Concerned about the series of mega-exhibitions organized from the early 90s that tried to redefine the contemporary art of Europe according to its shifting borders and horizons, the curators of The Baltic Times, Branka Stipanèic & Tihomir Milovac, „definitely did not want to mount a show based on European cultural geography”, but decided to create a „meeting point”, or a „platform of sorts” connecting „similar professional and private experiences”.
The exhibition initially shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art – Zagreb in May 2001 travelled to the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana in September 2001. It presents a selection of artists and groups now active in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, most of whose carriers have developed during the 90s. Based on thorough research and a relatively objective approach, the exhibition tries to capture the diverse artistic production of the last 10 years of the Balticum, but manages only to highlight some significant phenomena and production. One can meet names and works that have already been part of prominent thematic shows and have been acknowledged by the international art world, and if I can paraphrase Anders Kreuger’s words taken from the quite puzzling email interview with Liutauras Psibilskis in the catalogue, the art we see is more about the „what” and the „where” , than about the „how” and the „why”. In fact, going through the show, the lack of a linking narative, theme, or concept is further confirmed, so that the only possible point of departure that we are left with is to rely on our own different perceptions and comprehensions.
>From the works reflecting the radically changed positions and strategies of artists and the notion of art in these states, the most successful are the ones communicating the basic parts of the process with a quasi-documentative character, attempting to keep a fragile balance between the subjective and the objective approaches. The bitter, and occasionally close to the absurd, video, The Girl is Innocent (1999) by Artüras Raila, is an unedited and fragmented account of an evaluation/discussion that took place in the fine art academy in Vilnius. The discussions and arguments clearly show the diverse character of the crisis that has emerged in art education after the liberation. The piece that was shown last year at Manifesta 3 presents a puzzling mixture of personal, political and aesthetical issues and judgments reflecting the frustration and confusion of a generation who lived through the Soviet regime, finally finding itself with nothing left to hold on to anymore.
In For Aesthetic Reason (1999), a video made by Marko Raat, the protagonist, a young architect-historian, Anders Kurg, expresses his wish to settle down in Denmark purely for aesthetic reasons. He loves Danish post-war Modernism and would like to live in a house designed by one of its most prominent architects, Arne Jacobsen, surrounded by the designs of Bang&Oluffsen. While we are guided through some of the significant Modernist buildings by Kurg, we parallelly follow his attempts to get in touch with city officials and the proper authorities to find a solution. The only practical advice given, and the only remaining possibility, is what the Lutheran pastor suggests with an apologetic smile hiding his uneasiness, to marry a Danish girl, since families are not taken apart. The film which „bursts upon the stale and stuffy Estonian documentary film scene”(Andres Maimik) is influenced by the filmmaking experience of Dogma 95.
Deimantas Narkevièius, whose recent films are said to capture the „fundamental themes of contemporary social discourse in Lithuania” (Jonas Valatkevicius), with his 16 mm film, 54° 54′ – 25° 19” (1997), is more to give a silent and a rather melancholic account of the rural and urban landscapes 20km from Vilnius. Largely deprived of people and action, we travel through a land which, albeit marked as a distinct geographical unit, still retains a certain time-and-space-lessness.
Technically and contentwise, these observing chronicles range from the seemingly unmanipulated to the indiscreet and the provocative, making manifest a range of contradictions and existential struggles of this geopolitical-cultural context.
Introduced as one of the most crucial issues in the Baltic republics in the 90s is the conversion of the influences of the socio- political enviroments and the outcome of the changes (in the way identity is reflected, in the relation between artist and institution, in female representation – just to mention the most significant phenomena) into an approporiate visualization. A rising number of projects were more to be based on collaboration and communication, like the works of ATG (Academic Training Group) formed in 1992 in Lithuania, or the joint project the Riga Dating Agency (1999) of Monika Pormale and Girts Gabrâns.
Ly Lestberg deals with the issues of sexual identity in her photograhic works: both in the series of Insomnia (1999) with its life-sized studio photos, and What do you read My Lord? (1999/2000) with its fairytale-like coloured images depicting the conflicting relationship between biological identity and spiritual interpretation.
Eglë Rakauskaitë’s Chocolate Crucifixies (1994-2000) and an early series of photographs, Hairy (1994), her personal and intimate references to body experiences, are more of a mix of religious, cultural, aesthetic and sensual apearances hidden behind the temporality of organic materials.
There are more autobiographical works to act out existential anxieties on a more distanced level ranging from parody to poetics, like Kai Kajlo’s first, and still most well-known, video Loser (1997), or the magic piece, Father and Son (1998), of Jan Toomik. A certain similarity can be traced in the bare visual appearance and pictorial language between his more recent work He Said (2000), showing a man under some influence speaking to us in a distorted voice, and Ene-Liis Semper’s Fundamental (1997), where the artist with bleary eyes and smudgy make-up recites lines from the Bible in a drunken, semi-conscious state.
Even if the objective was to make the various levels of consciousness interact, The Baltic Times, although intelligently executed, failed in creating a platform and remained a safe overview set in a geographic framework. It is flexible and (inter)changeable in meaning, easily adaptable to the different spaces it travels to, reinforcing the stereotypical view of the Balticum as an „imagined community”.
The Baltic Times will be on view at the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck in April, 2002.