we don’t need freedom, we don’t need justice, just someone to love
installation / performance, graduation show, 2011
collaboration with Lina Kruopytė
he or she or it (the thing) that loves
text by Aaron Schuster
Self-appointed gallery chicks Lukytė and Kruopyte (the recipe is roughly half nerdy charm + berlin vibe, with assorted other seductive inducements) have constructed, conceived & curated an “exhibition of an exhibition,” a show that shows what and how shows show. We are catapulted into the rarefied stratosphere of conceptual self-reflection, for which we lack an appropriate term. Meta-conceptualism? It is often said that that ‘there is no metalanguage’, no outside perspective from which we could understand and direct the slips and ambiguities of meaning-making, to state unequivocally what it is that we are doing when we are doing it. But this is strictly equivalent to the thesis that ‘there is only metalanguage’, that is, language talking about language, art talking about art, an enormous ongoing conversation which we are ‘always-already’ and inescapably inside. Maybe Lukytė and Kruopyte want to be so inside that they’ll end up on the outside, maybe they hope to gain a glimpse of that unimaginable exterior through a maximal inward plunge. That would be one way of reading their obsession with HOT (research and trend analysis). What is HOT? A wall tapestry (everyday-readymade), a slide show of people pointing at things (indexicality), a commissioned Soviet painting (post-communist chic), a conference setting (dialogue), a video of modern dance (dance is cooler than art), a stack of cool books (piles are better than shelves), a boring video (take your pick), a spacious exhibition hall (cultural real estate), take-away zines (theory production), anonymous family photos (see everyday-readymade), a young male artist talking uncomfortably about his family (performance), and the young curators themselves, the ultimate insider gallery chicks talking theory gibberish that almost makes sense or else makes too much sense. Well, t h e t o p i c i s f l o a t i n g i n a w e i r d d i m e n s i o n b e t w e e n c o n c r e t e a n d a b s t r a c t , o b j e c t - b a s e d a n d p e r f o r m a t i v e. Welcome to the self-deconstructing weirdness of the in-between. The title is just such a floating weird dimensional topic, a work more than title or a title that works like a work that appears like a title: number 164 in Stefan Brüggemann’s “Show Titles” project, freely available names for exhibitions that should be credited as an art piece. This is what an exhibition looks like and feels like and thinks like here and now. Daniel Buren famously criticized Harald Szeemann’s landmark show When Attitudes Become Form (1969) for being an “exhibition of an exhibition,” by which he meant subordinating the artworks to the curator’s own creative vision. We’ve certainly come a long way. Doesn’t this epic struggle between artist and curator, still played out in certain quarters, seem oddly quaint? Are we not all (artists, theorists, critics, curators, teachers…) loving/hating partners in making/unmaking culture, in having/unhaving ideas, in sharing/unsharing spaces, circling around and endlessly encircling one another? Forget freedom and justice, just give me someone to love. So the big question is: what does this show tell us about how Lukytė and Kruopyte love? (Curating could be etymologically linked to loving via caring). Do they do it with their egos, in big expressive ‘I-love-you-you-love-me’ style? Or do they rather, like good analysts, try to reveal something of that obscure object of desire—what do we want from art?—that is aimed at yet concealed by the consuming passions and dramas of Eros? Or have they become characters who know too much and so are incapable of loving? She who knows does not love.
guided tour in exhibition & performance by artist Antanas Gerlikas
