|
|
| Sculptor in the maelstrom Pēteris Bankovskis, Art Critic Ivars Drulle. Based on True Stories 28.04.–10.06.2011. Alma Gallery | |
 Ivars Drulle. The Trial of Herberts Cukurs. Object. 2011 | |
| Ivars Drulle (see www.ivarsdrulle.com) is an artist. True enough, I don’t actually know what it means nowadays to be an artist. Or what it has ever meant. Judging from public events, it seems that they themselves conceive of and interpret their ‘profession’ in various ways. For example, we may hear a composer or singer of a three-chord song self-confidently calling themselves an artist. Or else girls whose behaviour and appearance suggests that they might be “working” elsewhere avidly discussing fashion artists (well, alright – designers, but that’s another story). It is traditional to consider, however, that in the so-called visual arts, at least – in activities most commonly resulting in some kind of visible, tangible object that is, nevertheless, superfluous to human and animal everyday physiological existence – the term ‘artist’ should be used with reference to a person who has trained at ‘art school’. In earlier times it was also important that in such a school one learned a craft: how to mix colours correctly, how to carve stone, how to cast bronze, how to use an offset press etc. In recent past the public in the Latvian SSR and similar countries knew for certain that an artist is someone who belongs to the Artists’ Union. But times change. Thus, for example, at the Royal College of Art in London they now teach you, among other things, how to create works from PET bottles, or how to correctly utilise an old bucket to express your ideas. More precisely, instead of teaching, they stimulate the students to unleash in themselves a prankster spirit, to think up for themselves some activity involving the objective world that nobody in their immediate vicinity had thought of before. Many tend to imagine that being an artist means, for example, to express ‘an active life position’. Of course, the confusion begins right away: what is meant by the words ‘active’, ‘life’ and ‘position’? Well, the last of these three words doesn’t mean anything. The first is presumably the opposite of ‘passive’. In order to avoid the impression that we’ve strayed into some study course at a college of banking, we may replace ‘active’ and ‘passive’ with ‘moving’ and ‘motionless’. And ‘life’: yes, we each have our own, and just one at that, and we know the ending. So then what? Perhaps an ‘active life position’ means providing oneself with a clearly defined path and a method of correctly preparing for this finale – death? If only it were so! Unfortunately, people of the present day have a different conception of things, and so an ‘active life position’ means sticking one’s nose into other people’s affairs, destroying any kind of order, and attempts to alter the world according to one’s own definitively tiny and transitory image and likeness. (By ‘people of the present day’ I mean people since the beginning of the so-called Age of Enlightenment). For Latvians, who have been influenced by the surrounding ‘culturally sophisticated nations’ for several centuries, the ‘active life position’ adopted by the Russian peredvizhniki, possibly, may seem familiar and selfevident. | |
 Ivars Drulle. Why Is It So. Object. 2010 | |
| Oh yes, and about Ivars Drulle. He is an artist, a sculptor who has studied at art schools. Yet the sculptor’s life at present is not the same as it was until fairly recently, when right here, in the Land of Mary, spirited, slightly uncouth men and feisty, strong women contested fiercely and sometimes perfidiously for major commissions. (Just as in their day Michelangelo and others competed in court intrigues in order to get the job of decorating the tombs of princes and popes, so too, in the Latvian SSR, sculptors fought in the offices of the Communist Party and other committees for the right to sculpt monuments to Lenin and memorials to the Soviet Union’s Great Fatherland War.). Back then, the life of a sculptor had a certain piquancy. Nowadays nobody commissions anything, with the exception of the occasional gravestone. Of course, there are all kinds of plein air painting workshops and ‘residencies’, where serious-faced people go around doing silly things with which they later clutter up the ‘public space’. Or else, aware of what’s what, they create their sculptures from ice or sand, writing not on the wall, but in sand and water: מנא ,מנא, תקל, ופרסין (Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin). Drulle, like so many others, lives in the present. A present made up of his own reflections (true or fanciful) concerning himself, his surroundings, what has been and what has, perhaps, contributed to the present. It is impossible to say how personal his thoughts are, how sincere, and to what degree they have been shaped by whichever way the wind blows and the dictates of opinion leaders. I appreciate that his father is important to him. But why is he so declaratively concerned with his father’s inherent ‘everyday anti-Semitism’? I understand that it may seem interesting to him to touch on the subject of Herberts Cukurs. But, again, why the emphasis on Mossad murderers, on the ‘Jewish question’? Or, in another work – the story of the wife and children of Goebbels – this dreadful banality of the Grand Finale of the future state proclaimed by the German National Socialist Workers’ Party. What does he need this for? The artist himself writes of childhood winter fun and games in Biķernieki Forest. Do these experiences truly tie in with what he later read about the Catastrophe and about Nazism, turning into an irrepressible drive that now has to be expressed in the narratives of works in an exhibition? We cannot tell, and, possibly, Ivars Drulle himself doesn’t know. Because Drulle, as I have already said, is living in the present – just like the rest of us. And the format of the present is formless, while the content that the present offers to our senses consists of endless scraps and rags, crumbs and lumps, smells and vomit. Look, he (it could be any one of us) reads an interview with some actor in a magazine, or simply notices it mentioned on the magazine cover whilst standing in a supermarket queue. It’s all complete drivel: words stating that someone that you or I don’t know – we don’t even know whether this ‘someone’ actually exists outside the magazine text – is giving an account of something. But Drulle (or any one of us) walks out of the shop with his carrybag of shopping, and the text on the magazine cover accompanies him and churns about in his head together with thoughts about work at the Academy of Art, about the dinner that is to be prepared for the family, and about the minutiae of making works for an upcoming exhibition. In this sense the exhibition of work by Ivars Drulle at the Alma Gallery was a true example of realism. Sculpture itself, in its pure form, cannot be realistic, even if we think of, for instance, the work of Antonio Canova. Contemporary sculpture, if you’re lucky enough to win a major commission, is more realistic: it expresses more openly the sculptor’s ignorance of the meaning or meaninglessness of life and the world. Drulle’s sculpture – these little play figurines in little dolls’ rooms – is even more realistic, since it tells of how discrete, i.e. divided into small chambers, is the capacity of the contemporary person to form judgements, how impossible it is to disentangle oneself from the maelstrom of ‘information’ in which our current civilisation is struggling. /Translator into English: Valdis Bērziņš/ | |
| go back | |
