Publications

A divine margin of error

Tomas Pabedinskas

A divine margin of error

 

The book “Iš mutantų gyvenimo” [From the Life of Mutants] acts as the overview of Algis Griškevičius’ photography, including the artists’ first works as well as examples from his latest photo series. The sketch drawings that the artist used later to craft detailed compositions and stage settings are also in the publication. The juxtaposition of photographs and drawings becomes a hint of one of the most interesting aspects of his work – interdisciplinarity, which is linked not only to the conceptualism found in contemporary art but more to the traditional notions of art praising craftsmanship and uniqueness. Griškevičius, a professional painter, started out on his creative path by making paintings, then illustrating books and creating posters and scenography. Even when he uses photography, he creates more as a painter or sculptor. He sketches and designs everything in his head, and then later thoroughly stages the situations by taking pictures while also constructing decorations for them. He’s not limited by the regular position of an observing photographer; instead he actively plays the role of a creator by connecting different fields of art: photography, sculpture, and theatre.

 

On the one hand, his photographs seem to go beyond documenting the actual reality, producing associations with the history of visual art: the references to various art genres, hinting at the iconography of painting or even paraphrases of iconic examples in art history (the series From the Life of Mutants). That said, citations from the evolution of art and several mythological plotlines contrast with the routine surroundings of their staging and the unidealised bodies of posing people. Such deliberate contrasts become one of the main motifs in “Cirkas” [Circus], a photographic series that might look full of absurd components at first: the bulky bodies of the models stuck in poses defying gravity, sculptures of titans replaced by real people holding the roof of a Lithuanian farmhouse, or the first Lithuanian cosmonaut flying his wicker rocket. A similar contrast between the material and ideal world is also evident in the series “Zodiako ženklai” [Zodiac Signs], where “simple” individuals embody the mythological creatures that make up the constellations. These people pose imperfectly and listen to the photographer when he’s staging a scene. The same goes for the series “Ritualai” [Rituals] – Griškevičius doesn’t capture actions that carry the purpose of a ritual; instead, he plays with the ironic metaphors of everyday life and routine social interactions. The artist’s images have a tendency to interchange different world outlooks: mythological stories, icons of art history, and circus tricks that seem almost miraculous, become part of an existence that’s overly mundane. Photography is especially suitable media for this sort of flip in the world’s order. John Berger, an English art critic, believes that a photo – unlike a painting or a drawing – always points to an external world that exists outside the image and even outside the taker’s imagination. “The power of a painting depends on its internal references. Its reference to the natural world beyond the limits of the painted surface is never direct; it deals in equivalents. […] The language in which photography deals is the language of events. All of its references are external to itself.”[1] Because of the said qualities, a photographic image represents the visuals born inside the artist’s imagination and then inevitably links them to reality, transferring them from the idealistic plane to the material one.

 

The overlap of the ideal and the everyday worlds grants the absurdity and irony of the scenes featured in the photographs, all highlighted by the artist since he chose not to create a convincing illusion. Yet Griškevičius doesn’t really get involved with naive images, or those dedicated to entertaining the spectator for that matter. His works might provoke important and not always safe questions: can we beat the restrictions of a material existence? Do various ideals of human beauty and other sociocultural stereotypes have anything in common with reality? Is it possible to find mutual points between the earthly world and the ideal, archetypal one?

 

Similar questions, perhaps raised in a slightly different manner, can be found in drawings made by Griškevičius, serving as an initial visualisation of photographic ideas. The sketches portray various wicker objects that the artist creates using his own techniques – he uses these objects in his photoshoots, as well as in exhibitions as independent art pieces. The incompleteness of the drawings and their continuation within the photos and other art objects speak of an almost ontological transformation – the image born inside the artist’s consciousness becoming a reflection of reality, the embodiment of an idea within the material world. The sketches don’t yet possess a contrast between a realistic reflection and an unconvincing situation – this only becomes clear in the photographs, turning into one of the main traits of Griškevičius’ art. The drawings also don’t have any space for the emptiness that gets its form and structure from spatial objects resembling empty lifeless shells of unidentifiable (or not identifiable so far) entities. Without seeing any realistic reflections or facing any adversity by tangible matter, the spectator’s imagination fills the drawings with notional life, imaginary lives, even dreamlike stories. Since the artist’s fantasies and hands create the images, the nature and technique of these sketches don’t allow them to pass as realistic visuals. It’s merely a space for recreating archetypal images, for playing games of the imagination – the spectator becomes a player too, as he’s given the chance to complete the sketch in his head. However, the drawings by Algis Griškevičius provoked the late philosopher Leonidas Donskis to raise an intriguing question: “Was reality itself launched at one point, and can it ever be complete?“[2] In other words, can reality ever become perfect, ideal?

 

It can’t, at least not in Griškevičius’ photos. The artist’s works have an always evident, wilful, and purposeful “creative margin of error” – the images he produces never look perfect, they never convince the spectator, but they also never unmask the illusion at hand. The consequences of this “creative margin of error” are similar to traces left by a constant creative process, to the results of one stage or other, but not to an entirely complete representation of reality. This sort of creative process is almost a ritualistic one, mimicking the creation of a reality that we all know, and according to Leonidas Donskis, “unable to ever be complete”. Griškevičius chooses a carnival-like approach to portray the incompleteness of reality – he disturbs the common world order in his works and then offers irrational images (which seem absurd at first) to replace it all. But the intense atmosphere and festivity of the carnival, in this case, steps aside to let melancholy and routineness filter through. The archetypal images recreated in Griškevičius’ everyday surroundings don’t commit to transgressing cultural and natural limits within a typical life, nor do they aim to provide an alternative for our reality that’s far from flawless. On the contrary – it feels as if a world that was launched (and unfinished, according to Donskis) by God will have to be recreated by man using earthly means, knowing beforehand that this process is destined for imperfection. The works of Algis Griškevičius allow us to take a glance at the discussed situation from another perspective – they show us that even our prose-driven everyday routine belongs to the endless, mythical time of the world’s creation, to the present of a moment that is constantly repeating itself.

 

[1] John Berger, “Understanding a Photograph“, ed. Geof Dyer (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 20.

[2] Algis Griškevičius, Tada (Jonava: NoRoutine Books, 2016), 19.

Algis Griškevičius: A playing man

Nerijus Milerius

 

Algis Griškevičius: A playing man

 

In his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “the world of the happy man is a different one to that of the unhappy man”. At first glance, this thesis might seem like plain banality, but it actually functions as a link in the chain of Wittgenstein’s arguments. In an early theory, after setting a goal to create a stringent concept of language that could express the factual world, Wittgenstein clearly realised that things that no one can express in scientific language exist beside facts that can be verified by scientific methods. If we were to focus only on the factual plane of the world, we would notice that sunlight shines on everyone, happy or unhappy. But the limits of a happy person’s world are widened in such a way that he or she perceives it very differently. So, it’s not the facts of the world that matter, it’s their relationship to the world – that’s why sunlight for a happy person is not at all the same as it is for an unhappy one.

 

Going through the works of Algis Griškevičius over and over again makes me remember this proposition by Wittgenstein. Certainly, there are artworks that charm audiences using the world that the artists have created, along with the uniqueness and sophistication of the artistic language that is spoken. However, most often an artwork attracts us precisely because of its tactics to broaden the limits of the factual world, opening both the artistic and the factual worlds in the same way. So rather than isolated artistic tricks, it’s seeing the factual world as different and in a different way that actually charms us.

 

The rituals of Algis’ art-circus possess this aspect of expanding the factual world using artistic principles, and the audiences love it. The visual rituals and performances act as “fuel” for training the artistic imagination. Unpolished, rough, half-naked or naked bodies of men and women look commonplace, at times even insistently mundane. But the poorer the appearance of these bodies, the weirder and more unusual these rituals seem.

 

One time, in Paris, on discovering Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture The Nose (a sharp and long nose basically pierces the eyes of the spectators) in an exhibition space, I thought about a world in which all people had such long and painfully pointy noses. You couldn’t just wake up in the morning and turn to face your loved one, you couldn’t wash your face while looking at the mirror above the sink, you couldn’t put a sweater on the same way… Your physical world would probably not be the only thing that’s different – the entire perception of such notions as honesty, courage, and love would be unrecognisable too. “Tell it to my face” would no longer be a synonym for harsh truths since long noses would be piercing various faces all the time, “eye to eye” wouldn’t represent agreement, and the phrase “love at first sight” would lose its romantic spontaneity as a close glance would on some level be assigned a notion of violence.

 

Such an odd reimagining of the world inspired by Giacometti’s The Nose is in a way provoked by the works of Griškevičius too – the Lithuanian artist skips using transformed, hybrid bodies, and instead uses regular bodies for transforming, hybrid practices. A man in Lauknešėlis [The Carrier] carries a slim girl on a long stick; Išpažintis [The Confession] shows a woman pulling a ball of string out of a kneeling man’s mouth; while the photograph Vaikščiojantis padebesiais [Sky Walker] portrays a man on very high stilts. All of these images challenge the clichés of typical sayings and practices, inviting us to reimagine what it really means to wait, confess, swallow pride, mutter, feel overly joyful, etc. The mundane meanings start shattering and they burst out of the rusty old connections, whereas the fragments of various shattered elements now form new bonds and assemblages, the meanings of which we can only attempt to guess. Next to the world that we’re used to, the one we live in every single day, other possible alternative worlds begin to coexist, and their details are “smuggled” into our factual world along with new, freed meanings. A world where bodies and everyday practices are untied and liberated is a place where basically anything is possible. Anything. Meditating in water, digging deep in the ground while naked, putting a light bulb in your mouth, flying with a board instead of with wings, carrying a stone (or a man) like it’s a balloon, growing on a tree branch in the nude, and so on. The ritualistic practices of Algis Griškevičius and the playfulness of his fantasies bring us back to a renaissance-like existence, where the new model of an industrious world hadn’t been designed yet and the creative imagination was flooded with technological innovations and scientific and artistic inventions.

 

This renaissance carnival urges us to slightly modify the points that Wittgenstein made is his previously discussed thesis. If “the world of the happy man is a different one to that of the unhappy man”, then surely “the world of the playing man is a different one to that of the un-playing man”. And the visual rituals by Griškevičius prove it. His photographs are the evident manifestation of the playing man, homo ludens. Every game has its own nature that reveals itself when you start playing it rather than when you’re only observing it. That’s how the images captured by Algis work – they infect us with creativity, turning the procedure of observing into a training camp to broaden the limits of our imaginations.

 

A started and unfinished reality

Book “TADA” Publisher “NoRoutine Books” 2016

Leonidas Donskis

 

What could be more interesting than sketches which the artist abandons, which he never comes back to, sketches – or billets of future artworks – which suddenly become artworks in their own right? Can it be that Algis Griškevičius’ photographs, meant as prototypes for paintings, not merely capture the time of boredom, but also become a space for urban sculptures where banal objects seem to acquire new life?

These questions inevitably lead to other questions. For instance, are all of the works we consider unfinished (or know as deliberately or accidentally left unfinished by their authors) indeed unfinished? Unfinished in relation to what? The author’s intention? The object of reality itself? The work’s future perceivers, i. e. the ones who partake in its space and constantly reactuate it?

Herein lies the intriguing question: what does a started and unfinished artwork mean? Furthermore, we are compelled to answer yet another one: was reality itself ever started, and can it essentially be finished (or brought to complete perfection in the eyes of the Creator)?

The humanist circles which emerged in the Renaissance era changed all Europe’s perspective on the classical languages, rhetoric, art, literature and politics, because the notion of humanism had the idea of incompleteness of reality at its very core. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de hominis dignitate), the Florentine humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) openly set forth what was undoubtedly perceived as a horrible heresy in the Christian world.

He claimed that God had intentionally left his creation unfinished, having abandoned it as an open project. To make the world complete and perfect, which is a neverending work and an open project in itself, God needs a creative partner. It is the human who assumes the latter role. Not just any human, but the one who chooses the work of constant self-perfection and spiritual cultivation. Such an individual can be l’uomo universale, in the sense of this term used by its author Leon Battista Alberti, but at the same time he or she can simply be an artist.

Hence, being an artist automatically lands one in a started and unfinished world. By working on it, we create ourselves. The human life is an open opportunity for constant self-correction and compensation of one’s imperfection through creative activity. Since we are the intermediate link between the animal and God, we must constantly choose between two vectors. It is either degradation to bestial state or elevation towards God.

This is the essence of Pico della Mirandola’s statement: the human dignity arises not only from likeness to the image of God, but also from constant effort to overcome one’s imperfection by perceiving oneself and the world as an always open and uncertain existential and creative project.

We know that many artists consciously or accidentally left their works unfinished. Occasionally works remained unfinished due to a very important new commission which could not be rejected. That was the case with Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi painting (stored in the Uffizi gallery in Florence). We know that the Augustinian monks of the Florentine San Donato a Scopeto monastery and church commissioned this work, but Leonardo had to leave to Milan on short notice and did not finish the painting. To me, this early masterpiece has always been among his most misterious works, much more so than the Mona Lisa – precisely because his Madonna Litta, Benois Madonna, Mona Lisa or Cecilia Gallerani will never let us into their space as finishers of the divine creation. Theologically or from the point of view of Florentine humanism, Leonardo might not have objected to that, but it is simply impossible for us technically – the works are too perfect to reveal a single prospect for future correction or alternative. Meanwhile, The Magi allow us to constantly partake in an open structure which contains endless possibilities for the completion and continuation of the work.

I could say the same and even more about one of my favourite Florentine artworks – the Masolino and Masaccio frescos in the Brancacci Chapel of the Santa Maria del Carmine church. Masolino and his apprentice Masaccio painted most of the Brancacci cycle in this collective early Renaissance masterpiece, but it so happened that they did not complete it. The cycle was finished later by Filippino Lippi, the son of Sandro Botticelli’s teacher Fra’ Filippo Lippi. Masolino and Masaccio’s unfinished project not only enabled Filippino Lippi to reveal his talent of a religious painter and fresco master, but also posed a question: how is it possible (if at all) to finish an unfinished work?

There is no answer to this question. Although we are fascinated by Filippino Lippio’s works in this cycle, we cannot know if it would have been even more interesting had the work started by Masolino and Masaccio remained unfinished. Just as in the case of Giorgione’s unfinished Sleeping Venus, completed by Titian (Dresden Old Masters Gallery).

Another category comprises intentionally unfinished works. Rembrandt left particularly many of them. Such a deliberately unfinished artwork compels us to not only symbolically do the remaining work and complete the piece by our participation and imagination, but also redefine the notion of an artwork and even art itself. And then, perhaps, the very notion of reality.

Hence, Algis Griškevičius’ urban photography is not merely raw material; it becomes an invitation to redefine boredom, the mundane, architecture, construction, the city, art and reality. The photographs turn into urban poetry discovering the everyday and that which must either develop into beautiful objects or vanish, but always has its future as an open possibility. We do not know which is better: temporary existence and disappearance or being an intermediate link between absence and becoming conventional beauty or even canon.

We do not know that. If we did, we would have no need for art, and it would transform into something else.

These photographs not only provoke us to decide whether we want to and are able to participate in the completion of the started reality (for what is finished dies and fades away). Each artwork contains the possibility of self-destruction and destruction of the world, thus these questions are far from being innocent. Who are we to say which fragments of reality or an artwork are valuable and which are not? Does it not resemble our confidence in knowing which life forms deserve continuity and which do not?

For all beautiful fragments of reality are similar, while all ugly fragments are ugly in their own way. For beauty is already finished, while its ugly masks conceal new existence. The question is how to discover it.

Algis Griškevičius’ works relentlessly tackle these questions. Let us remain in their space. Satisfying and convincing answers hardly exist. We would hardly become happier even if we got them.

Let us live without knowing them.

Modern Art Centre – about Algis Griškevičius

Modern Art Centre – about Algis Griškevičius
Open link

Games people play when they are being played with

Book “Mikališkių stebuklai”, publisher “Tyto alba” 2009

The shooting session starts with a curse: “Your damn photographs”, – says pani Aldona in the impossible-to-master tutejszy1 vernacular, bitterly seeing off the “session participants” and running after the scattered sheep. Meanwhile, these participants – mature men and women – are about to wade into the nettles, undress and squat down to pose, convinced that in this way they refute the Lithuanian folk wisdom that cautions one against wandering “naked in the nettles” at the minimum. Everything is possible when you do it with a smile on your face and see the absurd winking at you.
The photographs themselves, with their innocence and mild irony, wink at the viewer, and one couldn’t expect it to be otherwise: two men seated on a board and sawing a log with a huge saw remind of a familiar folk toy with two bear cubs. As we know, this toy doesn’t ride or do anything else that could be considered practical – it’s just a product of a folk carver’s engineering imagination, which condemns the two interlocked figures to saw that wood eternally.
In Algis Griškevičius’ photographs, a toy gets transformed into a big game played by apparently mature people, which is supposedly meant to trick the viewer, yet the mechanism of trickery is not hidden at all. Furthermore, the latter reveals that those involved in the creative process themselves merrily play photography: some joyously pose, the other, invisible, shoots them. The mutual benefit of art is evident: the scheduled time drags on in a more entertaining way for everyone.
In one of Griškevičius’ early photographs, appropriately titled The Director, the interdependence of the photographer and his objects is conveyed yet more explicitly: a squat naked man appears to manipulate the marionettes with his fingers, yet in reality the strings extend from the fingers to pegs hammered in the ground, so the actual question becomes obvious: who is really being manipulated here? Both sides are tied together by that tight existential string, forever bonded by profession and mutual dependence, and won’t grow apart if they want to stay in this sphere and retain the same purpose of existence.
The dependence is mutual. Algis Griškevičius is also tied to his pegs – not just the models (who are, in fact, friends or family members, and are available to him at no cost, since they are invaluable), but also objects of professional desire: painting, things “weaved” from wood or metal, and photography – the latter essentially unites all of these. Not just because the photographed objects – knives, rockets and scaffolds – first need to be created much like separate items, autonomously displayed in an exhibition. In addition, the photographs expand the space of painting.
It is strange that photography can expand the latter, since it itself is essentially tied to the image of reality, and Algis uses the almighty Photoshop with extreme caution. In painting, one can splatter paint and draw fish in the sky, but photography requires the imagined world to be put together in reality first, so that it could be reflected on the camera’s film later. The demiurge’s work, usually scheduled for weekends, is fairly exhausting after all.
As if aware of the Creator’s only essential difference from any other craftsman – the ability to create time, Algis Griškevičius proceeded to work on the Calendar series after the first photographic experiments. Initially conceived as light-hearted and playful, at present his Zodiac signs are something very different from an interior accessory hung in the kitchen. In fact, they have nothing in common with time, but fill the world with their odd anthropomorphic bodies, the additional attributes of which – the likes of Pisces’ wooden fins and Scorpio’s scythe – become not-so-necessary attachments: Scorpio’s female substance dreamily gazes at the sky, and appears far from being dangerous, while the very poses of maidens sitting on the bridge make them resemble live mermaids. The same bridge will later be occupied by apparently male birdies, birdlike primarily in the way they perch, while the nibs, made from osiers, will be merely hints of nibs, a possible evolutionary opportunity. The Zodiac is thematically continued by the Sharp Woman, a combination of a blade and scales: the female body becomes inseparable from its extension. It’s a bio-object like those created by theatre director Tadeusz Kantor, only framed within a photograph.
Yet even wooden or any other extensions of the human body are not necessary when the power of the word is employed: it’s enough to write “Virgo” in the title to make everyone believe that this is what the image really portrays, since the wreath-wearing guy with an ironically romantic look in his eyes suggests certain mythologems – Copenhagen’s Mermaid or a line from Pushkin’s poem: “[T]here’s a mermaid sitting on branches”. Algis enjoys mythologization, which is the underlying principle of his work. He looks back to the Bible and makes the demented Judith run around the village of Bijutiškis with an axe in her hands, so that a new myth is born out of the so familiar reports of domestic violence. He confines the Sphinx among the small village houses, squeezes the bodies of the Atlases into the porch of an old cottage: the Antiquity is here, in the countryside, and even though this juxtaposition of the “high” and the “low” makes one smile, in reality it negates the very notion of aesthetic hierarchies; neither Egypt nor Greece and Rome are superior to a village pond if one had spent one’s childhood near the latter. That is a perfect example of topophilia, love of one’s own place and even place in an ethnographical sense. If only Griškevičius could, he would drag that small homeland together with the house, well, barn, and pond along wherever he went, so that it would always be beside him.
The characters and their stories hark back to Algis’ painting, and that is where photography comes as close to the latter as it can: the colours in both images of different origin look identical, the soft light of the dusk favoured by the painter’s brush washes over the girl holding a stone in the photograph in the very same way. The only difference is that Algis usually portrays the city in his painting works, whereas he doesn’t even take his camera when going to it. His photographs require a wide and open space. Yet the figures seen in the photographs adopt and continue his paintings’ mythology so actively that one might have an impression that the artist had first painted and later “reanimated” his characters in reality, making them travel from one album page to another, and the distinction between drawing them with paint or with camera lens is irrelevant here. Aquarius the boy will become a man and will soar in the sky in a couple of years, while the Sky Shepherd, who used to herd fish, will later become the Surveyor, even though he will measure water (and the same fish in it) – quite possibly, together with the clouds reflected on its surface. The painting’s pilgrim will exchange the chair for mill fans in the photograph, and later will saddle a unicycle to perform a circus number (which is in reality an eternal juggler’s journey). The frozen time is not a stopped instant here; it is a way of life and a perpetual state of this peculiar toy-game-existence. The principal attribute that Algis endows his protagonists with is the myth. In the end, although the travelling characters offer surprising inversions and plot junctions, they cannot escape the space created by the director (or his subconscious). There are clouds and grass, and in between unfolds all this Bible of Mikališkės.
Another realm of being, already much more static, motionless and almost unrelated to mythical characters in the photographs, is that which is much less definite and intelligible. Even the titles reveal it: Swallowing the Rope, Getting Woody, Man with a Black Board, etc. These are utterly tautological, since they say exactly what we see in the images. Tautology does little to augment the theme – on the contrary, while contradicting our emerging thoughts (“what is the real meaning of this image?”), it creates a sense of something being wrong. This very confinement of thought liberates the suggestion of the image, since the plot is pushed to the background as unsound and intentionally incomplete: Man with a Black Board is spectacular due to its contrasts, while the plot is eliminated as such. It resembles a riddle for which the director doesn’t provide the answer – he only warns the viewer that not everything can be grasped. Something remains beyond, even though everything appears to be emphatically close, situated in the studio or some other more limited space.
I write “the director” consciously. Not just because Algis Griškevičius’ shooting sessions themselves resemble the process of making a film – cranes, props, shouts instructing the models to keep a straight face, etc. Algis’ photographic works themselves are still frames from a film that the viewers themselves have to create. Often a pose or a movement come by as the next-to-last sentence of an anecdote: this is Hitchcockian suspense, still tension, and who knows what came before or is to come after it. There is nothing worse than concluding an anecdote: the declining laughter leaves a void. Thus the Observers look just as comic as the characters waiting for the eclipse. Yet they also look just as tragic: a premonition of impending disaster lingers according to the viewer’s wish.
In one draft photograph a performer of the Mikališkės circus holds an upright staff, on which another acrobat “waves” in the place of a flag, although one can see the supporting rope hanging from above. Even though this rope will not be in the image after digital manipulation, what makes this photograph look beautiful to me is something that exists in its final versions as well – the disclosure of the mechanism, which reveals the creator’s evolution from the mentioned concept of the “director”: we depend on not only each other, but also the one who pulls the strings from above. The strings or ropes extend beyond the frame. When the Cloud Catcher attempts to lasso the clouds, he essentially throws a loop towards the impossible: a comprehension of what is up there. He is Mikališkės’ own astronomer Šmukštaras2, who can’t find peace of mind on the ground because he knows that there probably is something out there. He rises in the air as the first Lithuanian space rocket, manifests himself to a girl in the guise of a kite, glides above his homeland like Icarus – maybe that explains why in all of Algis’ photographs the homeland appears so small, as if seen from a bird’s-eye view. The previously earthbound world experiences an inversion; small mechanical toys rebel and rise up in the air – to question and try to comprehend the world. The essence of the timeless Lithuanian myth – the craving for rising up to the sky – is exposed: far from being a desire to overcome the pull of the Earth (the latter always persists, no matter what), it is a game turned into an existential myth. One can bear the earthly reality only from a distance, through aesthetic experience – not touching the ground and loving it from afar. Simple games become games through which someone might well be playing with us. In the photographs, the place of the photographer, much like that of the viewer, is clear – the gaze comes from the same direction. Yet even though the creator’s gaze here is purely directorial, manifested through the “actor”, the whole scene becomes an object in another director’s hands. The space surrounding the “actor” is activated, expanded and extended beyond the frame, augmented by our guesses and premonitions.
Something probably exists out there, beyond that space – something unknown, though possibly knowable; maybe a hope, maybe a reluctant wish. Something or someone this world is handed over to. The Big Viewer.

Vaidas Jauniškis

Circus

The photography of Algis Griškevičius is easily recognizable as probably the only body of work in this style in Lithuania. Its interdisciplinary nature is most memorable, related to traditional art forms such as painting, sculpture or theatre, rather than to modern art practices. Griškevičius’ photographs represent the end result of a long creative process, depicting complex structures and precisely engineered situations produced by the author. As a professional artist with a background in painting, illustrations, posters, set design, and creating objects of wood and glass, Griškevičius seems to apply his creative experience and craftsmanship to photography. The images portrayed in his photographs must have been born in the artist’s imagination, and realized especially for the purpose of the shot. In this, they differ essentially from candid shots noticed and taken by photographers in the natural flow of life. Griškevičius in this way transcends the stereotype of the photographer as a keen-eyed observer, choosing instead to play the part of the active creator, which enables him to unite different art realms. While this creative method is well-established in the international photography scene (e.g., the orchestrated situations portrayed in the photographs of Austrian Erwin Wurm or Japanese Tatsumi Orimoto, where people become sculptural objects of sorts), Algis Griškevičius is probably the only one to adhere to it in Lithuania. The creative outcome is just as unique in the context of Lithuanian photography. At first sight, Griškevičius’ photographs may seem full of absurd details: the looming bodies of models frozen in gravity-defying positions; the real people replacing atlantes bearing the weight of a Lithuanian log house’s porch roof; the man blowing at clouds. However, these and other seemingly nonsensical discrepancies in Griškevičius’ work can be easily “read” as meaningful signs which evoke existential questions. Can man defy the limitations of material existence and rise to the realm of dreams? Do the various beauty ideals and other social and cultural stereotypes men harbor have anything to do with reality? Is it possible to find points of contact between earthly and ideal “heavenly” life? Is it because most of us live our lives trying to answer such questions, that artists are able to convince their models to create a “circus” in the middle of a field? Despite being evocative of existential questions at a closer look, Griškevičius’ photographs remain studiedly mundane. The artist creates symbolically meaningful mise-en-scenes, yet their symbolism clashes with the ordinariness of the applied tools and the material character of the human body. The photographs emphasize the opposition of generalized philosophical meaning and the triviality of the symbols it is expressed through, thereby supporting the statement that dreams must always be realized in very earthly ways. This contradiction often makes us seem like clumsy, strange circus actors, determined to perform impossible tricks. The author of these photographs takes a similarly eccentric role in the Lithuanian photography scene. The conceptual basis and the irony of his works connect them to the context of modern art, while the tendency towards philosophical generalizations, visual metaphors, and rural motifs echo the Lithuanian philosophical traditions. This dualism may well be the most interesting feature of Algis Griškevičius’ photography, uniting local photographical traditions with a (self-)reflective view characteristic of the international modern art realm.
Tomas Pabedinskas

A city seen in a dream

The works of artist A.Griškevičius fit into the traditional boundaries of painting, yet express the spiritual condition of contemporary man. One can feel echoes of the past, as well as the accepted values and uneasiness of the present. The works are fluid and conform to the standarts of contemporary art, enriching the discoveries of the postmodernist period.
Within the frames of the paintings the artist attempts to capture the enigmatic forms of reality, existence. A city seen in a dream, or in a moment of painful relevation, the people of the city, caught in a moment of loleness… The empty city‘s landscapes. Tje architecture, the court yards, buildings that are being restored, the bridges – each seem to live a life of their own, independent of human beings.
All is concrete, detailed, material. The paintings are structured as a harmonious whole, complete, with stable compositions. The surface is created methodically, with small, precise brushtrokes, each detail is orchestrated; a gesture stopped in midair. Within this static stability lies an important secret without which the painting would be meaningless. There is no ramdomness in the world of A.Griškevičius, and nothing can be changed – the events cannot be altered. The painting is a statement of existence, and there is a little room for error. The paintings visually stun, and we find ourselves in a space where time has stopped, and the most important player is irritating, expressive light. It grabs a hold of reality beyond the mask of the visible and the familiar. The tension of the bright colours and the contrasting light suggest the formlessness of the artistic vision.
The visible world invites us to feel the metaphysical world. A.Griškevičius‘ works are many layered; concrete scenes become magnifying glasses for the hidden world. One also feels an indefinite sense of waiting. The painful harmonies and ominous seriousness are present not only in the motive, but also in the colours and style of painting. Various dimensions of reality are exposed, and we feel that the gap between existence and non-existence, the temporal and the eternal, is not so great, and these states or conditions are all within our grasp.
The artist expresses his inner world, which is often pain filled, calmly, without anger or aggression. His feelings seem to thicken the light and the colours in his works.
A belief in the power of harmony, trusting one‘s own intuition and experiences. Reality is as rich and interesting as the person observing it. This is all a part of the artist‘s craft. Artist A.Griškevičius knows that better than any of us.
Art historian Aldona Dapkutė

A Bit of Rough A PAINTER TURNS TO PHOTOGRAPHY

A fairly monotonous repetition of exhibition cycles is sometimes interrupted by surprises provided by artists, which equals the pleasure of reading an unsuspected denouement.
The painter Algis Griškevičius, 49,instead of a safe demonstration of his seemingly recognised painting, has put on a display of photographs in a small picture gallery.

Life is theatre

Algis Griškevičius is best known as a painter who occasionally creates sculptures. However, photography has always existed in his paintings. Not just because they look faithfull to reality (although the imitative nature of his paintings is a disguise), not just because they often give an impression of accidental snapshots, but mainly because the artist has used photography as a way of sketching and memorising impressions since the 1980s.
What is painted has been photographed beforehand. But photography is necessary not only to help the memory. It has become instrumental in the artist‘s relationship with reality.
As he says, ‘’Reality itself starts to dictate. One gets involved in that straightforward recounting of the story. There is no distance left.”
The distance is needed in order to transform a specific subject, to move it into the realm of fantasy.
“It’s more interesting for me that way. An atmosphere appears, a distance. It is a state of seeing some simple thing or a building in a dream, but the mood is somehow inadequate to that thing, for instance, horror. I have always wanted to connect them. There is a state of mind and a completely different object.”
If we invoked the spirits of Freud or Jung, the two experts in the human psyche would eagerly dig into Griškevičius’ paintings, sculptures and photographs. For simple things, so real here, often have hidden meanings that always point towards the imperfections, inabilities and fears of constantly dreaming human beings. But the highway in this direction is blocked by irony, which leads the viewer to a different kind of origin of Griškevičius’ world.
As he himself admits, this all started in the early 1980s at the end of Soviet era. “When I was young I used to sit and discuss ideas, with the writer Juozas Erlickas and the theatre director Eimuntas Nekrošius. Theatre, litterature and the visual arts merged in our fantasies.“
This instance was very important under the ideological control of the 1980s. Soviet reality could only be criticised or laughed at indirectly. Theatre with Nekrošius in the lead created a metaphorical language, a way of saying things by not saying them openly, and thus escaping the scrutiny of ideologues.
But unlike the creators of theatre, Griškevičius was always a nonconformist on the art scene. For instance, his works belong to the section for alternative Soviet art in the New Jersey Museum in the USA. And not only because he exposed the artifice of Soviet life.
He also rejected mainstream Lithuanian painting, which has always been tightly connected to some form of expressionism, and ,,literature” was considered to be a fault. On the contrary, literature, or the subject, has always been most important to him.
“Then it is unimportant whether it is painting of photography if there is a essential principle, an original idea.”
Thus there was something that displeased both ideologues and the artistic elite in Griškevičius‘ paintings. At first they look like naive, faithful representations of reality made to please people, those uninitiated to art.
,,As one of the starting points they used to ask me: What are you doing here? People won‘t understand. And then I thought it would be interesting to satisfy a wide range of viewers. An old village woman could read the surface, and then there would be layer for different levels of intellect. This is when I started using strange colour combinations, such as apple green for the sky.“
However, this pleasant, and distributing, if you think of an apple green sky, surface should not be seen just as a mask which the artist would throw off if he could. The present demands of the market also make artists wear this mask. This layer, or kitch, is where Griškevičius finds and places emotions, nostalgia for the primitive carpets explored so often as a child, all human sentimentality, which is simple, unintelligent, trivial, but universal, connecting us all. Then the artist started weaving or making “wicker” paintings from metal wire, as an allusion to the metal wicker baskets you can buy in a crafts market, just a different kind of meaning can spring from what everybody sees and takes pleasure in possessing, holding and touching. And it is kitsch that creates the subtle irony for those who know that it is kitsch.
Kitsch, which was „bad“ in Soviet times and apreciated in contemporary postmodern culture, is what disguises other meanings, all levels of meanings, in Griškevičius’ paintings. The straightforward nature of kitsch sometimes prevents the viewer from seeing how much reality has changed. A sentimental apple green sky is connected to an unmatching ugly building.
Then you notice that trees and bushes have faces, that a house makes love (with its other self?), that fish fly away in the sky or that landscape assumes the shape of a gun, a skull,a fish. But that is not all the unreality there is.
Often it is quite imperceptible, because it is created exclusively by light, the phenomenon, the discovery of which the artist credits to the prewar surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico.
Then it is in this light that simple real things acquire the power of existential symbols in Griškevičius‘ world, such as paper boats or airplanes, or anything from paper.
“Paper or anything made from it for me is a symbol of temporariness, and not even that, but of the change of meaning.”
When a paper boat is reflected in the water, it might become a Star of David, a religious symbol. And there is quite a number of those Griškevičius‘ paintings, sometimes obvious insertions into a “normal” scene, such as the replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” in a decaying house.
Sometimes it is not so clearly visible, such as the picture of an eye on a kite flying high up in the sky above the most derelict part of Vilnius, aptly called “The Colosseum”. The underlying, flying or hanging fish (“Pieta”) is an old symbol of Christ.
“I find this idea very beautiful, that the most silent creature in the world is God,” says the artist.
However, although Cristian symbols are frequent, they are just hints or openings on universal existential perceptions, a way to speak about the world beyond this one.
“I see those symbols and the Christian religion itself as legends. That’s all. A beautiful legend, useful,but no more.”
He only uses existing religious symbols instead of creating his own.

To Renovate the Flower

However, there is one thing which has become for Griškevičius as a symbol of his own. This is the constantly reappearing scaffolding in his paintings, sculptures and photographs. It seems that the artist wants to renovate everything, not only an old castle, but also a chair, a flower, a tree, a man, whatever. He calls it his idée fixe. It started from his painting “The Castle”.
“I saw so many meanings there, it reminded me of Kafka’s castle. It was phantasmagoric.”
From then on, his obsession has included not only painting this visually complicated, protective and at the same time threatening structure, but also making and photographing it. The artist, who has always used photography, makes every piece of scaffolding he draws. The act even resembles some sort of ritual.
“It takes a month to make the scaffolding, and then I photograph it in a few seconds.”
Perhaps this is why things hidden in scaffolding in Griškevičius‘ paintings and photographs seem not just to be undergoing renovation but rather waiting to be born, as if something so far unseen is forming underneath this elaborate shell or nest. Thus the artist nurtures his fantasy. And in his sculpture, scaffolding loses its original core, the object to be renovated, and becomes independent, a different mode of reality. However, with all his inventiveness, around the year 2000 the artist felt that something was happening to his painting.
“I felt that I could not go on painting as if everything was all right. A kind of energy was missing. I felt afraid. And I realized it was time to put those paintbrushes away, to stand down. But how could I do nothing? Then I decided to try photography.
This is how it started, and visitors coming to the exhibition to see the painter found a photographer instead, and a very unexpected one.

Objective instead of A Brush

The content of his photographs is not social. You will not learn anything about the hard lives of the poor, or find an answer to the riddle of the meaning of life. It is not erotic, although the pictures teem with naked bodies, or political (but, who knows, maybe these nudes might be past or future politicians?). Neither is it documentary (what is pictured is not reality) or intended to impress. In fact, these photographs are just short ironic stories.
Some of his photographs reflect what some people refer to with respect and others with scorn as “high culture”. This is a concept of the past, and it is from there that the artist draws popular images that have almost become clichés, and immediately merges them with the plebeian present.
The tired “Prodigal Son” by Rembrant is now replaced by a naked and pretty “Prodigal Daughter” who obviously did not wander off. St Sebastian now becomes the target of darts in pubs, not for his inappropriate faith but just for fun. The saint is shown in the same posture as in the Old Masters, the only difference being the smile instead of the expression of pain.
The smile distorts the understanding of all the images displayed here. Works that once shocked the viewer are now made joyfully banal, and become figures or fun or trophies, which is the case with the crucific placed among antlers, stuffed birds and various other animal skins (“Trophies”). A stuffed God is the only thing left over from religion. The consumption of “high culture” is washed down with beer.
Once lofty ideas are now materialized in a rough form. Coarsely made wings attached to a cow’s back are clearly wooden and not heavenly at all. Therefore, the cow does not become a muse (“Uncle Juozapas Watering the Muse” rather thank milking it, which would be more usual) and does not even try to express some mythological being, which in photographs usually looks funny in the worst possible sense.
The artist construes images that do not bring you closer to any noble experience or beautiful ideas but rather move you away from them. He clearly does not let the viewer in, but remains in the safety of irony. The artificiality of the situation and the exaggerated materiality of the props create absurdity and art are all absurd.
One photograph shows a man standing in a meadow in a posture that is almost identical to the old sculpture or Lenin that once stood in Vilnius, with hundreds of shiny orders, medals and badges collected over the Soviet period piercing the skin. Another photograph features a male making energetic strokes through wooden waves. The artist’s muse finally quenches her thirst with the absurd.
The photographic material itself is also a bit rough: the pink bodies of large men romping in bright seen grass. It represents the naturalism of the colours, a standart rural environment, and a domestic way of taking pictures. There are no subtleties when trying to “hear” the light, or radical angles, textures, shading or retouching.
Nor does the photographer relish the texture of a rusty bathtub showing two men playing in it with toy boats, which is so characteristic of photography.
A practically amateurish, only greatly oversized, photograph is one more layer commenting on a situation, not only showing the absence of criteria for professionalism and the presence of complete permissiveness but also enhancing the feeling of absurdity. A stranger to photography, the artist intrudes into a foreign sphere, destroying its canons, which he does with partial seriousness, seeking not to cause a revolution but only to have fun.
The object of most photographs, a middle-aged, large and balding (usually the same) man is the antithesis of “normal” photography which feeds on nice young ladies with additional retouching. Skin free of wrinkles, spots and cellulite is the most common object in photography. In Griškevičius‘ photographs bright daylight shows the body in an everyday pose. Therefore, it looks unnatural when naked (equally unnaturally pink), just as in everyday life people do not usually walk around undressed.
Thus, those rough, real and unnatural bodies combine into signs of the Zodiac, a fountain or a swing, and try to become symbols.
As a photographer, Griškevičius is a director. With the exception of a few “domestic“ observations, everything is a performance.
The photographs show a drama about everyday concepts, ghosts of the past and even, so to speak, the artist’s calling. I have a suspicion that the photograph called “the Director” depicts the artist himself. His fingers are holding the strings ready to manipulate the puppets, but the strings are attached to the ground. The artist, who is trying to photograph his own imagination, becomes tied to reality like a cow, while his muse makes unsuccessful attempts to take off with her wooden wings with holes in them.

Agnė Narušytė

Bridges Between Reality and Fiction

After the exhibition of Algis Griskevicius in Vasby Konsthall (2004) it became obvious from critical reports that works of this artist are understood and reflected in the same way as in Lithuania: The surrealistic effervescence spreading to all forms of artistic expression, literature, plastic arts, theatre, photography and even politics, bridges between the real and the visionary, has visited Stockholm with Algis Griskevicius due to ambassador of Lithuania Petras Zapolskas and Cultural Attache Liana Ruokytë. Multi-expressive artist Algis Griskevicius brings a theatrical spirit to every day usual objects placed in situation unreal, conceived by the sensibility of the artist. It is a dreamlike fruitful arrangement between the natural represented object and the subconscious mood of the artist. The intuitive appearance of the work leads often to an abstract dream. The distance between the image of the represented usual-banal object ant the intellectual creativity of the artist is given by the fact that Algis conceives at first the final work before starting producing it on canvas, with film or sculpture. The essential is communication, says the visionary artist, coming from long years of heavy political regime in Lithuania, as hit predecessors surrealists came out of the dramatic years of the First World War. Algis insists upon the importance of communication, also with materials, among other colours witch have their own powers of life. The work of art without dramatic elements is flat.

Griskevicius – A Contemporary Surrealist’ (Ditt & Datt, 2004 Stockholm)
Alexander Scarlat

Who le­ads in a de­sert. Dre­ams and spe­cu­la­tions

Who le­ads in a de­sert. Dre­ams and spe­cu­la­tions
Juozas ERLICKAS
Extremely popular Lithuanian satirical poet, dramatist and prose writer

1. Al­gis Al­gis Griške­vi­čius a fa­mous Lit­hu­a­nian painter of the 20th and 21st cen­tu­ries, both a re­a­list, ide­a­list and mo­ra­list, and marine painter too. On ot­her oc­ca­sions – an edu­ca­tor, spi­ri­tu­al le­a­der, fat­her and son.
2. His youth was dif­fi­cult, but Al­gis re­a­li­zed early enough that a brush is so­mew­hat ligh­ter than a spa­de.
3. His cre­a­ti­ve path, cut­ting through dif­fe­rent his­to­ri­cal epochs, has be­en dra­ma­tic and rough. Ha­ving ri­sen du­ring the years of the cold war, it has sin­ce des­cen­ded upon the hot spots of our pla­net (Pa­ris… Rio… cer­tain di­stricts in Ams­ter­dam…). Ha­ving cros­sed de­ser­ted was­te­lands and wal­ked through brims­to­ne-smel­ling crow­ded ci­ties, Al­gis has en­te­red the re­alm of his­to­ri­cal ad­van­ce­ment and, with a sin­gle brus­hstro­ke, has wi­ped all the com­mu­nist scurf off the Earth as well as so­me ot­her pla­nets (mad do­ves of pe­a­ce… gar­dens blo­o­ming on Mars…) to re­ve­al the pri­me­val be­au­ty of the uni­ver­se (dar­kness). To­day, Al­gis’ pain­tings fill up all the gaps in the land­sca­pe of the world and cul­tu­re.
4. His ta­lent was con­cei­ved among the pe­op­le and star­ted blo­o­ming to­get­her with them – over a glass of red wi­ne. It ri­pe­ned in the Red Ar­my, though. It was Al­gis’ po­sters that rui­ned the high stan­ding of the So­viet mi­li­ta­ry for­ces and hel­ped Gor­bie co­me to po­wer. Gor­bie then rui­ned the Ber­lin wall. Af­ter that, eve­ry­o­ne has be­en rui­ning wha­te­ver he or she wants, ac­cor­ding to per­so­nal tas­te…
5. His pain­tings are suf­fu­sed with a cer­tain mys­te­rio­us light that eve­ry per­son of a nob­ler soul ke­eps das­hing to, even though no one is ever des­ti­ned to re­ach it whi­le ali­ve. How do­es this une­art­hly light find its way to Al­gis’ pain­tings? The pain­ter sa­ys it is sim­ple: I bre­at­he and he­re it is. This sa­ys a lot about his ta­lent, but do­es not re­al­ly help the count­less tro­ops of his pu­pils and ad­mi­rers.
6. “I was for­tu­na­te to ob­ser­ve the cre­a­ti­ve pro­cess…
In the be­gin­ning, he cre­a­ted a fra­me and a can­vas. The can­vas was ba­re and the fra­me un­pain­ted; on­ly smo­ke from a ci­ga­ret­te was flut­te­ring over the easel. Next he said, “Let the­re be light!” And the­re was light. He then se­pa­ra­ted the light from the dar­kness. All this hap­pe­ned on the first day of cre­a­tion.
On the se­cond day, he se­pa­ra­ted the paint, or­de­ring one part of it to gat­her in the up­per part of the can­vas, whi­le the rest was sup­po­sed to fill the si­des. He wor­ked this way for a few mo­re da­ys.
Six da­ys la­ter he had a pain­ting ful­ly cre­a­ted, and on the se­venth day he res­ted, drank vod­ka, and laug­hed.” (From the me­moirs of Ma­rie Sklo­dow­ska-Cu­rie).
7. On this si­de of the light the­re is a col­lap­sing and di­sin­teg­ra­ting world lost in scaf­fol­ding. The­re is no ho­pe to re­pair it as the ve­ry foun­da­tion was laid wrong. But Al­gis – an ide­a­list – a coup­le of years ago de­ci­ded to res­to­re No­ah’s ark: ac­cor­ding to him, the hulk that still sits on the top of Ara­rat is too ca­pa­cio­us as no­wa­da­ys the­re are so few righ­te­ous ones on this Earth, too few wort­hy of sa­ving… Mo­re­o­ver, we can see one of them ro­wing a bo­at, try­ing to get away from the Ark, whe­re vio­len­ce, smug­gling, and sex are thri­ving. This, alas, is our world… (“The Res­to­ra­tion of No­ah’s Ark”).
8. The din­ner in ruins (“An Ordinary Supper”). Eve­ry­o­ne who can is fe­as­ting in ruins to­day. On­ly a tree, per­haps a ro­wan, which pro­tects hu­man beings from evil spi­rits, has es­ca­ped to the fourth flo­or and is re­a­ching to­wards the une­art­hly light, re­min­ding us that the­re is no hap­pi­ness in this world. Be­au­ti­ful things can on­ly re­si­de in the be­yond. The­re­fo­re, it is qui­te lo­gi­cal that even in his works­hop the ar­tist ca­re­les­sly throws ci­ga­ret­te butts on the flo­or and squ­as­hes them with his fe­et. The­re will be no be­au­ty he­re.
9. Such is the re­a­li­ty, and the mas­ter do­es not at­tempt to be­au­ti­fy it, alt­hough he has fre­qu­ent­ly suf­fe­red for the truth. Loc­ked do­ors, a bro­ken torch, and a rub­ber stick that ne­ver blo­oms – all the­se are in­se­pa­rab­le at­ten­dants of the tra­gic des­ti­ny.
10. And still, eve­ry pit prompts him to se­ek the heights. In eve­ry stick, upon ca­re­ful exa­mi­na­tion, he se­es the emb­ryo of a bud.
11. “Ve­ro­ni­ca’s Dre­am.” Eve­ry­o­ne in Eu­ro­pe knows of this girl’s tra­ge­dy. Tho­se who do not, will at le­ast re­call Op­he­lia’s fa­te, alt­hough the­re are no re­cords of her il­le­gi­ti­ma­te preg­nan­cy – the re­a­son of Ve­ro­ni­ca’s un­ti­me­ly de­ath. Al­gis ap­pro­a­ches Ve­ro­ni­ca’s sto­ry in a new way. Drow­ned Ve­ro­ni­ca’s po­stu­re ex­pli­cit­ly shows that she has re­con­ci­led with the si­tu­a­tion. Co­lour­ful, ob­vio­us­ly non-Lit­hu­a­nian fish are let­ters from a re­pen­ting pimp and al­so a Gre­en Card – an in­vi­ta­tion to Ame­ri­ca. But Ve­ro­ni­ca lo­oks away with dis­dain…
12. And the light… Un­der­wa­ter-po­stmor­tem light. You re­a­li­se that the girl would not want to re­turn to the dark abyss of pas­sions any­mo­re. I fe­el the­re is gre­at edu­ca­tio­nal va­lue in this work of art, as it is cer­tain­ly no ac­ci­dent that mo­re and mo­re vir­tuo­us girls (in Lon­don, Pra­gue, Ber­lin…) are cho­o­sing Ve­ro­ni­ca’s way.
But why is this pain­ting not in the al­bum? Has the ar­tist not pain­ted it yet?
By the way, a lot of Al­gis’ most be­au­ti­ful can­va­ses are ne­ver dis­cus­sed for the sim­ple re­a­son that they ha­ve ne­ver be­en pain­ted. But is the­re any ne­ed to paint? Is the­re still any­o­ne who fails to grasp the mas­ter’s vis­tas, even if they be li­mi­ted to fra­mes on­ly?
Art cri­tics from dif­fe­rent coun­tries do not ne­ces­sa­ri­ly ag­ree on this point…
13. “The Coun­try of Bal­lo­ons.” The emp­tier the sto­machs, the big­ger the bal­lo­ons – this prin­cip­le used to sym­bo­li­ze the So­viet li­fes­ty­le. To­day, in the fly­ing skull of a don­key (a cro­co­di­le?) I can see both a vi­sion of Eu­ro­pe it­self and man­kind’s das­hing pro­gress. So­me of the fi­nest thre­ads still con­nect the si­nis­ter ima­ge of the ide­al to re­a­li­ty, but the­re is no doubt: the skull will so­on ta­ke off and car­ry the su­bli­me spec­tac­le to hell.
14. Ide­als fly, whe­re­as a be­gin­ning in­tel­lec­tu­al (“The Ica­rus Syn­dro­me”) will so­on bre­ak his neck. Su­re, he do­es not lack de­ter­mi­na­tion but his bo­dy is al­re­a­dy ex­haus­ted and the bur­den of the wings too he­a­vy. The cri­sis and cri­ti­que of a con­su­me­rist so­cie­ty – this is what a fort­hright, un­sop­his­ti­ca­ted vie­wer would say.
15. Let him be. No one will be ab­le to help tho­se who can­not dis­tin­guish a Breug­hel from a ba­gel.
16. A fly­ing egg, pain­ted a num­ber of years ago, when hu­man beings (even in Wes­tern Eu­ro­pe!) we­re still in­te­res­ted in both star­lit skies abo­ve them and mo­ral laws in­si­de them. To­day, ma­ny of us would be re­pul­sed by such a hu­ge edib­le thing flo­a­ting abo­ve the ci­ty with no ob­vio­us pur­po­se. This is why Al­gis, an ar­tist inc­re­dib­ly sen­si­ti­ve to hu­man suf­fe­ring, ne­ver ex­hi­bits this pain­ting, fe­a­tu­ring the egg and a few ot­her ob­jects, flo­od­lit by a daun­ting pink light. The­re is al­so a long whi­te stick furt­her in the bac­kground – this is a fi­re­ball, straigh­te­ned by cor­rup­tion. The egg, the fi­re­ball, and a win­dow on fi­re (on the left) – we can­not see any pe­op­le in the win­dow, but we su­spect that they are sit­ting be­hind it (on the right), eating an ome­let­te – all this cre­a­tes an in­ten­se emo­tio­nal field the hung­ry ones should avoid. Well, we can of cour­se in­ter­pret the pain­ting dif­fe­rent­ly. Ma­y­be it is not an egg, ma­y­be it is a cloud flo­a­ting the­re. Ho­we­ver, this would be an in­ter­pre­ta­tion of a well-fed id­ler, an art gour­mand, alien to pe­op­le on the frin­ge.
17. By the way, I ve­ry much doubt if eve­ry­o­ne in Eu­ro­pe will re­a­li­ze why an egg, at le­ast a si­ze­ab­le egg, should be unat­tai­nab­le to a de­cent Lit­hu­a­nian. On the ot­her hand, one might sli­ce off the up­per part of the pain­ting and ex­plain it wit­hout the egg. Of cour­se, a cul­tu­red per­son (and they are so few on the Earth!) would call this sug­ges­tion out­ra­ge­ous and unac­cep­tab­le. I just wan­ted to draw our at­ten­tion to the fact that even if we cut up the pain­ting, its aesthe­tic po­wer do­es not di­sap­pe­ar. This me­ans that one can find in Al­gis’ pain­tings that so­met­hing that Chek­hov was not ab­le to find in hu­man beings.
18. And this is on­ly the ve­ry first and su­per­fi­cial la­y­er of me­a­nings! If we scrat­ched off the paint, we would be daun­ted by a light spa­ce. Ga­zing at it, we would find even mo­re fo­od for thought. And for the soul. But even though he has blot­ted out this spa­ce with paint – ma­y­be he should not ha­ve do­ne so – the ar­tist has not ful­ly de­stro­y­ed the exis­ten­tial po­ten­tial that lies hid­den be­hind it.
19. And what if we ma­de one mo­re step for­ward to­wards an even mo­re pro­found un­ders­tan­ding of art and got rid of the can­vas it­self? We would then ha­ve the fra­me, from which eve­ry­o­ne could ma­ke crut­ches for per­so­nal use. Or ma­y­be even do­ors! To le­a­ve and start a new li­fe.
20. Ho­we­ver, this is for gour­mands on­ly. But what about tho­se who are con­vin­ced that art has to be “un­ders­to­od”? It is for them that Al­gis so­me­ti­mes draws a TV set in a cor­ner, and then eve­ry­o­ne who co­mes to the ex­hi­bi­tion can watch TV for hours and fe­el at ho­me (“Pa­trio­tic Ga­mes”).
21. For the most ex­pe­rien­ced, tho­se that pur­port they are no lon­ger af­raid of any kind of art, the­re is “Sim­ply Ma­ria.” An or­di­na­ry Lit­hu­a­nian wo­man (but she can al­so be a Mus­lim) lin­gers on the ro­ad­si­de, a bas­ket of bil­ber­ries in hand. The po­wer­ful of the world fly past in fan­cy li­mou­si­nes. No one stops. What do they, big shots, ca­re about bil­ber­ries when su­per­mar­kets over­flow with pi­ne­ap­ples?
Two sty­les. Two li­ves. Two ga­la­xies.
So­me fly past all smug; ot­hers stay be­hind an­no­y­ed… And then lo­ok, skysc­ra­pers start fal­ling… This pain­ting by Al­gis, a war­ning, pain­ted a go­od ten years ago, was han­ging cons­pi­cuo­us­ly in the ar­tist’s works­hop. Any­o­ne could see it. But did the spe­cial ser­vi­ces pay any at­ten­tion? Dre­am on! If they had, the­re would ha­ve be­en no 9/11.
22. The­re are no li­mou­si­nes in the pain­ting, of cour­se. The ar­tist ap­pe­als to an ex­pe­rien­ced vie­wer, ab­le to dif­fe­ren­tia­te bet­we­en van gogh and gau­guin, du­rer and dur­ren­matt, cho­pin and scho­pen­hau­er, etc. For such an in­di­vi­du­al one thing is im­me­dia­te­ly ob­vio­us: if the­re is a ro­ad, the­re must be a tra­vel­ler. And he­re co­mes the cat­har­sis! If you watch the pain­ting for mo­re than 24 hours, you will de­fi­ni­te­ly see an omi­nous black BMW emer­ge be­hind the slim wo­man’s back. A do­or slams and out co­me a te­am of nur­ses. Such ef­fects can on­ly be cre­a­ted by a gre­at mas­ter.
23. The can­vas “Aqu­a­rius” gi­ves shi­vers. A child, a ba­by re­al­ly, is car­ry­ing two of the ap­pa­rent­ly most be­au­ti­ful Lit­hu­a­nian la­kes away – to Eu­ro­pe. This is what all tho­se ga­mes that Brus­sels of­fi­cials en­joy so much ha­ve led to! Ha­ving se­en this non­pa­reil cre­a­tion of his fi­nis­hed, the ar­tist was so shoc­ked that, hard­ly cons­cio­us, he out­did him­self and pain­ted so­met­hing even mo­re non­pa­reil (“A Va­ga­bond Ci­ty”). This ti­me, a train is drag­ging a part of Lit­hu­a­nia it­self. Now it was the Bel­gians’ turn to be shoc­ked and they im­me­dia­te­ly vo­ted for Lit­hu­a­nia’s en­tran­ce in­to the Eu­ro­pe­an Union – on con­di­tion that it re­mai­ned exac­tly whe­re it was.
24. But of cour­se, it is the bra­ve child’s des­ti­ny that wor­ries the vie­wer the most. Be­lie­ve me, the child is sa­fe and sound! The ar­tist al­wa­ys ta­kes ca­re of the des­ti­nies of the cha­rac­ters he cre­a­tes. The child is now ma­tu­re and a well-known den­tist, My­ko­las Y. Years la­ter we en­coun­ter him in ot­her can­va­ses such as “Pilg­rim” and “The Weig­hing of Salt in the Cen­tre of Eu­ro­pe.” It is qui­te pe­cu­liar, but the ar­tist do­es not pla­ce the den­tist in a cli­nic. No, My­ko­las Y. is lo­o­king around in the wil­der­ness. It would se­em that in the den­tist’s opi­nion, or­di­na­ry na­tu­ral field boul­ders are no wor­se than ar­ti­fi­cial­ly grown tar­tar – or re­nal cal­cu­lus for that mat­ter! A new and inc­re­dib­ly bra­ve point: even the­se da­ys na­tu­re has a fu­tu­re!
25. “Cor­ri­da” le­a­ves an even stron­ger im­pres­sion. Pain­ted in an ag­ra­rian man­ner, it aims to draw the Eu­ro-Par­lia­ment’s at­ten­tion to cer­tain so­re is­su­es in ag­ri­cul­tu­re. A few ca­re­ful brush stro­kes he­re, a few li­nes the­re, are enough to re­ve­al the un­can­ny tra­ge­dy of a Lit­hu­a­nian (Slo­ve­ne?) far­mer. Even a Brus­sels of­fi­cial with his eyes al­wa­ys wi­de shut will be start­led at the sight of the he­a­dy ud­der of a ru­fous cow. But why, ins­te­ad of rus­hing to milk it, is the far­mer hol­ding a dir­ty rag in front of the cow’s eyes? Is he a clown? A sa­dist? A mad­man? Oh, don’t jud­ge too fast! What is the point in mil­king the­se da­ys? Who will ca­re for the milk? Eu­ro­pe do­es not ne­ed it. Wi­ne, blo­od, oil – this is what has va­lue to­day.
26. Do­es the ar­tist pro­po­se any way out?
The fri­vo­lous cow is cu­rio­us­ly wat­ching the rag and the­re is no doubt that she would be wat­ching TV with even mo­re cu­rio­si­ty, should a TV set be put in front of her right in the field. We could even bring one from a pain­ting men­tio­ned be­fo­re! Ha­ving was­hed her eyes with the so­ap of ope­ras, the po­or thing would be ab­le to es­ca­pe from glo­o­my re­a­li­ty at le­ast for a short whi­le.
And thus we can see a fra­gi­le flo­wer of ho­pe bre­a­king its way through the glo­o­my co­lou­ring of the pain­ting – in a free coun­try, eve­ry­o­ne has a chan­ce! No ne­ed to wait for fa­vours from eit­her Was­hing­ton or the Va­ti­can.
27. Is this not the re­a­son why an or­di­na­ry vil­la­ge mot­her is se­wing a vi­sion of the mot­her­land for her­self and her fa­mi­ly (“A Coun­try­si­de Se­amst­ress”)? The vi­sion is qui­te be­au­ti­ful from afar: on eit­her si­de the ri­ver lie long fields of bar­ley and of rye that clot­he the world and me­et the sky; and through the field the ro­ad runs by to ma­ny-to­we­red Vil­nius… But let’s en­ter one yard…
28. Eu­roin­teg­ra­tion. An in­tel­lec­tu­al, in­ca­pab­le of in­teg­ra­ting, has be­en thrown out… Ot­hers, still so­mew­hat ca­pab­le, are re­a­ching for a bot­tle, ho­pe in their eyes… Ruins, dirt, re­ek… On­ly the lit­tle ones are flo­a­ting ti­ny bo­ats, fly­ing ki­tes and still dre­a­ming of hit­ting a big ro­ad… (“Co­li­seum”).
29. Will they hit? Will they stri­ke at all? This is not a mat­ter of hu­man will. We can now see one of tho­se who left the yard a coup­le of years ago, un­dres­sed and spi­ked with nails – the in­ter­net ge­ne­ra­tion is ha­ving fun (“Se­bas­tian”).
30. Now, let’s lo­ok at a girl who has just kil­led her mot­her’s co­ha­bi­tant. She is still clut­ching an axe, per­haps her on­ly com­for­ter (The girl’s fat­her, the ped­dler Ko­lia, di­sap­pe­a­red in the red-light di­strict of Ams­ter­dam fi­ve years ago…). The guy’s sli­my en­ti­ce­ments are still rin­ging in her ears: “Co­me try, swe­e­tie pie, co­me try…” he would be mum­bling, a bot­tle of ho­me­ma­de vod­ka in hand (“Ju­dith from Uþuba­lis”).
31. Then – she­er moc­ke­ry – on a moun­tain, that is ne­it­her high nor ste­ep, emer­ges “The Light of Ho­pe” (ve­ry si­mi­lar to a red light, by the way). So­me­how, no­bo­dy is try­ing to re­ach it any­mo­re, even though, jud­ging by the worn stairs, at­tempts ha­ve be­en nu­me­rous. In­fa­tu­a­ted by the swe­et pro­mi­ses from the go­vern­ment, the po­or things ha­ve slip­ped and slid in­to ot­her pain­tings, ma­y­be not even Al­gis’, to be­co­me gangs­ters and mur­de­rers, beg­gars and go­fers. A hi­de­ous and dep­res­si­ve sight.
32. And still… If we we­re to wi­den this so­mew­hat nar­row pain­ting at le­ast a coup­le me­ters to the left and anot­her coup­le me­ters to the right, we would see plen­ty of the most won­der­ful things: banks and hol­dings, ma­ho­ga­ny par­qu­ets and su­per­mar­kets, glo­wing high­wa­ys and fat but nim­ble men on the run to tend to their bu­si­nes­ses… In ot­her words, ma­ny pain­tings would ac­qui­re ot­her di­men­sions if the ar­tist ad­ded a sun in the left cor­ner. He would not ne­ed much paint and the ef­fect would be enor­mous.
But no­ne of this is to be found eit­her in this pain­ting, or in ot­her works by Al­gis. Why?
Well, ob­vio­us­ly, just be­cau­se the ar­tist trusts his vie­wer’s sa­ga­ci­ty and the­re­fo­re can af­ford to le­a­ve a lot out­si­de the fra­mes.
33. One could go on and on about the splen­dour of his pain­tings fo­re­ver, but no quill is ca­pab­le of this. One should get a pia­no and start pla­y­ing, oc­ca­sio­nal­ly tou­ching the black ke­ys as well. Ho­we­ver, such a com­po­ser has not yet be­en born in Eu­ro­pe. To­day a com­po­ser rings his own do­or­bell and ner­vous­ly de­mands, who is the­re?
34. Be­cau­se thre­ats lin­ger all around. It is not wit­hout a pur­po­se that the ar­tist wants to lock the ci­ty of his youth in a ro­om. But the ci­ty – a frigh­te­ning black drun­ken-eyed cre­a­tu­re – is thrus­ting its bo­dy out of the can­vas, thre­a­te­ning to de­vour the ca­re­less vie­wer – just li­ke the fish, flo­a­ting in am­bush, wai­ting for co­lour­ful im­mig­rants on both si­des of “The Har­bour.” An un­cul­tu­red vie­wer will un­doub­ted­ly re­cog­ni­ze po­li­ti­cal for­ces at work he­re, as well as their work prin­cip­les and pro­spects.
But a mo­re in­sigh­tful in­di­vi­du­al’s eye will be ab­le to pick out a la­dy in black, tol­ling the bells in the ho­ri­zon. Don’t ask for whom…
35. It is even mo­re sca­ry to watch “A Ci­ty on the Tab­le.” Qui­te a few po­li­ti­cal big­wigs ha­ve al­re­a­dy ex­pres­sed their de­si­re to pur­cha­se the pain­ting. So­me ha­ve or­de­red “Lit­hu­a­nia on a Spo­on,” “Lat­via on the Tip of a Ton­gue”… Alas, this is how art is un­ders­to­od the­se da­ys.
36. Is this what the ar­tist was ai­ming at? Oh no! A few im­por­tant things on the tab­le be­ar wit­ness not to swal­lo­wing, but to the work that is in pro­gress he­re. The “No stop­ping” sign or­ders you to work un­til you drop. Ho­we­ver, the one who has be­en wor­king is now­he­re in sight at the mo­ment de­pic­ted. This is un­ner­ving. Whe­re is he? Al­gis do­es not of­fer any ans­wer, but on­ly warns us that all tho­se who think dif­fe­rent­ly will ine­vi­tab­ly be dis­po­sed of. You le­a­ve the ex­hi­bi­tion un­cons­cio­us, ha­ving lost your pe­a­ce of mind for ever.
37. Well, ac­tu­al­ly, we can see a fi­gu­re skul­king off in the se­cond ground (a snob would say, in the back­ground). Per­haps it was he who was sit­ting at his desk just a coup­le of mi­nu­tes ago, then jum­ped up all frust­ra­ted and left… Is the­re any lack of frust­ra­ting things in this world, things ca­pab­le of thro­wing our sen­si­ti­ve (all Al­gis’ cha­rac­ters are im­men­se­ly sen­si­ti­ve) con­tem­po­ra­ry off ba­lan­ce? Ma­y­be his sa­la­ry has be­en de­la­y­ed? Ma­y­be his boss has knoc­ked out his front te­eth and at the mo­ment the po­or thing is he­a­ding to the po­li­ce, whe­re he will lo­se the re­mai­ning ones?
38. In any ca­se, he must re­ach the cros­sro­ad be­cau­se it is on­ly the­re that the po­wer of the omi­nous sign ends. It is a pi­ty that the pain­ting al­so ends at the sa­me cros­sro­ad and we will ne­ver le­arn what hap­pens next. By the way, I ha­ve no­ti­ced that all Al­gis’ pain­tings fi­nish this way – too so­on – even tho­se that are not fra­med.
39. I can­not say much mo­re about that per­son in the bac­kground, ex­cept that he will not walk ve­ry far. It is dif­fi­cult to me­et a go­od man around the cor­ner.
In fact, ma­ny of Al­gis’ pain­tings ha­ve thril­ler ele­ments. The vie­wer’s strai­ned ga­ze ner­vous­ly sli­des from the left bot­tom cor­ner up to the right up­per cor­ner wit­hout a mo­ment’s de­via­tion to one si­de or the ot­her, even though this is whe­re a gor­ge­ous lo­ver of art is pro­bab­ly wai­ting for his at­ten­tion. This is bad, but go­od in a way.
40. By the way, it is qui­te pos­sib­le that the “No stop­ping” sign in the pain­ting ac­tu­al­ly sa­ys, “En­tran­ce for­bid­den.” In this ca­se, the in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the work of art chan­ges com­ple­te­ly.
41. And still, in spi­te of all in­ter­dic­tions, the ar­tist’s soul is free. Of cour­se, pha­ri­se­es used to rep­ro­ach Al­gis: why did he still par­ti­ci­pa­te in group ex­hi­bi­tions?!.. On­ce the ar­tist lost his pa­tien­ce and re­tor­ted, “But is this your bu­si­ness? We­re you at my si­de when I sto­od up to res­to­re No­ah’s Ark? Even to­day, se­ven years la­ter, the Ark is still in scaf­fol­ding. Is this your so-cal­led cul­tu­ral po­li­tics? Thus get lost all of you, you jerks!” The pha­ri­se­es could on­ly ut­ter, “Mas­ter, you ha­ve ex­plai­ned it all, and so well.” No one has da­red to con­tra­dict the ar­tist ever sin­ce, and the pu­re ones ha­ve brought brus­hes and oil paint.
42. This is why so­me of Al­gis’ works are pain­ted with oil. In the “Opel Ka­det” for­mat. The­se are ob­vio­us signs that the ar­tist is try­ing to ap­pe­al to a Third World per­son, gna­wing at a her­ring in a de­ser­ted Wes­tern Eu­ro­pe­an car ce­me­te­ry. This is hu­ma­nist pain­ting.
So­me­ti­mes, pun­dits in­qui­re whet­her the oil Al­gis uses is cho­les­te­rol free.
The ar­tist is known to ha­ve said in res­pon­se, “You fo­ol! If your bo­dy sta­ys he­alt­hy, your soul will wan­der in dar­kness fo­re­ver.”
43. I do not ana­ly­se the co­lours and forms of Al­gis’ pain­tings on pur­po­se. Go­od pain­tings do not ne­ed things li­ke that. In­de­ed, the most splen­did pain­tings of na­tu­re are not co­lour­ful. And if the ar­tist oc­ca­sio­nal­ly dabs so­me paint on a can­vas, it is on­ly in or­der to say to tho­se who are al­wa­ys in a hur­ry, stop! Tho­se who can he­ar will pau­se, lo­ok in­to the depths and, start­led, will drop a bot­tle, a kni­fe, or an ex­plo­si­ve de­vi­ce…
44. So­me­ti­mes at night the light in Al­gis’ works­hop sud­den­ly go­es off. This me­ans that the ve­te­ran is con­ve­y­ing his ex­pe­rien­ce to the young…
But to the mas­ter him­self all po­si­tions are all too cle­ar! The­re­fo­re, we find him nap­ping in a Bie­der­mei­er arm­chair mo­re and mo­re fre­qu­ent­ly. Still, his bad ha­bit-ad­dic­ted fin­gers are con­ti­nuo­us­ly crum­pling and rum­pling so­met­hing… This is how – ab­so­lu­te­ly by chan­ce! – the won­der­ful cop­per strings we­re born. The­re is no doubt that the ar­tist wo­ve his brigh­test fan­ta­sies in­to them: to li­ve fo­re­ver, to lo­ve pas­sio­na­te­ly, at le­ast three ti­mes a we­ek… The­se strings are Al­gis’ most so­lid cre­a­tions.
45. Tho­se who want to com­pre­hend the ori­gi­nal idea of the wi­re strings must find the right end of the wi­re. Then they can un­re­el the who­le thing and if the re­sult turns out un­sa­tis­fac­to­ry, we­a­ve a com­ple­te­ly new ver­sion of it. This is pre­ci­se­ly why Al­gis ne­ver uses che­a­per bar­bed wi­re.
46. Su­re, ma­ny avant-gar­de ar­tists, much mo­re di­sad­van­ta­ged by na­tu­re than Al­gis, would try to shock the vie­wer by elec­tri­fy­ing the wi­re. Al­gis do­es not do that. He re­lies on a stick and ot­her tried me­ans.
47. “So­me­ti­mes his enor­mous ta­lent dis­turbs the pain­ting pro­cess. But he should out­grow this pre­di­ca­ment.” (Char­les Per­rault, “About him,” p. 454).
48. Al­gis is a born ma­ri­ne pain­ter; this is why the­re are al­wa­ys op­por­tu­ni­ties for fish – even her­rings! – in his pain­tings. Hu­man beings are a mo­re com­pli­ca­ted is­sue. From ti­me to ti­me so­me­o­ne co­mes to Al­gis to ask him to paint his or her por­trait, in which ca­se Al­gis al­wa­ys de­mands the spe­cial ser­vi­ces to gat­her enough in­for­ma­tion for him to de­ci­de whet­her the client is go­od. The­re is no pla­ce for bad pe­op­le in his pain­tings. This is why we ne­ver see any big shots the­re.
But if – ex­tre­me­ly sel­dom and on­ly ex­haus­ted by tough cir­cums­tan­ces – the ar­tist paints a bad per­son, such a pain­ting eit­her lacks per­spec­ti­ve or, by con­trast, it is all too cle­ar.
On­ce he pain­ted a por­trait: Earl Bir­ming­ham in the Gar­dens of Lu­xem­bourg at a ban­qu­et tab­le. (The ban­qu­et was ar­ran­ged to ce­leb­ra­te Lit­hu­a­nia’s en­tran­ce in­to NA­TO). The pain­ter ca­me to the Gar­dens so hung­ry that he im­me­dia­te­ly star­ted grab­bing and swal­lo­wing eve­ryt­hing that was dis­pla­y­ed on the tab­le (be­ef stro­ga­noff and Wel­ling­ton, trans­pa­rent sli­ces of car­pac­cio, opa­que pie­ces of ba­con, both ro­ger and fran­cis…). The cor­pu­lent En­glish gent­le­man star­ted wa­ning un­der eve­ry­o­ne’s eyes. In the eve­ning he was al­re­a­dy so skin­ny that when the ar­tist ope­ned the do­or, the Earl fell out of the fra­me, ex­cu­sed him­self and died.
This is qui­te usu­al in the world of art. Should we bot­her?
49. Al­gis’ ans­wer is cle­ar: no! The­re is this fan­ta­sy thril­ler, “Chic­ken­pox,” qui­te cha­rac­te­ris­tic of the ar­tist’s sty­lis­tics. A wo­man of the Earth (a mot­her) has grab­bed a spot­ted alien and is hol­ding it by the leg. The world do­es not end with what we see with our two eyes, just as li­fe do­es not end with the ro­ad that we walk along with our two (so­me­ti­mes four) legs…
50. “What should we do, brot­hers?” vie­wers are frigh­tful­ly as­king each ot­her in front of the pain­tings.
Al­gis Al­gis Griške­vi­čius has said to a cer­tain per­son from Zu­rich, “Do not fe­ar. Be­lie­ve.”
The rest is si­len­ce.

World According to Algis

Numerous pieces of wattle, handmade from copper, brass and wood celebrate painter Algis Griskevicius’ incessant desire to keep experimenting with new materials. However, it is undoubtedly not merely the artist’s keenness on radical experimentation or his creative exploitation of various materials and techniques that fascinate the viewer. True, the latter will be surprised by Griskevicius’ fondness of such a seemingly female activity as handiwork. Still, what is even more captivating is first and foremost the consistency of his experiments which allows the viewer to follow the artist’s train of thought as well as the slow movements of his characters, caught in a somewhat absurd earthly pilgrimage, or else, in the world according to Algis, a world tinted by autumn melancholy, where the paint of the houses slowly peels away and the living creatures are neither human nor beastly, but both. The copper-brass-wooden spectacle that the viewer is confronted with is neat but intricate. It traps the viewer’s eye in the maze of graceful lines and sleek forms. Griskevicius takes risks – he has chosen the materials that have too much power over colours and forms. Wood dries and changes. Likewise, one is never sure what colour brass will acquire when put into acid. Welded metal strings require space. This incessant fight between the artist’s stubborn hand and resisting material endows these works with vitality. These pieces of art leave a lot of space for improvisation, but at the same time they also play with conventions and the viewer’s expectations.
Austėja Čepauskaitė