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 The Experimenter Evelīna Deičmane Vilnis Vējš, Artist | |
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A friend of mine was once observing the blue tits outside the window and wondering: perhaps these birds are regarded as loveable beings simply because they're so small. How energetically they peck at a piece of fat, how they attack seeds... In his imagination, he increased the size of the bird to human dimensions. In order to enhance the visual effect with sound, my friend used some quite basic computer software to transform the blue tit's voice to correspond to a body weight of 180 kg. The effect was frightening: you should have heard those deep, hoarse roars! I do not in any way wish to indicate that Evelīna Deičmane bears resemblance to a frail, light-haired girl only outwardly, but in actual fact... It's just that Evelīna frequently acts like that friend who observed the blue tits. She's a great experimenter. However, in using the term "experiment", we shouldn't confine ourselves to the meaning of the term which it has in the language of art, and the aesthetic challenges connected with it. Evelīna's experiments are closer to those secondary school activities which involve trying out everything that excites the imagination and could lead to an "interesting" result. Her experiments in the field of audiovisual installations seem to have no other goal than that of seeing (or hearing) the result. Thus, Evelīna convinces her friend to test whether it's possible to eat soup while standing on your head. It turns out that it really is: the experiment was a success (Soup Eater, 2007). What kind of sound is emitted by a micro-phone attached to a long cable spinning at high speed around a fixed point? The answer is given by the installation Diameter 761 (2006). How does a vinyl record sound that's been glued together from two halves of different records, one playing a sentimental song and the other a patriotic work from the Soviet era? The result, in the form of the work Nje mechtaj i nje dumaj (Russian: ‘Don't dream and don't think') was shown at Manifesta 7 in 2008. I'm not sure how clearly Evelīna envisages the end result when she launches into a new project. However, it doesn't seem believable that someone could devote quite considerable time and effort (such as are evidently required to prepare major installations) just to create an altogether predictable object. When Evelīna says her works are not easy to watch (or listen to), it seems as if she counts herself among the audience. However, as Evelīna goes on to say, "if you watch carefully, you can see quite a lot." So what is the focus of her interest? | |
 Evelīna Deičmane. Video still from video and sound installation "Season Sorrow". 2009 | |
| In compositional terms, Evelīna Deičmane's works often are created according to a similar scheme and hearken to a struggle between two geometric figures: the circle and the straight line. The circle is produced by the cyclic repetition of an action, sometimes also by creating visually perceptible lines, while the straight line, line segment or ray represents the temporal dimension of the action, the linear development of the story. The one or the other predominates alternately. For example, in the Soup Eater, the same action, - attempting to get a spoonful of soup into one's mouth, is repeated many times over. However, eating soup also has elementary directional movement: soup is eaten until the plate is empty, or the experiment is terminated. The extreme pose of the protagonist gives the story tension, which, characteristically for Evelīna, relates to overcoming resistance and to physical tension. It is true - in the case of Soup - there's also an element of merriment. Diameter is a more serious, and more abstract clash between two lines: the microphone circling in the air marks out one and the same precise circle, while the drama is heightened by the possibility of the centrifugal force breaking the bond with the centre. The straight line, or more precisely, the ray, represents the potential development of the situation. For good reason, a wire mesh is placed between the work and the viewers. The sound generated as the microphone overcomes air resistance is the immediate result of the experiment and vividly illustrates the potential danger of the situation. Were this sound ob-tained in any other way, it would, after all, have an entirely different significance.
A different, but essentially related scheme is played out in the photo and video installation Breathing Prohibited (2006), which has been exhibited in a range of variations, one of which was shown at the 15th Biennale of Sydney. The images and monitors show people sitting motionless, apparently not even breathing, while the setting gradually gets darker as the picture fades. In this case, linear development of the situation is of primary importance leading, moreover, to a result that is not in doubt: complete blackness. However, this is no more than evidence, no more than a segment of another process - the diurnal cycle of time, which must be one of the most commonly examined cycles in art (along with the human lifetime, the seasons, etc.). This appears repeatedly in Evelīna Deičmane's range of interests. Thus, in Time Conditions (2006) we see an intermittent view of the diurnal cycle in the form of separate "line segments" of real time. In both cases, it is significant that the material has been filmed in reality rather than generated by technical means, for example. In addition, in Breathing Prohibited, as indicated by the title, the "major" diurnal cycle is replicated by the "minor" cycle, i.e. breathing, even if this appears in negative form. It should be noted that the symbol of the mirror - the false, dis-torted mirror - is also part of Deičmane's arsenal. The soup eater, quite literally created as an upside-down figure, was displayed together with another mirror which seemingly turned everything the right way round, but not quite: the girl, placed on her feet once again as a result of this double inversion, turns out to be eating soup from an inverted plate, which, moreover, is suspended above her head. Also reminiscent of a distorting mirror is one of her early works: As the Years Approach (2005), in which a female figure approaching the viewer gave the impression of accelerated aging. Yet another variation on endless rotation with gradual development must be the most minimalist, in visual terms, of Deičmane's works: the sound installation The Elves and Jupiter, which, like Diameter 761, was created for a sound festival in Riga. Arranged in the corners of a room within an abandoned factory are four tape recorders connected in a loop, recording the sounds in the room and playing them back. The tension in Evelīna's works, mentioned several times already, is in this case created by the insistent focus on a structure that has been done to death in contemporary art: the loop, seeking the physical and conceptual possibility of breaking out of tiresome rotation. Nje mechtaj i nje dumaj, a work shown by Evelīna Deičmane in Flensburg, Rovereto, Berlin and Prague in 2008, is the most literary and narrative of her works. In formal terms, it is developed from the motif of the broken and refitted record, a variation of the circular structure behind the earlier works. However, the focus of attention is on time - the situation in the youth of the artist's grandparents and the distance that separates it from the present day. In visual terms this is expressed in the video material: the artist's relatives are shown on recessed horizontal surfaces alongside the record players. Yet the message is universal, since it deals with a typical aspect of the East European experience and links it with the feelings familiar to everyone throughout the cycle of the succession of generations. | |
 Evelīna Deičmane. Photo from the Evelīna Deičmane's private archive | |
| It's not quite as if Evelīna Deičmane's art is characterised solely by combinations of formal structures. These are rather a form for her subjective sense of conflict and drama, discovered intuitively. For example, the cycle of photographs entitled A Legend - Tales of Human Behaviour (2007) seems to be oriented specifically towards unconscious movements of the psyche, striving to pin down images that are difficult to explain, in the tradition of classical Surrealism and the gothic horror story. However, the carefully thought-out realisation of the staged photographs suggests that momentary flashes of imagination were not the only sources of inspiration for the artists. (The photographs were created jointly with Theo Mercier). The careful arrangement of the space and objects around the figures is the result of yet another physical experiment, which examines how the conditions of the material environment, including the force of gravity, can be overcome in the name of illusion, and encourages us to ponder the riddles of this distorted mirror in the form of a photographic image. Evelīna Deičmane does not conceal her personal interpretations of the works, and it has to be said that these are captivating because the material has come from life itself. For example, the sitters for the photographs in Breathing Prohibited are Evelīna's brothers and sisters (four in total and, as the press loves to emphasise, all of them artists), while Nje mechtaj i nje dumaj was apparently a good excuse for bringing together the grandparents. The trajectory of her own career, from rural Latvia, namely the village of Burtnieki, to the capital Riga, where she studied under the influential Professor Pētersons, and later to Berlin, begs to be compared with the programmed breaking-out of the object featured in Diameter, from its restricted orbit into space. The purposeful striving for international exhibition experience and a cyclic return to local sources of inspiration, largely the result of the irregular and changeable situation Latvian contemporary art life, goes in tandem with the creative oscillation between the general and the specific. However, all of this together creates an unusual combination of the personal-emotional and rational-objective approaches, which has turned out to be a profitable offering for the organisers of international exhibitions.
/Translator into English: Valdis Bērziņš/ | |
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