Photograph by Povilas Dumbliauskas, personal archive, 2012
“Spaces – are a karaoke of many mouths: words, with which paths are drawn, flow through the pipelines to a common circulation“ – says the official description of a contemporary art exhibition “Tap Water“ (Russian Drama Theatre of Lithuania, Vilnius, 09/02/2015 – 09/17), curated by Audrius Pocius. It aims to explore the connection between language and space, folkloric geography and linguistic communities of the theatre. The usual intellectual grandeur of contemporary art. The exhibition declares to be an inquiry on how common language relates to the construction of our shared space, which indicates that its theoretical problematic is essentially relational. However, I claim, that the show did not carry out its mission, and not because of external reasons, meaning, that it failed but could have succeeded, say, if the concepts were more fleshed out or the work – more relevant, but because of its internal structure and practices, under which failure of such an endeavor is not only immanent, but also appears as a success of high culture.
The aim of this text is not to address the aesthetic or theoretical qualities of the artwork presented, which would result in abstract analyses, where the authors can always dispute the claim to knowledge by simply pointing out that one did not get it. Here I will not deal with art as such and its ideas – as I deem them to be of secondary importance. I will focus mainly on the relational qualities of the exhibition, on what was promised – its relationship with the space and its community in the construction of the so called folkloric geography to draw out and pin point the cultural practice of psycho-colonialism.
The official show description opens up wih a quote by Gaston Bachelard: “The stream doesn’t have to be ours; the water doesn’t have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring”. It may be fruitful to clarify that the stream of which Bachelard talks here (quote taken from Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter) is the stream of the river. This quote juxtaposed with the rest of the description, which is dominated by the image of pipes, cannot but generate a striking contrast, a contradiction even, which, as I will argue, permeates the artistic practice of the exhibition itself. Thus it is important to explore the exhibition’s usage of the metaphorics of water in relation with its practice.
The title, Tap VVater, invites to a wide array of rather amusing readings. The image of having a glass of tap water can be seen as an examplary case of the zero level of consumerism: indeed, the everyday household owner, washing his dishes or brushing his teeth, has little, if any, understanding of the intricate plumbing structures, spanning thoughout the city, underground, connecting to the main privatised water source, and distributing it. Furthermore a tap is a mechanism of control. To have tap water means to be able to control the flow by sheer desire. Thus the consumer is only concerned with the consumption and with the ability to control the free flow of water – a supposed power over water; a thought of an unstopable surge of water from damaged pipes or the overflowing toilet, when water breaks out of the confinements of human organisation, sends a shiver down our spines – truly a domestic nightmare. Consequently, in a world where 750 million people have no access to clean drinking water, the invitation to have a glass of tap water cannot but conjure up a privileged position. Privileged not only on the side of consumption but more importantly, on the side of orginisation – in other words, the privatisation of the source by the ownership of the means of its extraction – the privilege to tap it.
The dialectics of space (mis)perceived as the opposition between inside and outside disregards the uncanny third space sustaining the dichotomy: a space in between spaces, a space filled with pipes and electric wires, a secrect world of infrastructure outside of our phenomenal experience. What I want to argue here is that this invisible third space is also at work in the production of art, that is to say, in the production of meaning. After all the institutional infrastructure of contemporary art is exactly such a phenomenologically invisible network of privilege, privatisation and distribution. Whoever controls the means of the production and distribution of meaning, controls also the sources, the circulation, and the relations,
“Tap VVater“ is an examplary case of such a practice of contemporary art. The cartographically inexhaustible folkloric space explicated in the conceptual side of the exhibition obfuscates the fact that the space effectively becomes colonised – cartographised – by the artwork scattered around the building, serving as map legends, showing us what we should pay attention to and what is allegedly important. Apparently, the organizers thought this was not enough to control the production of meaning, so the audience also had to be guided in a form of an excursion, or perhaps the connection of the artwork with the “folkloric space“ was so thin, that it had to be reinscribed again and again by the main „mouth“ of Audrius Pocius, the curator of this “karaoke“. Thus the audience was guided from artwork to artwork, in a way reminding us of an educational tour or of the children‘s game „connect the dots“, where the dots and the results are pre-given and one needs just to connect the dots in the intended right way. To put it succintly, the audience were following the pipelines laid out by the owners of the streams from which, to quote Bachelard again, “memory issues“. A show about walking, was in fact a show about following. Here we can easily discern that mapping, the conceptual representation of space, has material effects. Its aim is to conceptualize a space and impose (violently or as a sign of good will, as education or “science“) a mental map on the psyche of a living community, that is, to impose the way they relate to their space, experiences and memory by offering them conceptual tools, standardised language or, as is the case here, art. In short, its purpose is psycho-colonialist expansion, whose objective – to build an infrastructure of meaning in the hands of the institutions to extract resources for art making, ignoring and denying annonymous and autonomous self-given meaning
The real experience of a working class person, who dwells in the corridors of the theater in her/his everyday life, whose hard work, complex life and daily experience effectively sustains the old, and gives the space new meaning, should at the very least be taken into consideration and demands respect, not marginalization.
The running joke of the show, mentioned by Pocius, is the personnel of the theatre rearranging some of the artwork: throwing out posters, changing the exposition; allegedly a janitor (or some other theater worker) even put the evacuation plan of the building on top of one artwork. Perhaps amusing to the cultivated comfortably-off, but it is far from being a laughing matter (as portrayed by the curator). It created a situation in which the building actually became part of the exhibition, not just an exploited space: here for a brief moment a glimpse of a possibily for the exhibition to reflect upon itself appeared; sadly it was ignored. I would not exaggerate in pointing out that this particular incident is a lot more interesting and meaninful than all of the artworks of the show combined, if what we are truly interested in is the relationship between language and space. The real experience of a working class person, who dwells in the corridors of the theater in her/his everyday life, whose hard work, complex life and daily experience effectively sustains the old, and gives the space new meaning, should at the very least be taken into consideration and demands respect, not marginalization. The exhibition proclaims that “spaces – are a karaoke of many mouths“, yet some voices were silenced from the very beginning – as the construction of meaning was privileged to the “mouths“ of institutional artists. Not to mention that “karaoke“ by definition is a repetition of established forms. This act of the janitor is a small leak in the controlled circulation, which reminds us what an autonomous flow is. This is not an idealization of the masses, for the janitor did nothing revolutionary per se, nothing pretentiously radical, she/he just managed to unintentionally break out of the mystification of art by simply relying of the mundane pointing us to the processes behind it, to the inherent privilege and exclusion, to those left out of the production of this “folkloric geography“. Besides, it raises quite a serious question: what is more relevant – art or an evacuation plan – for the building and those in it?
Instead of the promised “investigation into the folkloric geography and linguistic communities“, we got an ethnocentric streamlined construction of meaning imposed on the building and its community from outside.
The effective practices of “Tap VVater“ betray the exhibitions intellectual pretense: the implied liquidity, processuality, the Heraclitean motif of panta rhei – the free unstopable flow, mutability and change – is undermined by the streamlined, or perhaps much more fittingly, pipelined, format and the process of the exploitation of experiences and the construction of meaning being given as an artwork to consume with a name of the artist attached somewhere nearby, perpetuating the romantic (and colonialist) role of the artist, who, above everyday life experiences, patronizingly draws our attention to things by giving them meaning. In such an organisation the community, from which the artist draws the experience to be modified in the production of art, is nothing more than an inert material. A material to be manipulated and exploited by force if need be to get the desired result. Namely by establishing rigid forms on the common shared experiences and memory to capitalise from them. This is where the benignant intellectualism of the exhibition falls short: instead of the promised “investigation into the folkloric geography and linguistic communities“, we got an ethnocentric streamlined construction of meaning imposed on the building and its community from outside.
No wonder then that the masses distrust contemporary art, and why shouldn’t they? It is definitely not for them. “Tap VVater“ with all its conceptual shortcomings and contradictory practice umambigiously embeds this. And this is not a problem of the “education of the masses“ that cultural colonists like to evoke, for the masses also have knowledge, albeit a different kind of knowledge. Perhaps, janitors have no knowledge of what is art, but they surely know garbage when they see it.
