, where people in chemical suits and wheelchairs play a broken piano and act out roles among empty children's cots. Although these events - seemingly absurd to the minds and eyes of rational citizens - might seem totally inert to anything outside this environment, the "butterfly effect" they engender is readily apparent: transforming the life of a Soviet citizen into something similar to Western Zen Buddhism and broadening the limits of freedom within oneself. Furthermore, this process need not be intelligible. The aim is to create FEELINGS: feelings that are chaotic, approximate, repaired and restored, feelings not previously experienced, feelings that are mutually interactive and thus all-encompassing. Myths While one language of the trespassers is aimed at the approximate and the all-encompassing, and mainly at inner frontiers, another is very precise in terms of the mode of expression and message, undermining the myths connected with the atmosphere of place (since the Soviet state was, after all, based on myth and utopia). In this exhibition, such works constitute the "Myths" section - most commonly infused with socio-political messages, but still expressed through metaphor and association (the associational code in itself being an inexhaustible theme in Soviet art, permeating the rhetoric and becoming enmeshed in the freedom struggle and the illusions of ideology and of the language of Aesop). The language of these works covers the widest spectrum of existential expression: searing fatalism, aggressive breaking-out, self-destructive pathos and even the mild and fragile. Most emotional and powerful is "People as flags", by Inese Mailīte and Ivars Mailītis: black (burnt), broken, inept figures in a field of coal, but monumental all the same ("monuments to those who wished to fly, who hoped and loved", as the artists' themselves put it). The worker from Andris Breže's "Masters of the earth" is as impressive in its monumental ruggedness as the Soviet avant-garde of the 1960s: "Masters of the earth" by Edgars Iltners. With the difference that this labourer, presented as the master of the soil he tills within the frame of the Marxist dialectical struggle between the mentality of the master and the slave, does not express the idea of freedom and emancipation, but instead betrays doom and alienation. Oļegs Tillbergs' "Aurora" is aimed at one of the most vivid Soviet revolutionary myths, the warship or the image of empire, here transformed into a whale bone supported on the flimsy little pennants of the official children's Lenin movement. The force of expression, the tension of breaking out and expressiveness of the supergraphics, embodies the pathos of the age, with figures that call to arms, rent the world, fight and bring light into the darkness. There's irony in the prints by Normunds Lācis: flourishing Soviet life and Soviet heroes in a jungle of statistics, a synthesis of Pop Art comics and the optimism of Socialist Realism. There's comment on the customs and conventions of the Soviet era ("To your health!!" by Leonards Laganovskis), and everyday material reality is "conserved" in the "Bread trays" by Andris Breže: a sickle stuck in pitch and felt, the hook of a black and dreary rubber pump, with altered proverbs as comments of Soviet life ("One little cynic is enough to topple a great load", "Early bird gets the whack"). These "myths" are all very precisely aimed "in the local atmosphere", at the flesh of the dying whale that was the Soviet empire, and so they remain as "myths" for the future (i.e. today), like a message from the past that has fulfilled its role of calling to arms. Even a work on subject that remains topical today, "The Burtnieki Castle" by Kristaps Ģelzis from back in 1988 - an enormous castle of used paper covered in cement dust - dedicated to the Vilis Lācis (National) Library and the idea of a new "castle of learning", nevertheless appears today as a sunken vestige from the past. Today's artists use a different language, and the codes perceived by the viewer are likewise different. The spirit of the age has once again struck a different hour. "Trespassers" is about history, albeit very recent history. | |
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