Until an artwork gets to its usual environment, as visitors of exhibition might naturally think – to an exposition hall, an author has to attend a lot of organizational issues, which eventually are left behind the scenes. What if the organisational process itself would become an artwork? Inspired by this idea the artist Bronė Neverdauskienė presents her artwork “Trip” in the contemporary art project „What is missing“ (curator Julija Čistiakova), which is held in Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre, 11 10 2013 – 10 11 2013.
The way how her work will look like among other items of display might surprise even the artist herself.
An item that for two months was virtually connecting the artist, drivers of logistic company DSV and embroiderers, designers and curators involved in the project, will not be displayed at the exhibition. However, this very item is a converging point of the project and “a traveller” that was staying for a while in Spain, France, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Denmark, Finland and the Great Britain in August-October; a diagram of its trips visually resembles a flower.
This item is an empty packaging box, which was carried along the designated routes to-and-fro the places of destination by the project partner – logistic company DSV from Vilnius. Its trip – such as it is imagined, without any hints from the project author or contacts with people involved into transportation of the box – is being embroidered by eight embroiderers, both women and men.
These people have never met the artist, do not know her personally, and, most likely, will never meet her.
The exhibits will include accompanying documents of the trip (waybills, shipping documentation) and embroidery. The idea of embroidery was inspired by so called Bayeux tapestry (tapisserie), which according to historical sources was made around 1070 and depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England.
According to B. Neverdauskienė, creative process of the „Trip” reminds her of peculiarities of work in a bureaucratic system, which served as the source of inspiration for the idea.
„It’s a usual practice in the system that knowledge of one member about others is limited only to the scope necessary for performance of a certain function. In this project, identical situation was created – the artist does not know what is being embroidered; drivers do not know why they are transporting an empty box; embroiderers only know that they have to embroider the trip of the box along the designated route; people who made the box knew that it was empty and would be carried around Europe; designers who created the project logo did not know its purpose. I present the final result to the exhibition curators – an exhibition in the exhibition“ – said the artist.
According to art critic Ignas Kazakevičius, the essence of „artwork“ or „box“ in this project is comparable to the essence of exposition space – venue of all art processes and accompanying institutional-bureaucratic processes. And these very processes turn into an artwork.
As the art critic says, an empty box-mediator allows, in paradoxical way, to maintain purity and elitism of the artistic idea: „Usually, public presentation of an artwork requires a lot of arrangements: coordination of exhibition time and venue, flight and hotel booking, cancelling, transfers, publishing, photo session, changes to contents or composition of the display… Each of these stages involves various concessions, striving for a compromise, until ultimately an artist’s idea is embodied into real-life „format“ – as if it should fit into an imaginary box. Having replaced an imaginary artwork by its packaging, the artist can stay aside from the process, and is not forced to adapt and idea to harsh reality.“
