About Lions, Things and their Meeting Places. A conversation with Ona Juciūtė

Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė (AMS): I arrived at your ‘Every Dog is a Lion’ exhibition in the Editorial space after the documentation had already gone round, and so with preconceived thoughts and curiosity. I don’t know where my thoughts were when I was looking at the photographs of the show, but maybe because of the tricky composition or the angle it was shot from, those two shapes on the wall, the bones that protect the bone marrow, appeared to me like two rolls of toilet paper with a vanilla necklace. I smiled, bearing in mind your sense of humour: it could have been an inventive way to fill your home with nature. On the other hand, keeping a close eye on current events, you introduce the exhibition with the fact that vanilla is currently more valuable than silver. It seems this could just as well be applied to the roll-version these days, against the background of the terrified shoppers sweeping the shelves in stores.

I would like to start with this exhibition. Can you tell us the story of the origin of the title ‘Every Dog is a Lion’?

Ona Juciūtė (OJ): The title comes from the saying ‘Every dog is a lion at home.’ It is quite popular in the West. Orientals have their own version: ‘Every dog is a tiger on his own street.’ Unfortunately, we don’t have it in Lithuanian. I wonder what it might be. Maybe: ‘Every dog is an elk in its own forest’? On a more serious note, I’m quite interested in folk wisdom, in all those supposedly unshakeable expressions. I remember very clearly our first lecture on academic writing. We were told that we should always indicate the source of every statement: the author, publication, etc, unless we say something self-evident. As an example of such a statement, ‘The sky is blue’ was suggested. It’s interesting that one of the most chameleonic phenomena in nature has become an example of stable colour, even self-evident. This story probably illustrates very well my relationship with proverbs and sayings. The same thing happened with ‘Every Dog …’ The meaning seems obvious: courage is determined by the environment. But at the same time, in the very formulation of the sentence, an awareness of the human’s gaze at nature is heard. When I found this proverb, I wanted to stress it even more, by changing it slightly. By removing the ‘at home’ bit, I turned it into a rather absurd sentence: ‘Every dog is a lion.’ No dog is a lion. A lion may be a cat, but it is also a way of classifying animals invented by humans, turning them into species. In this saying, lions and dogs cease to be animals, and become cartoon characters that can only be seen through a human lens.

Since one of the main thematic threads of the exhibition was the hierarchy of materials, I thought this title would serve as a good introduction. And about the parallel with toilet paper: I haven’t noticed it myself, but a lot of people have told me exactly the same thing. I didn’t tell them anything then, but I’ll tell you now: my dog’s two favourite toys are the bone that hugs the bone marrow, and toilet paper rolls. Just a resemblance that ignores differences between species.

AMS: Every dog is a snake in its river? Be that as it may, I like to read your exhibition titles as warning signs, hung on the door handles of strange rooms. Kittens! Heads and Tails! Every Dog is a Lion! At this point, I’m interested in the ability of things to speak for themselves. It seems self-evident: things are silent, and we hardly want a drawer that screams out our secrets. So we know a great way to mute: we tie the tongues of things by explaining them with our demystifying words. Arriving from the most different contexts, things seem to forget where they came from; yet they are still followed by the ghosts of former spaces. I wonder how it is with art? Does an object that speaks for itself become a work of art? Dust settles on your hardwood shelves in the Editorial space. A spider settles in the top corner (we met!). The sun changes the colour of a walnut gradually, vanilla loses its sweet scent. Do you think the piece then changes or creates itself? Or is it the same ‘blue-sky’ question after all? You seem to know various spells and eye-catching techniques.

OJ: I liked the remark from one visitor to ‘Every Dog is a Lion’. They said that, paradoxically, the most stable thing in this show seems to be the moving image. The metal sways, the wood is as thin as paper, the bread is mouldy and crumbling, the vanilla is losing its smell as it dries, and so on. I don’t know if the exhibition was created because of this, but the stability of the materials in general makes me wonder. Wood, let’s say, even when turned into furniture, floors and doors, is semi-living, like a zombie. It moves, it expands, it squeaks. In his film Slow Glass, John Smith wonders how we really know that glass, which was once liquid, is now completely frozen? Maybe it’s moving, just, but it’s impossible to see with the naked eye. These ideas were important to me when preparing the show.

I’m glad you met the spider. The exhibition was popular with insects, beetles and arthropods. The spider you met settled there just after the shelf was hung, and almost did not move during the whole exhibition. I was waiting for it to spin a cobweb, but the house I had built seemed to be just right for it. I took that as a compliment.

I don’t think things can speak for themselves, or speak in general. Words and sentences have a beginning, an end, and different trajectories. But in the background of such stories, objects seem to be thoughtful, humble or shy, not trying to break through and prove something. That’s why I’m drawn to them: for a certain freedom of vision. It’s up to you how long, or from what angle, you want to see them. If you choose not to look, you’ve still at least caught a glimpse. They don’t have any preconceived duration, unlike video or sound works; and being an impatient person, I’m always grateful to them for that. It may sound strange, but those static appearances of theirs somehow make me free to behave as I wish. And that does not apply only to objects found in exhibitions.

AMS: While reading your answer, I remembered how your conversations with Victoria Damerell often mentioned Clarice Lispector’s paragraph from A Breath of Life, in which she meditates about a chair with incredible attentiveness: ‘The armchair is mute, it’s fat, it’s cosy. It greets every backside like any other. It’s a mother.’ It seems this thought takes a seat beside your work. You say objects free you to behave as you wish, as if letting you go. For me, it’s the opposite: with their loneliness and silent presence, things grasp my mind so strongly that they pull me by the tip of my tongue or by my fingers. Not necessarily to talk to them or touch them; the desire to fall into their embrace is enough, for I think we have a lot in common. ‘To be alone is a state of being. I learned this from things. It’s obvious. It’s clear that things tend to be alone. But a living-room set is so lonely!’^{[1] [1]} 

In the Swallow project space, which opened its doors for the first time this year, you exhibited Bruno Mathsson’s Pernilla chair, and called it Weekends. Only thoughts and dust could settle on it: so fragile! It is curious that in English the word ‘armchair’ also means ‘impractical’: something that lacks specificity, and is difficult to use. What thoughts of yours swung in it?

OJ: If you visited Swallow’s debut show ‘Palydos’, you might also have seen a video screen hanging just above the red Pernilla chair. Everything started from that. On the screen, I showed the windy silk material I found on YouTube. These are ten short videos with very similar choreography, in which we see an author filming his torso, caressed by silk waves fluttering in the wind on a high hill, in a geographical area quite foreign to our eyes. I was genuinely surprised that the video was both very subtle and special, and at the same time so rough and careless. On one hand, it is silk in the wind; on the other, a dusty car glass, a carelessly dropped phone, and so on. I was surprised, and laughed at such a cowboy solo act: one person, a car, nature. And he films himself in fluttering multicoloured silk shirts. Ten different tops in his collection have this anonymous person. I call him ‘anonymous’, because we don’t see his face, only his back, torso, hands, and a part of his bottom. This carefreeness next to the silk shirt is brilliant: the material itself and its behaviour in nature become the main character. As if nothing else matters for a wind and silk combo. In this situation, I find the relationship between human and natural phenomena interesting. There seem to be quite a lot of tools needed to experience the wind: transporting your body further from the city by car, putting on a shirt, filming it with your phone, and so on. The other hero of this work, Bruno Mathsson, was one of the most famous furniture designers in Sweden, who came from a wooded rural area himself, and based his designs on a relationship with nature. While creating Pernilla and other furniture in that series, he experimented with another element, snow. Through it, he tried to understand his body better; for example, by sitting on snow and exploring the imprint of his buttocks, he was looking for the ideal shape to sit on. It’s strange, it wasn’t he who invented the memory foam. Or maybe it is not at all strange, because sitting in a Pernilla chair has a feeling of discomfort: am I really comfortable; or maybe the chair is already too close to repeating the inclines of my body, it feels as if someone is trying to make a copy of my shape. The wind behaves the same with silk. I wanted these two men to meet in one piece, which I called Weekends. The name is as ambiguous as our relationship with nature. On one hand, weekends are the time of our freedom; on the other, the principle of the week itself has no primary equivalent, it is something our civilisation created. Weekends as a reward for the week’s work. By changing the dark brown pernilla leather to red multiple-shaded silk, I wanted to take the solidity of a good interior out of it, to turn it into flesh, a piece of meat, or a ring. To Paulius Andriuškevičius (he wrote the review), the chair reminded him of a mouth without teeth, but with two tongues.

While I didn’t refer to Clarice Lispector directly in this piece, it’s nice that you mentioned her; it seems she could offer an interesting trajectory for reading this piece. Clarice probably knows how to turn the everyday environment into a brutal primordial situation like no other. The scenes she creates, at first glance so simple and so casual, even boringly domestic, in some elusive way turn into a completely unfamiliar dive deep down to the very roots of our nature. And even when doing so, she manages to retain a light, or even humourous, tone.

In a broad sense, Weekends is about freedom, and the trajectories within which that freedom can move. Objects become the main characters in the work, but only in relation to humans. They are like antagonists, tempting us to get to know nature, the wind, or our own bodies, while simultaneously losing us at the very moment we start to believe in such an opportunity.

AMS: You often talk about exhibitions as a magical place, or a second-hand clothes shop, where things meet for new combinations. You are an excellent context designer, able to link the most distinct finds in one surprise. Since you not only create but also curate exhibitions, with your friend Viktorija, you go on curatorial trips to foreign and Lithuanian art schools. I’m curious to know whether you have a favourite place you hurry to most often for the new selection. Are the stories, pains and jokes of young artists that you hear in Frankfurt, for example, any different to those in Vilnius?

OJ: I don’t think I can sum up the stories from Vilnius or Frankfurt, or from any other art school, even though we have heard a lot of them. We have met a lot of people. But the very context and the mood of the reviews in some foreign art schools differs from Vilnius, as much as day differs from night. What I miss in Vilnius is the liveliness and the variety of the exhibitions, the active audiences, and the young artists with a positive attitude, unashamed of their work. In its turn, Vilnius could teach something about slowing down, space and listening.

I always rush to Art Viewer in search of artistic sympathies; but today it is especially fun to prove the existence of the outside world. Talking about other strange meeting places, I live near the Halė Market, and there are individual traders at the entrance to the Maxima supermarket there who sell produce from their gardens, and there is always a man at the end of the line. He brings a few things, different things, every day. The combinations of these items are often extremely unexpected, you couldn’t come up with them on purpose. I have a theory that he finds them after they have been thrown away, and tries to find new homes for these orphans by selling them for a couple of euros. When I walk my dog in the mornings, I often hurry to visit him. Like daily changing pop-up galleries, or a Vilnius newsletter, what we no longer need today.

^{[1] [2]} Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life, New Directions, 2012.