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| VILNIS ZĀBERS Daiga Rudzāte "Who are you two? A strange question. But we like it that we both are. We're V. Zābers and N. Lācis." Now, one of them has been living in Moscow for several years, and the other is gone, so that Riga has lost such concepts as klikt and pļukt, the division of humanity into boys and girls, and Zābers' three different kinds of laugh. He himself has formulated them as follows: one's so loud you have to block your ears, the second is quiet and the third he never made any mention of, and it seems that rarely anyone heard it. It is in truth very strange to reflect that a whole generation of artists has grown up now among which Zābers is a myth for some, while for others his name is only a little-known aspect of art history, the artefacts of which may be found in newspapers and magazines from the time of turmoil or at best in the catalogues of local and international exhibitions of the 1990s. "He'll be another Purvītis, if the drink doesn't ruin him," said Helēna Demakova. Such a description was current in early-90s Riga. And this year he'd have turned 40. | |
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Enfant terrible The range of Zābers' artistic media was so wide that in these nine years since he has gone, the Latvian art scene has not seen the emergence of any individual with such exceptional manipulative abilities: painting, prints, installations, drawings, caricatures, literary works etc. Nevertheless, however endlessly one could add to this list of media, towering over it all is Zābers' greatest work of art - his life - balancing everything within its spatial limits, starting with his self-image and ending with very specific and finely conceived nuances of behaviour, where only Normunds Lācis was a worthy match for him. In truth, many never actually saw the true Zābers (maybe only at moments when he broke into song for no apparent reason, singing "the waves come and go, and always pass by", or when he suddenly remarked "I'm a boy from the Lubāna meadows"), since it was all covered over by his Dürer locks of hair at first and then by his bald pate, by a carefully tended homme fatal beard or a Tartar-style goatee, by yellow jackets, orange trousers and brand ties bought in second hand shops, by a variety of suitcases, Lenin-style peaked caps and rocker caps. This was all garnished like a cake with his hedonic laugh, most commonly out of place, his Russian address to girls "Hello, my beauty" and his wild, vital energy that had the intensity of a fireball, simply stunning all those present in the room in expectation of the bang, often claiming a victim too. (Not for nothing did he wear a chronometer around his neck for a while.) The enfant terrible of Latvian art, as he was accurately dubbed after his death by Rita Laima Krieviņa and Jānis Borgs. He seemed to have an inbuilt obsession with cars - starting with the drawings he made for his son and the delight in BMWs he shared with Lācis (we may recall the LPSR Z exhibition "BMW" at the Theatre Museum, at the opening of which the two walked in embrace, wearing felt hats adorned with real BMW insignia) and ending with stories by other enthusiasts of trips with Zābers. And the end of the whole performance resembled a finale directed magnificently and with feeling, were it not reality, a field where Zābers has now fulfilled all the requirements of the classic artist, among which an early death is almost compulsory. (A few years later, presumably not under the influence of his particular example, the artist Andris Frīdbergs focussed public attention on art's obsession with death, offering to conclude a contract for suicide.) Absurd though it may seem, Zābers has become a legend. The recounting of this legend even interests women's magazines, whose readers no longer have to plug their ears with dainty pink fingers. On LPSR Z Held at the Gustavs Šķilters Museum in spring 1987 was the first exhibition of works by the LPSR-Z group of artists (Normunds Lācis, Vilnis Putrāms, Māris Subačs, Artis Rutks and Vilnis Zābers). The small format booklet which seems to have become in Latvian art history the only printed witness to the existence of what was a very out-of-the-ordinary group of artists for its time, includes something resembling a manifesto, still followed by its members today, though Zābers was the most consistent upholder of the dogmas it established. "The activity of LPSR Z may be characterised as an attempt to embolden any person to a creative experiment, not only in order to present art to a wider section of society, but at the same time to make it an instrument for these masses (x - known-unknown), offering an aid to solving a creative equation at any level. A creative equation should be understood to mean the expression of any form of art or its synthesis. We think the 21st century will be a century of humanism, and so it will require the humane person, whom we must mould already today. For our century poses a straight question: humanize or be destroyed. (...)" "With Gilbert and George I do have a relationship, but not with Jackson Pollock". Said Zābers on 14 March 1991 in an "LPSR Z radio play" published in the paper Atmoda Atpūtai, which we wrote one spring morning together with Naumanis, Lācis and Zābers at the editorial office on Basteja Boulevard, where all the answers given by the participants had been written by ideologues of the group. No matter how logical it may seem in the context of Zābers, with his manipulations with phallic symbols and pornographic elements, to mention, for example, the American artist Paul McCarthy, much closer in emotional terms would seem to be the emotive and theoretical approach of the famous British duo, founded on the wish to make art as accessible as possible and bring it closer and more alive to its potential consumer. We might describe Zābers, in the same measure as Gilbert and George, with the words of British art critic Matthew Collings: "(...) These artists are play-acting and it's part of their art. They also create objects, but their mythical rituals are much more their work of art than the objects." Also essential is the fact that Zābers never employed shock as the central element. His were always velvet revolutions, based on the wish to create an emotional experience. The main value of his art was not professional and talented execution, where one takes advantage of the spirit of the age and simultaneously submits to its dictates (although all this was present too), but rather a particularly concentrated and sometimes even indescribably sorrowful view of the world, culminating in his last solo exhibition "WZ invasion" at the Bastejs Gallery in February 1994. A total of 23 quite small rectangular works, numbered and arranged in pairs in a monotonous rhythm, were like a mirror of Zābers, with successive strata of demonism and fragile, easily wounded sentiment. Photographer Jānis Deinats made a photo portrait of Vilnis during the creation of this exhibition, the only one to catch the true face of Zābers in this single picture. "Maybe because I don't have harmony elsewhere, I find it in my works. Life is sometimes completely muddled. What I do always seems bad. I jump from this to that". He said this in an everyday interview. Alongside the myth of Zābers himself, there is in Latvian art also the myth of his "white paintings" - fragile and pearly pale, the subject matter being quite transparent (or in fact it may have been entirely absent). The value of these paintings, now all somewhere with Per in Stockholm and never seen again, lay in the energy field concentrated within them. Miervaldis Polis, together with whom Vilnis sold sunflower seeds by the Laima clock and opened an exhibition without real works of art at the Kolonna Gallery, once said something like this: he doesn't know whether Leonardo or Van Gogh are alive. He has no idea, since for him they exist anyway. The case with Zābers is similar. I would like to have the confidence of Miervaldis. During these nine years, whenever I think of Zābers, he comes before my eyes in a different form each time. It's like a child's kaleidoscope with coloured glass, in which, when you turn it this way or that, the glass falls and forms a different scene, just as dazzlingly colourful. At Christmas 1993, he sent his friends postcards by Lichtenstein, where the figures said to one another in clear Latvian: "Merry Christmas, my dear girl. Merry Christmas, my dear boy". | |
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