Danutė Gambickaitė, Art Critic and Curator This article was published in “Lithuanian Art 2012” catalog for Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius
The morning after the exhibition opening Have you ever been awake for so long that you could watch the rising sun in the morning and fall asleep when it was already up, having shed light on everything that had been hiding in the twilight of the movie (or the play) of the night, behind the thick curtain of darkness? Of course it is likely that you have, at least a few times, which means that you were able to dream the whole movie, all of the scripts intended for that evening while being awake, with your eyes open. It makes no difference whatsoever if this strange intoxicated state was induced by four whole coffee beans from the strange screenplay titled The Night Before the Exhibition Opening. In any case, it is at night more than at any other time that you can meet, in a cinematic dream, the 1960s’ evil spirit, Viy, the same one you meet in the famous eponymous Soviet horror movie. The peacocks sing at dawn, and all the cinematic ghosts (the forgotten, prematurely deceased, unrealized, imaginary, confused, mythical, rejected scripts that dare to lift Viy‘s eyelids) hide from daylight. The morning has come, but it is all too late to change anything, Viy‘s eyes are wide open, and he follows the rules of the mentioned screenplay and Ukrainian folklore, seeing right through all of the charms and magical shields – salt circles, monks’ habits and prayerbooks with scripts one has already come to believe, halogen comets and hermaphrodite voices emanating from record players. There is a similar atmosphere or situation in the screenplay and/or cinematic dream that Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda have dreamt up and proposed for the exhibition, in which, like in any regular dream, various things that have been consciously or subconsciously seen, heard, sensed, smelled, remembered, read etc. intertwine. The cinematic spectre one encounters in the exhibition’s dream is very similar to the cadaver or phantom hiding in the depth of the image, unseen to the naked eye, described by the culture critic Jurij Dobriakov in his text Playing Hide-and-Seek with the Cadaver. “This is the reality that lies beyond the photographic image, something that never fully belongs to it and never appears in an obvious form, but permeates the entire image with its invisible presence.”1 If you have succeeded in dreaming the whole movie, all of the cinematic ghosts offered for that evening with your eyes open, it is likely that you have encountered the piercing gaze of Viy, who is watching you. Now it depends only on you what you will be like when you wake up (if you do), but first let’s go back to the night before and dive into the dream scenario slowly. 1
Jurij Dobriakov, “Žaidžiant slėpynes su lavonu”, Artnews.lt, 2012-05-23, online access: http://www.artnews.lt/zaidziant-slepynes-su-lavonu-15541 [accessed on July 9, 2012]
On the eve of something, anticipation and hopes come to haunt one, thus this time is always filled with an air of now more than ever (which becomes particularly thick on the nights before exhibition openings), even if cinematic spectres are about to meet. Every time this phrase sounds as if it has the potential for an ever greater present, as if it marks some ever more special/appropriate moment. In any case, it is an unsettling saying, after which one feels a sudden need to do something, but what exactly? Well, for example, buy the first pair of sunglasses, as did the protagonist of Neringa and Ugnius’ film, an actor who remembers this experience and, most importantly, the environment of this experience now more than ever each time as the film loops. On the other hand, Now More Than Ever never gives any direct answers and promises nothing. Therefore, every time (or so far, as we have finally discovered the Higgs boson), all of the now more than evers ever uttered are equally empty, unfulfilled, unresolved. To tell the truth, they will never be fulfilled – they represent pure potential (and nothing more), a storage medium for an atmosphere of expectations, hope, intentions and speculation, or maybe a probable script (since we are speaking about cinema), which likes being solved but not resolved. Thus, we must try and come to believe that it does not matter to us at all that this possibility exists only in order to demonstrate its probable nature and open the horizon (horizontality) of the undulation of probability emptiness. The only medicine against such belief is light self-irony and doubt. It can easily be found in Neringa and Ugnius’ exhibition itself, especially in the already discussed title. “Now More Than Ever” was the slogan that flashed in the election posters and speeches of the U.S. President Richard Nixon, who introduced this phrase into the political discourse in the last century. Re-elected into his second presidential term in 1972, Nixon was preparing for a visit to the Soviet Union, and suddenly Romas Kalanta immolated himself in the Kaunas’ town garden, as if by accident. In Neringa and Ugnius’ exhibition, this seemingly accidental coincidence (among other things) appears as (slightly paraphrasing Dobriakov) the reality that lies beyond the cinematic image, something that never fully belongs to it and never appears in an obvious form, but permeates the entire image with its invisible presence. In 1972, Nixon’s script titled Now More Than Ever demonstrated its probable nature, but never came true, because probabilities never promise anything, but what is the situation with Kalanta? Perhaps Kalanta’s script was also a probability (potentiality), which began with the following condition: “If there is fire <…>, it follows that <…>”. Perhaps Kalanta had enough time to see Viy’s wide open eyes, or maybe he himself looked through those eyes at all of the cinematic spectres of scripts created every second. And, having been turned (at least symbolically) into ashes (by the look), he resurrects each time in a different, equally dream and real, scenario, in an ever different roost of history. An actor who continually confuses the acted and dreamed script with the one that is dreamed with eyes open, experienced through one’s eyes, fingers, lips, lungs, legs, etc. While those instants of confused real and created scripts are very ghostly, they are exceptionally pervasive in their presence.
The soundtrack of Reflection Wood Chronicles, recorded during a closed screening of the film with seven participants, if I remember correctly (the authors, a soloist, and listeners), and woven into the garland of heterotopia and heterochrony, is pervasive in this way as well. Now we hear in this part from Henry Purcell’s Music for a While (1692), sung by Viktor Gerasimov, that something which never fully belongs to the visible image and the acted-out script, we hear our inaudible breathing and feel our invisible presence. The actor from Now More Than Ever, who is watching slides with images captured after Kalanta’s self-immolation, must have felt something similar. Saying the memorized text and seeing his own imaginary presence in every slide, envisaging the image of his face in the crowd, hidden from the camera lens behind a vinyl record he has just bought. As soon as the record player’s stylus touches the groove cut in the vinyl disc, we come back to life and wander in the reflection wood together with the hatted girl and her dog like invisible breaths, like reflections. Yes, we too are woven into and imprisoned in this chronicle’s heterotopia and heterochrony. For a moment, it feels like Viy’s gaze is not Viy’s at all but mine. I imagine it so vividly that I believe I see my own face, burnt by perishing frost and wind, in one of the reflections, and hear the thoughts I had on the day of recording and imprisonment in the androgynous timbre of the soloist’s voice. I remember clearly (or imagine that I remember, although this is not that important) that at that time they were travelling somewhere in Andrei Tarkovsky’s mother’s face from his film The Mirror, wicker chairs in the fire from The Sacrifice, and the aliens’ city from Andrzej Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe. Following these thoughts – more precisely, the last one, about the aliens’ city, – I spot Neringa and Ugnius’ video installation In the Highest Point. I recall the motif of the city as an apocalypse that had become widespread on the eve of Y2K. I first read about it in some text by the philosopher Nerijus Milerius. Now more than ever (as ironic and cliché as it may sound), in 2012, as the same apocalypse motif is spreading, I think about the monuments to space conquest – the Karoliniškės kindergarten in Vilnius, the stores Kometa (Comet) and Vaivorykštė (Rainbow), etc. Although I never visited the latter in the high point of their activity, I only see their carcasses, stuck in 2012, and witness how the “residents moving in the trajectories of their daily activities become actors in films based on still unproduced or rejected scripts, children playing in the sand turn into doubles of the colonizers’ offspring playing in unfamiliar cosmic landscapes, and a bar waitress becomes a stewardess of an intergalactic ship”2, a vision suggested by Ugnius and Neringa. The idyll of a cinematic space odyssey, frozen childishness and naivety – the kind that can be seen only in the eyes of the female extraterrestrial in Richard Viktorov’s 1982 Soviet sci-fi movie Per Aspera Ad Astra (Через тернии к звездам). Now it has faded; only meagre sighs of the past idyllic utopia remain. Speaking of the apocalypse, the cinematic space conquest always entails such forebodings, while each predicted end of the world is always “now more than ever”. Apocalyptic stage sets for invisible yet existing dreams, visions, fragments of seen realized screenplays, which surface in 2
Ugnius Gelguda, Neringa Černiauskaitė, Dabar labiau nei bet kada / Now More Than Ever, Vilnius: Contemporary Art Centre, Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association, 2012, p. 20.
this exhibition in the shape of cinematic ghosts. More than anything, the ghostly kindergarten playground resembles the aliens’ caves from Rene Laloux’s animated film La Planète Sauvage, in which the aliens’ children play with their pets – humans. The highest (in the physical sense) point of the space odyssey and cinematic utopia that unfolds in the exhibition is the capsule of the TV tower. Slowly turning around its axis, we watch the apartment blocks’ stars, the only kind we’ve managed to conquer. The carcasses of such spaces as the mentioned kindergarten playground become the stage sets of unrealized and rejected scripts, heralds of cinematic apocalypses that never happened. Meanwhile, to those who used to play in them they also represent places that contain that ghostly something, the minute part of the self that never fully belongs to the visible image and the acted-out script. It seems that it is precisely this self (or selfish appropriation) that prevents ghostliness from getting out of its ghostly existence. If you have succeeded in dreaming up at least several of the cinematic spectres offered by Neringa and Ugnius in their exhibition with your eyes open and encountering the piercing gaze of Viy, who is watching you, it now depends only on you what you will be like when you wake up (if you do), but first let’s go back to the night before again and dive into the dream script slowly, because this text is but one of numerous possible extensions of the exhibition.
----The exhibition Now More Than Ever comprises three projects: Reflection Wood Chronicles, In the Highest Point, and Now More Than Ever.
Reflection Wood Chronicles: digitized 16 mm film, 7’15 min, 2011; sound recorded during the closed screening at the Arts Printing House in Vilnius on February 4, 2012, where Viktor Gerasimov performed Henry Purcell’s piece Music for a While, 1692. In the exhibition, the setup features a vinyl record, 7’05 min, and a record player.
In the Highest Point: video installation (video, full HD, 60’2 min, 2011; 16 mm film, 4’47 min, 2011), Tamara Levkova and Mikhail Karyukov’s script Let Galaxies Collide!, 1959, neon object.
Now More Than Ever: digitized 16 mm film, b/w, sound, 8’27, 2011, 3 silver bromide prints, 12 x 17 cm, 2001, single-slide projection.