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| Kaspars Goba Ieva Puķe |
| Podnieks from Drusti Ieva Astahovska Kaspars Podnieks is a 24-year-old artist still studying in his final year at the Visual Communication Department of the Academy of Art. His works have been noticed not only at exhibitions by the young and talented ("2 Show" in Vilnius, "What is important?" in Riga and elsewhere), but have also attracted attention at the traditional "Autumn" exhibitions, where he has participated every autumn/winter since 1999. We may remind ourselves of the most conspicuous works of recent years: a six-metre-high reed structure that turns out to have been inspired by the ancient Latvian straw decorations or puzuri; and a series of quite enormous photographs under the title "Milk", featuring 1) a calf grazing in milk, 2) a farmer lying dead in milk, 3) a three-year-old boy on a tricycle in milk, and 4) a forlorn, packed-up milking machine standing in milk. (I was convinced that this work is staged virtual reality, but all of it turns out to be real: the calf and everything else, including Kaspars himself as the dead farmer, and 500 litres of milk, donated by the young artist in the name of art from his parents' farm.) Shown at the "Nature. Environment. Man. 2004" exhibition was the work "Cow": moving screens showing the cows Gudrīte and Paija appearing and slowly disappearing from the screen which had been neatly upholstered with the hides of these animals, now grazing in happier pastures. I wouldn't like to develop any further my apologia on the artist's work, since this is only the promising start to his quest. However, various thoughts do arise. From a contemporary standpoint in art, Kaspars Podnieks has maintained the approach that "brings art out into nature" or "brings nature into art". At the same time, this is a path little-trodden so far in Latvian art: namely, he develops the "art-nature" relationship not as an aesthete or a metaphysician, a destroyer or a hooligan, seeking poetics, exotic form, alterative settings or subjective intellectual inspiration, but in quite a different manner: with a farmer's thoroughness, stability and sense of scale, and even with a certain rational humanism, which is kept down to earth by the ironic note so characteristic of young artists' work. Kaspars Podnieks brings the theme of the countryside into art. And not as an idyllic pastorale, where the country or nature serves the purpose of "fleeing from civilisation", returning to primeval elements or presenting studies of the exotic, of the kind that have frequently attracted 20th century artists, and which even in these cases serve to confirm that art is after all more of an urban activity, a somewhat snobbish affair. The aim of Kaspars' subversive work is not one of objecting or protesting. He's simply saying "It's better in the country!" |
