Artist Tomas Martišauskis invites to a point with specific coordinates in the pinewood in the locality of Šventoji (Lithuania), where he presents the site-specific installation Appropriate, which can be viewed live until the lime mixture naturally washes off the tree trunks.
The horizon might well be one of the few elements of the environment that hasn’t changed over the ages. Just as inspiring and banal, it was observed millennia ago and still is today. The horizon line shaped the concepts of time and space, helped sailors estimate the ships’ locations, and continues to be the metaphor for travel destinations and ambitions. Precisely this silent and mute distant horizontal is claimed to have enabled the domination of the West and its concepts, and to have served as the instrument of colonial conquests. Having entrenched objective standpoints, the horizon introduced mathematical prognostics and the illusion of stability, becoming a hostage of the truth it so confidently proclaimed. No matter how constant the horizon could be or appear, though, its stability depends on the observer and the base they stand on. Today the status of this dominant visual paradigm is changing. The horizon line quivers because of contested outdated ideas, it is cut by the rattling, constantly shaped landscape, while the status of the human looking into the distance as the centre of the world depreciates.
Taking into account these shifting orientational states and evaluations of stability, the artist Tomas Martišauskis approaches the horizon as a kind of portable and assemblable material. In his site-specific installation Appropriate, the artist offers a look at the usually inaccessible open or even infinite-panoramic horizon. Having painted more than 150 pine trunks with lime mixture in a replanted storm-affected pinewood in the locality of Šventoji, Martišauskis has created a territory of nearly a hundred metres in diameter, in the middle of which the viewer can stand in a marked spot and see the painted areas of the trees blend into a continuous horizon line. Based on the anamorphic (from Greek anamorphōsis, “transformation”) composition principle, the installation functions as an optical illusion constructed using a rotary laser level. Such spatial categories as proximity and distance temporarily coalesce here, making the visible image flat, the surface fictional, and the world a poetic puzzle.
Raising the artificial horizon line to the eye level of an average human height, the artist turns the installation into a kind of fata morgana, an optical phenomenon that makes distant objects appear suspended in the air due to specific light refraction. Finally, to see this deceptive sight, the viewer must stand in a predetermined precise position. Although invited to the very centre of the installation, the observer is in a certain sense ‘imprisoned’ in it, their individuality and the freedom of alternative observation choice is appropriated. This shade of meaning complements the multifaceted title of the work, Appropriate, which can be both a verb and an adjective.
Critically reflecting on the problem of territory appropriation, the artist uses subtle marking to expose the human interference into and desire to ‘arrange’ and construct the environment that may not even be our property. The artist applies the trunk bleaching procedure, usually employed for garden fruit trees, to forest pines, thus upsetting the order between ‘domesticated’ and ‘wild’, garden and forest trees, the ‘owned’ and the ‘appropriated’. With this gesture, used in gardening to protect the tree bark from pests and other harmful factors, Martišauskis proposes a slightly different semantics of forest tree marking, dissociated from logging meanings and at least in this case capable of acting as a protection of observing pines from a distance.
The artist has recreated this project after fifteen years. The first version of the work was presented at the International Thomas Mann Festival in Nida in 2008. Due to environmental protection requirements, the visually somewhat different installation was displayed only for several days. The new version can be viewed live until the lime mixture naturally washes off the tree trunks, or online.
The installation complements the artist’s ongoing research on the contemporary art landscape, testing the non-institutional model of displaying work. One of his previous exhibitions based on this principle and accessible only as photographic documentation published in the online contemporary art magazine Artnews.lt was the Islands project, realized in collaboration with the photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
