Still from music video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (1969)
Lithuanian art life in the first decade of independence is often characterised with reference to the differences between the traditional and the new art spheres, the lingering Soviet and the emerging “liberal” approaches to culture management, and creative unions and the new “independent” artist groups. In this article I will focus on the distinctive qualities of contemporary visual art through the prism of communication. The aspiration to reach mutual understanding (in other words, the communication discourse in general) is associated here with geopolitical factors – the end of the Cold War((The end of the Cold War and the sudden metastases of free market capitalism in the early 1990s prompted spontaneous proclamations of the end of history and geography not only in the USA but almost all over the Western world, while the “inevitable” realpolitik character of the free market was acknowledged even by its critics.)) and informational or network capitalism(( The theories of network capitalism and network society were presented most comprehensively in the famous trilogy by Manuel Castells. See also: Webster, Frank. 1995. Theories of the Information Society (First ed.). Oxford: Routledge.)). At that time, new advanced technologies, imagined (and widely covered in the cultural press) rather than actually experienced, marked the utopian vision of the future. In real life, they also enabled new connections and unlocked previously inconceivable possibilities; globalisation, in its turn, considerably accelerated the development of new forms of events.
When “the walls fell”, we heard a lot of talk about international and intercultural communication – in our country, Karl Popper’s vision of the open society was most prominently represented by the Open Society Fund Lithuania, of course, yet there were also numerous informal initiatives. For the latter, communication often became both an instrument and a subject, even a new cultural trope. In a broader context, just as intriguing as the progress of communication technology are the various disruptions((Technical disruptions could be called communication interferences, while the lack of mutual understanding could be metaphorically imagined as lagging.)), misunderstandings and miscommunication, which also marked the trajectories of new Lithuanian art in dotted lines. By the way, the very beginning of the new means of communication is often hard to identify chronologically due to their later rapid proliferation, radically increased affordability and seemingly democratic nature. For instance, today we can remember when the Internet (with a capital I) became available in Lithuania, and at least approximately identify the time when it was first employed in the local art. Yet here one should also recall the capacity of that time’s Internet connection, i. e. the fact that the latter was quite different 20, 15 or 5 years ago((For instance, in 2010 we heard news reports announcing Lithuania the European leader in the fiber-optic Internet network penetration.)). In general, the development of the various means of communication is uneven or easily predictable, and thus it is also hardly possible to draw a clear dividing line between those who have access and those who do not((Today it makes little sense to look for differences between those who use the Internet and mobile devices and those who do not, yet certain subtle distinctions can emerge in other spheres: for instance, some are active in the social networks, while others stay away from the latter altogether, and so on.)).
In her overview of the beginnings of Lithuanian net art, Renata Šukaitytė compared Lithuania with other Baltic and Central European countries, and concluded that the discourses and practices of cyber culture had reached us with a considerable delay. Virtual art institutions or communities began to emerge in Lithuania only in the mid- and late-1990s, while media culture itself, according to Šukaitytė, was quite fragmented. The reason behind this was the lack of prominent electronic art streams, institutions, or a group of artists (ideologues) which would shape the local electronic art culture and strengthen its institutional positions((Šukaitytė, Renata. 2006. “Elektroninis menas Lietuvoje, Latvijoje ir Estijoje: globalūs procesai ir lokalios iniciatyvos”, Kultūrologija (Kultūra globalizacijos sąlygomis), No.13. pp. 48-74.)). These features were mentioned as weaknesses, yet in my view it would be more appropriate to define fragmentary initiatives through the prism of their leading figures’ enterprises and communication hubs or temporary platforms (projects), rather than systematic activity.
What we have come to call the critical discourse in art was fermenting further away from the major exhibition institutions. For instance, some post-Soviet Lithuanian cultural figures were discussing the need for an alternative to the new political consensus of the “liberal market” after the restoration of independence. That time’s grimaces of savage capitalism, i. e. the neoliberal shock, as well as the all-encompassing privatisation campaign that surged the post-Soviet space, provoked ambivalent thoughts in critically-minded avant-gardists as well as traditional artists. In short, critical discourse meant rhetorical liberation from the shackles of the Soviet era, yet the ideology of “heading for the free market”, which had no sensible alternatives after the restoration of independence, was an object of critique as well.
As Gediminas Urbonas, an active member of the new Lithuanian art scene who had founded a new NGO called Jutempus Interdisciplinary Art Projects (JTMP)((Initially JTMP was presented as a potential agency of another institution, Art League.)) in 1993, recalled in a 2001 conversation, the summer of 1992 had seen people like Leonidas Donskis, Audronis Liuga, Zita Čepaitė, Karla Gruodytė, Audronis Imbrasas, Oskaras Koršunovas and Petras Ubartas meet and discuss. Urbonas later explained these individuals’ shared aspiration to create an unprecedented “different” alternative to the neoliberal status quo as follows: “There was no notion of alternative art in the Lithuanian cultural discourse at the time. People were desperately trying to take advantage of the first benefits of capitalism, and that was very obvious in the cultural community. <…> When savage capitalism, alternatively known as corporate fascism, took hold in the years following 1990, it was not possible anymore to rely on the stance of a “quiet modernist”, and there was a need for a complete reconstruction of the notion of the alternative.”((From the author’s conversation with G. Urbonas, September 11, 2001 (the author’s archive).)) This emerging effort to oppose the neoliberal ideology, shared by fellow-minded cultural figures, coincided with the JTMP’s aim to become an innovative community that would not be restricted by state control and would be active in international communication networks.((I have discussed Jutempus’ networked nature in more detail in my article “Who Is Counting the Decades of Independent Art?”, in: Michelkevičius Vytautas; Šapoka, Kęstutis (eds.). 2011. (In)dependentContemporary Art Histories. LTMKS. Vilnius, p. 50.))
The community’s almost utopian anti-institutional state and programmatically networked nature of activity enabled the artists to realize the Ground Control project, a collaboration with UK artists and international theorists which sought to consistently take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Internet. According to the project’s authors, as they were networking and making contacts since as early as 1994, they were attempting to break free from the “logic of the culture industry and the capitalist market” and create art solely from communication technologies, as well as to construct an electronic alternative public space. In this informal communication space, images of global capitalism were critically reconsidered before the Lithuanian politicians began their official talk about the information or knowledge society (thanks to the project book’s guest contributors, theorists Susan Buck-Morss, Julian Stallabrass and Leonidas Donskis). The countries also exchanged artists – the participants’ physical trips and live discussions between London, Newcastle and Vilnius were an important part of the project.
Extended in time and space, the project, which encompassed a variety of meetings and temporary laboratories or displays in the UK and Lithuania, could also be considered a joyous celebration of technomodernism((Buck-Morss called the artists travelling between Lithuania and the UK flaneurs electroniques, who became diffused in cyberspace and ended up being “an allegory for the interactivity of the electronic media they deploy.”See Buck-Morss, Susan. 1997. “Art in the Age of Its Electronic Production”, in: Jablonskienė, Lolita et al. (eds.) Ground Control: Technology and Utopia. London: Black Dog Publishing. p. 34.)) today, although its participants themselves denounced the naïve optimism of informationalism. One could feel it in the peculiarly tautological vocabulary, however – according to Buck-Morss, in this project art was made “out of communication technologies in order to question the act of communication as such.”((Ibid., p. 38.)) According to the project’s organisers, “for most of its participants, Ground Control represents the beginning of an exploration into the unknown territories of the new technologies and new pan-European relationships. As such, the use of ephemeral media in this project has been for the primarily practical purposes of relaying information, rather than of creating polished multi-media artworks.”((“Valdymas iš Žemės: Menininkų Pranešimai iš Lietuvos ir Didžiosios Britanijos”, 1997, in: Jablonskienė, Lolita et al., ibid. 183.)) Most importantly, however, the project questioned the cultural exchange between Western and Eastern Europe in its discussion of the relationship of contemporary art and techno-utopias (denouncing the then-prominent “emphasis on educating the recalcitrant East in World Bank orthodoxy”((Preface, 1997, in: Jablonskienė, Lolita et al. ten pat, p. 7.))).
Despite its ambitions, the project was quite detached from our country’s state of affairs. As Urbonas later claimed, the intention at the time was to turn the Jutempus office in the “Iron Hook” building into a platform for new communications and experimental projects, and eventually set up something similar to a media lab. The project’s partner in the UK applied for funding from the European Union’s PHARE program. Unfortunately, the artists never received it (although the proposal passed two stages of selection and the only remaining step was to receive the approval of the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The post-Soviet Lithuanian government’s approval and confirmation that Lithuania “was ready to accept the funds” was obligatory, yet at the time our government was much more concerned with the need for new agricultural machines rather than “some computer technologies”.((From the author’s conversation with Gediminas Urbonas. November 25, 2014 (the author’s archive).)) In other words, the artists who were trying to symbolically surpass the post-Soviet period did not reach mutual understanding with the politicians, and the project supported by foreign institutions was implemented without the support (even moral) of our country’s authorities.((Although Lithuanian cultural policy strategies had been saying out loud that the global changes were inseparable from the development of information society networks and new communication technologies as early as in the mid-1990s, in reality it was only the Lisbon strategy implementation objectives, adopted in 2000 by the European Council, that actually sped up the connection of cultural policy and the lexicon of informationalism in Lithuania. The future development of Lithuanian culture was later determined in the light of these objectives.))
Critical questioning of the global order and the levers of power was also felt in the individual works, while some artists’ attitude and statements revealed comic misunderstandings. The project’s participant Artūras Raila, among others, emphasised the difference in the mentality of the representatives of post-Soviet Lithuania and the UK, even a completely different sense of humour. As the artist stated in June 1997, retrospectively reflecting on his experience in the foreign country, “London imposed very serious themes. For an hour we were yawning while listening to Buck-Morss, another hour while listening to Stallabrass, and kept thinking: when are they going to start joking? How am I supposed to behave if the general tone is so academic? I felt confused and started speaking seriously. It turned out to be a big mistake, because I really wanted to ask whether Brits were Americans.”((“„Ground Control“: Vilnius – Londonas (diskusija)”,7 Meno dienos, June 27, 1997, p. 9.)) This seemingly total geographical ignorance of a “naive” Eastern European came about as a response to the Londoners’ nearly articulated “absurd” question whether Lithuanians were Russians. Raila’s report from Sunderland University was also supposed to contain (yet eventually omitted publicly) an optimistic message, the irony of which, according to Raila, was insulting to the Brits: “People of Lithuania, I have discovered Britain! It turns out they are not Americans, they live on an island near France.”((Ibid.)) In other words, the artist mocked the primitive stereotypes, yet at the same time he was concerned about the deceptiveness of the “new quality” relationships. Preconceived notions, traditional images and possible misunderstandings were important in some of the other Ground Control artists’ projects (for instance, that of Valdas and Aida Ozarinskas) as well.
Miscommunication was also evident between the Lithuanian artists, who had enjoyed real (as opposed to virtual) trips to the UK, and the local press, which had not travelled anywhere. By the way, one must keep in mind that it was before the low-cost airline era (in other words, a trip to the UK was a costly pleasure to an ordinary Lithuanian cultural worker). As many of the works were ephemeral and existed only as concepts, the participants of the project sought to disseminate their original ideas and the insights from the trips between the two countries as widely as possible. The Internet space (where the creative reports were supposedly posted), too, did not yet function in the way it was said to be in the theoretical texts.((One should not forget that the “slow” Internet was not widely accessible. According to one of the project book’s authors, the British theorist Stallabrass, “even in a country like the United States, but more so in Britain and greatly so in Lithuania, <…> only people of some wealth have access to the Internet.” Stallabrass, Julian. 1997. “Money, Disembodied Art, and the Turning Test for Aesthetics”, in: Jablonskienė, Lolita et al., ibid., p. 79.)) Therefore, the local audience might not have seen much; nevertheless, it had a chance to hear the artists’ verbal explanations of how everything was to be understood in the Skliautai gallery. The musings of the Ground Control participants failed to meet the expectations of the supposed “viewers”; meanwhile, some of the artists decided that the local “hillbillies” were the only ones to blame for that.
During a meeting with the local cultural press, Raila was telling the story of a desperate and ultimately failed space hook-up attempt. Similarly, when the artists from different countries finally managed to hook up, like astronauts, according to Raila “it turned out that we had no questions for each other and had nothing to say to each other.”((“„Ground Control“: Vilnius – Londonas (diskusija)”, ibid., p. 8.)) The utopian nature of effective communication was also perfectly illustrated by a verse from David Bowie’s 1969 song Space Oddity((Allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.)), taken as the project’s motto. Bowie’s lyrics tell the story of the astronaut Major Tom, a fictional character who merrily goes to space in his spaceship and later leaves his capsule, following the instructions transmitted by the satellites. In the culmination, connection with the Earth is lost for unknown reasons, and the flight control operator can only keep desperately repeating the phrase “Can you hear me?!”, now a one-way signal. This allegory of a lost connection with an astronaut seems to be appropriate to describe some moments which “disturbed” the usual (post-)Cold War narrative.((Even during the 9/11 events it was not the Internet, but predominantly the television that broadcast and “constructed” the new geopolitical image of the world in real time. Here I would like to recall my personal experience of those evenets. As I was sitting in a cafe in Vilnius Old Town on a sunny afternoon, the TV set, with its volume constantly being turned up and down intermittently, disturbed my calm. The young waiters said it was some supposedly fictional yet “extremely odd” plot of a global conquest. The image on the screen alternated between the horrifying scenes of the WTC’s Twin Towers’ collapse and a well-known Lithuanian TV reporter, visibly scared and pressing his hand to his ear (as well as the microphone to his lips). His glitchy report said there had supposedly been nine (!) hijacked planes that had attacked the USA. It was only somewhat later that everything was explained more coherently, and we learned that it had been a real thing.))
One of the project book’s contributors, political philosopher, visual culture researcher and theorist of (post)-totalitarian visions Buck-Morss has talked about the ways in which the perception of the global order changed after the fall of socialism on numerous occasions. She described utopian dreamworlds and their demise in certain historical turning-points in her 2000 book Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. In the end of the book she mentions the intense international intellectual exchange that had been taking place between Russia and the Western world in the late Soviet years, and was discontinued when the Soviet Union collapsed. As the geopolitical situation was rapidly changing, the previously fairly clear perception of the world began to rupture as well.((For instance, after the January 13, 1991 tragedy took place in Vilnius, on January 16 the USA began bombing Baghdad (due to understandable (geo)political reasons). At that time, Buck-Morss was surprised to see that the reaction of the puzzled post-Soviet and American intellectuals to the images of the Vilnius repression and the Persian Gulf War they saw on TV was completely different. See Buck-Morsss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West . Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. pp. 245-247.)) The theorist also emphasises certain moments of miscommunication which followed the initial euphoria of the encounter, and imagines them as a certain “loss of innocence”, which happens when one realizes that one’s foreign counterpart may not necessarily rely on naïve images, but definitely sees all that is happening around somewhat differently.
One could also interpret the aforementioned asymmetry between the physically travelling Ground Control participants (comfortable in their flaneurs electroniques role) and the local cultural press, which was educated by the former yet never actually moved anywhere, as a new form of didactics. The know-how pathos of post-Soviet cultural exchange is begging for one more edification, indirectly provided by the USA billionaire George Soros, by far the most ardent protagonist of the open society, who was in particular esteem all over the Central and Eastern Europe region. In this case I am more concerned with the personal attitude of the patron of post-socialist countries’ culture, rather than with the visions promoted by the open society institutes. One of the founders and directors of the Open Society Fund Lithuania, Irena Veisaitė, often remembers a comic slap-in-the-face (which she calls precisely “a lesson Soros gave us”) that took place in 1995 during the opening of an exhibition of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Vilnius. According to Veisaitė, Soros “delivered a speech nobody understood. We thought he was speaking Hungarian. When the opening reception ended, I went out with Mr. Soros and apologised for not having had a translator from Hungarian. Soros smiled and told me he had been speaking in a made-up children’s language, I don’t remember exactly how he called it, rather that in Hungarian. I asked him what the point of speaking in a language nobody understood was. He replied: “Look, I don’t understand anything in this modern art, why should they understand what I am saying?”Then I asked him why he supported something he disliked so generously. He said: “Because I am a proponent of the open society. Modern art was banned in the Soviet times, so now we must give it a green light. After all, there are people who need it.”((“Apie Lietuvą ir pasaulį. Kalbasi Irena Veisaitė ir Kęstutis Nastopka”, in: bernardinai.lt. July 9, 2014.))
I propose to perceive this incident not just as a prank mocking the foreign guests who are always “lost in translation”, or as a memorable lesson in tolerance. Although Soros’ last sentences quoted by Veisaitė sound like obligatory anti-Soviet rhetoric, the patron’s statement is also a confession of limited human understanding. In other words, the billionaire pointed out the illusory nature of smooth “cultural translation”, and even denied the need for such translation. In their turn, as some relevant present-day debates in the Lithuanian art criticism field demonstrate, the various misunderstandings between artists and critics take place not because the ability to speak the same global art language is supposedly (still) lacking in Lithuania.((I would note a discussion in the online social networks that was triggered by Monika Krikštopaitytė’s and Dovilė Tumpytė’s articles about Deimantas Narkevčius in the 7 meno dienos weekly (of October 17 and October 31, 2014). In this discussion, one could feel a hint of the still lingering conviction that for some reason the local art criticism “still” fails to adopt the “universal” criteria of evaluating art that supposedly circulate in the globalised world.)) The unspoken conviction that only those who physically travel and actually see the “events”, and therefore have a better understanding of the contemporary art agenda, still very much exists in 2014. The image of a “completely open” international art system, declared by the Soros CCA and similar institutions, in many cases proved to be merely a “deceptive trick” (speaking of the professedly universal access to the fruits of cultural globalisation)((One could mention a statement made ten years after the Ground Control project by Lolita Jablonskienė, then head of the Lithuanian Art Museum’s Contemporary Art Information Centre, which perfectly illustrates the illusion of the “total openness of the art world”. In Jablonskienė’s view, the art market can be imagined only on the global level, because the artists have open possibilities to create their projects in the international context, while the audience in its turn has all possibilities to see the art processes in any country, as “cultural tourism turns even the people who live in the most remote places in Lithuania into visitors of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Tate Modern in London.” See: Trilupaitytė, Skaidra; Jablonskienė, Lolita. 2007. “Šiuolaikinio meno centro kontekstai Lietuvoje ir pasaulyje” (Conversation), in: Kuizinas, Kęstutis; Fomina, Julija (eds.) ŠMC/CAC 1992-2007. Vilnius: Contemporary Art Centre, pp. 20-22. Unfortunately, in reality the space of the international art market can be viewed as “completely open” to Lithuanian contemporary art only in rare cases.)), yet that is precisely why the aforementioned conviction remains relevant. Unlike in the 1990s, today it is difficult to imagine that there is a singular hypothetical “proper” career trajectory which leads towards an “ideal” art centre in the world of contemporary art. The relationship between the global and the local recognition factors cannot be easily forecast((It would perhaps make sense to speak not only about the changing and ambiguous local image of the “international art stars” (e. g. Narkevičius), but also about the new expatriates’ (the famous generation of Kęstutis Zapkus’ students) “comebacks” to the Lithuanian context, which are yet only anticipated. The artists’ choice of the place of residence is a different, albeit equally intriguing, issue.)), let alone rationally constructed. As the communication between different dreamworlds or even different segments of the same art world (artists, evaluators, patrons etc.) is failing, the illusion of glory that is “at one’s fingertips” pervades the creative imagination in most unexpected ways. Meanwhile, the communication itself is for some reason constantly accompanied by (slightly) excessive and, later, (slightly) failed expectations.
The text originally appears in the newly released „(In)dependent Contemporary Art Histories. Artist-run Initiatives in Lithuania 1987–2014. 2nd volume“—a compilation of stories about the genesis and evolution of contemporary art in Lithuania from the period of Revival (1987) and the restoration of Lithuania’s independence to this day. For more information see here.
Edited by Vytautas Michelkevičius & Kęstutis Šapoka, published by Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association, 2014.
