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| THE BOUNDLESSNESS OF LATVIAN ART: FROM “DIGITAL ROMANTICISM” TO EVERYDAY COMMUNICATION, FROM... TO... Helēna Demakova | |
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There's nothing new under the sun - this conservative, familiar saying might be used by a thinking person who does not wish to compare the changing forms of art with current technological advances. A thinking observer will discuss style and content, leaving to the technocrats their enthusiasm for technology. However, at least in recent eight years, the developments seen here in Latvia indicate radical innovation and the emergence of a new, altogether different scene. Technologies (photo, video and digital media) have played a secondary, but nevertheless very significant role in the development of this phenomenon.
It's impossible to adequately describe this novel art scene either in a single article in a journal, or in a catalogue text. It's a theme worthy of a dissertation. In November last year, I strove to present my view of recent Latvian art trends in the catalogue for the 2‑SHOW exhibition - a joint Latvian-Lithuanian young artists' exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. Collaboration with young artists, including those educated outside of the Latvian Academy of Art (Kaspars Goba, Simona Veilande and Emīls Rode), was an opportunity to gain a more-or-less objective view of interests and tendencies among young artists. The "product" seen at the exhibition represented only a small fraction of their creative potential, but a very representative one. The main idea crystallising from the exhibition and from looking at a great variety of creative expressions by young artists is not really a very original one. The most noticeable process occurring in recent years is the divergence of what was formerly an easily-surveyed, traditional fine art scene. Fine art, as distinguished in Latvia, with its accustomed structures, has diversified almost to the point of boundlessness. As it escaped in former times the watchful eye of the Soviet censor, so it now evades the all-encompassing outlook of the contemporary art critic. Young artists also participate in traditional events (such as the "Autumn" exhibitions), but the essence of the new art is mostly to be found elsewhere. Virtually every young artist has a small circle of associates and their own subculture, showing only limited overlap with others. Neither is the term "young artist" entirely appropriate. Several artists in their middle years (Kristaps Ģelzis and Ēriks Božis) work in milieus where becoming one of the favourites of the Riga Gallery is of no significance. Likewise, that outstanding master of painting, Imants Lancmanis, continuing over the years his work on the conceptual development of the "Kalēti" series, belongs more to the new art scene than to the traditional one. His "stills" and documentary emphases represent the fruit of very contemporary thinking. With regard to the new trends, it would be too limiting to discuss only the particular school associated with the Visual Communication Department of the Latvian Academy of Art. Also represented in the new art, in addition to the "vis-coms", is the somewhat rough conceptual art of Ernests Kļaviņš, the cutting social photography of Kaspars Goba, the theatrical pseudofashion of the pureculture group and the scenographic approach of Kristians Brekte, a worthy continuation of the somewhat aggressive work of "scenographer" Gints Gabrāns. Many of the young masters with an ambitious professional approach have received a good education abroad. Thus, photographer Ivars Grāvlejs has trained in Prague, while photographer and performance artist Kristīne Alksne is still studying in Milan, where "vis-com" graduate Santa Oborenko has also been studying for several years. This list might, and should be continued, but then it would turn into a research paper. Writing and criticism on current developments has the humble, though conspicuous aim of generating interest, enlightening, contextualising and perhaps finding fault as well. In connection with the mentioned 2 SHOW exhibition, there arose a well-justified wish to speak of a so-called Third Wave in Latvian conceptual art, which might be regarded as successors of the metaphorical "installationists", painters and graphic artists of the second half of the 80s (Breže, Tillbergs, Pētersons, Ģelzis, Gailāns, Māliņa, Boiko, Juris Putrāms, Mailītis, Mitrēvics, Zariņa, Ieva Iltnere and others) and the paradoxical Western-appropriating "messengers" of the first half of the 90s (Frīdbergs, Fišers, Gabrāns, Zabiļevska and others). This "Third Wave" is significantly different. Generation boundaries are always hazy, particularly in terms of style, but the change of generations does occur. Would you not agree that the painted, ironic comic-strip works by Ernests Kļaviņš on the canons of culture and art (Ernests once admitted that he's not interested in art, since he's seen too much art all around him right from his childhood) or the cold, schematic, also somewhat comic-strip-like painted interiors by Kristīne Plüksna, nevertheless so different from Pop Art, represent something cardinally removed from the restrained precision of Miervaldis Polis or the pan-human metaphors drawn, painted and photographed by Ilmārs Blumbergs. The new tendencies are neither better, nor worse; they are simply different. In this new art, the aspect of utopia is very hard to perceive. The utopia of Tillbergs was substantial and poetic; the perceptible utopia of Breže is also poetic, but at the same time full of ideological paradoxes. The protagonists of the first generation of conceptualism (not suggesting that individual, marginal phenomena of conceptual art were absent even in 60s or 70s Latvia) were Wide-Ranging, Powerful, Interesting, Clever, Self-Denying and Non-Institutional. The present loss of hierarchies (so that today it's unbearably difficult to answer the question: "What is good art?") does not envisage any central, all-embracing concepts. Neither does it envisage the creation of interestingness, of any emotional "forcing" that moves every viewer/listener/reader, any idealistic ranking of values, or an enormous artistic scale, such as the ships or planes of Tillbergs once were. Neither is any "artificiality" envisaged: such as the decaying home-baked pizzas of Gints Gabrāns a decade ago at the exhibition "Culture of Life" curated by Inga Šteimane, or the patterns on the pavement by Armīns Ozoliņš in the 1999 project "Ventspils Transit Terminal" curated by Solvita Krese and Kristaps Ģelzis. There's no doubt of the existence of certain fashion trends, which no country belonging to the West can do without. In Latvia too, the new art is thoroughly Westernised, so the tendencies represented here are in tune with the West. Networking, antiglobalism, communes and the interactive involvement of small social groups in art projects - these are only some of the trends. Networking in itself is not a serious concept, since any craftsman can do that. Otherwise, applying the ideological context of the network, we might regard as an outstanding artist the Ministry of Culture driver Raitis Ermanis, one of approximately 20 radio hams in Latvia (at 27 MH frequency), who spends every free moment contacting similar operators across the world. Of course, Raitis is not and never will be an artist, since he's not interested or engaged in the prerequisites that guide the development and understanding of art. Likewise, criticism of the mass media and consumer society in itself is only criticism: it's not utopia and, in itself, it's not art. In my view, this is a good thing, since games with the aesthetics of advertising on the knife-edge of professionalism (for example, Mārtiņš Ratniks' light box "History") do not pretend to the perspective of a genius. There are geniuses these days too (or quite recently, as became apparent in the course of writing about Bruno Vasiļevskis), but it's also a very good thing that in our new art setting, the prevailing concept is not that of the Messiah, but rather that of the Idea. What might crystallise as an abiding value from today's creative quest is well investigated by the multi-layered work Timewillshow, produced by the F5 group of artists. This example of sculpture/installation/environmental or video art may be read at several different levels of content. It seems that the artificial flowers, the conserved music and the digital images of "beautiful" flowers were focussed on the aim and meaning of mummification, including the mummification of artefacts. This major three-dimensional work, involving digital video, unwittingly pointed to the artificial division of artistic genres and media, where the origin of the concept disappears. At the same time, this kind of debate on the "beautiful" in the contemporary art scene may be regarded as a reaction to excessively social valuation. It is apparent from the institutionalised evaluation of contemporary art in Europe that each and every critical gesture is in itself considered a mark of quality. Of course, the name of the work and its realisation also involved personal and very private experience, but all in all it is a contextual, contemporary work. We might join F5 in saying: time will show! So far, ringing in a hopeful future in the visual arts in Latvia is the advent of teaching methods where the young artist becomes much freer from cliches and pre-ordination than the young actor or musician. The emerging contemporary artist has the space and the opportunity for free thinking. And that in itself is something. | |
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