AN INTERVIEW WITH LIUDVIKAS BUKLYS
by chris fitzpatrick
C.F. I'm in San Francisco, where are you?
L.B. At the moment, I'm in Ghent.
C.F. Okay, so I'm calling you and I'm nine hours behind. With time displaced, it seems appropriate to mention that a lot of your projects seem to exist in the form of studies for future works, or as proposals which may or may not ever be realized ? a wooden model of an exhibition's architecture, studies for a buried sculpture or for flowerpots. But they aren't quite models or plans; they aren't reducible in that way. Is it that the study itself is enough or that the study is a prompt to elicit a mental image of what the study suggests could follow, and that a mental image is enough?
L.B. It is about proposals, or creating a document, which contains a certain idea, but in which the idea is not represented or finished. I recently created a work, which you saw at Galerie Emanuel Layr in Vienna, called Study for a Buried Sculpture (2011). First I thought about the sentence "study for the buried sculpture" as an idea, or as a dilemma to think through in the studio. What can I do in relation to buried sculptures? Then I saw Sol Lewitt's show with the photographs, and he buried a cube. I started to think about all the possible buried or hidden sculptures in the world. First I made the drawings, but while these sketches look the same as the resulting structure, Study for a Buried Sculpture is actually more like a friend of buried sculptures than a buried sculpture itself.
C.F. A friendly sculpture?
L.B. Well, it's true that many buried sculptures exist in the world, so that's what the study's about.
C.F. So does it also function retrospectively - a study in reverse?
L.B. It's a study of things that are hidden, things we can only imagine and can't see. It's more about the idea of the sculpture ; about the idea of the object that thinks about impossible sculptures, but appears in the shape of sculpture.
C.F. I would like to meet a sentient sculpture. What about the studies for flowerpots? In 2010, I saw them in your exhibition Study at Enrico Fornello in Milan. The black iron circles seemed as if they were floating, seamlessly protruding from the wall, like perimeters inviting more than the absent pots. I imagined some vegetation growing in them - aromatic, romantic, antic, hologrammatic, cognitive, and so on.
L.B. Flowerpots are easy to imagine. They differ, of course, but the image invoked is always a flowerpot with a flower inside. If you place a flowerpot in an interior, the interior changes and, likewise, the interior can be changed again by removing the flowerpot. And also about the idea of a flowerpot. Neighbor's dog: Ahrwhoof, tfwoofef, ahrwhoof.
C.F. I wonder what the dog is saying? Anyways, you said something about the idea of a flowerpot?
L.B. I think the dog was trying to say that flowerpots were originally used for transporting plants with boats from one continent to another. So my interest in flowerpots is more about transporting things, and transporting the idea of things.
C.F. That reminds me of Unpacked Painting (2009), which you titled quite descriptively since it's an old painting that is unpacked and visible, but exhibited inside the packing material, which doubles as a sort of plinth or structure for the painting. By the way, the man it depicts looks a lot like Christopher Walken. I know it was at least unpacked at Croy Nielsen, in Berlin, right? Is this travelling painting an object that gains meaning through its dispersal, or is it a found object that's already layered with some significance other than its representational content? I haven't opened it yet, so I don't know.
L.B. Absolutely right, in?
Dog: Ahrwhoof, fhwoof, ahrwoof, hwroof, ahrfwoofoof.
C.F. Liudvikas, can you hear me? I thought I heard you say something about how in Soviet times the paintings had to be hidden? Is Unpacked Painting about the disappearance and reappearance of paintings?
L.B. Yes and no. It's not that all paintings were hidden, they were hanging somewhere, but it was illegal to sell them. In the year '87, antique markets and flea markets appeared. The painting belonged to a man who bought it in '89 for ten bucks or so in the flea market from the back of a car. Some guy opened the door and said : "Do you want to buy this painting?" It was kept hidden in the attic, but when I found it all these years later I thought it would be interesting to compare the network or market of contemporary art with this black market or network for trading and exchanging things.
C.F. I have a question about your exhibition with Antanas Gerlikas in 2008 at Tulips & Roses.
L.B. And then came Johny.
C.F. In the press release, whenever the letters "f" and "i" appear together they are replaced by a question mark, like "?rst" instead of "first" or "?nally" instead of "finally". Was this substitution necessary for reasons of phonetics, physiognomy, typeface, the hypothetical implications of its inversion "if", or for something else entirely?
L.B. I think it was just a mistake. I don't think it was done intentionally, but you know about Gintaras? [Did?iapetris] f-hole, right?
C.F. Yes, Post Brothers and I showed it in SC13 last year. It had a nice resonance.
L.B. Whenever the "f" appears, also the hole appears.
C.F. You have created at least two portraits of the Lithuanian sculptor and counterfeiter Ignacy Julian Ceyzik, and in more than one form. This seems fitting, since Ceyzik himself is represented in variable forms, with his surname appearing as - excuse my pronunciation - Cyjzyk, Cejzik, Ceizik, Cejzych, Ceyzik, Cezik, Cidzik, Cydzik, Zejzyk, and Zyjzik, according to your text. One, shown at Tulips & Roses, is a sort of abstract, angular, grey plasticine sculpture, while the other, shown at Emanuel Layr, is a wall painting ? soft, blue, and in the ambiguous shape of an arc. Can you tell me about these permutations? Are there others?
L.B. Ceyzik's story has followed me for a long time. When I studied sculpture in Vilnius, the art teacher told us about Ceyzik as a joke, during a lecture on nineteenth century artists. About four years later I decided to make something about this artist, but the teacher was gone and I couldn?t find anything. I asked friends if they remembered the lecture, but no one remembered his name. I started to think that maybe I just made it up, as if I dreamt it. Then by coincidence I found Ceyzik on a list of famous Lithuanian criminals. How could I make a portrait of him? I thought it would be stupid to conclude things, to start to make fake things, for instance. I decided instead to make pieces that are hiding the story or hiding his ways of making things, rather than showing them.
C.F. So the object is really a vehicle that carries Ceyzik's story, and you're portraying only his story, not his features?
L.B. Yes, the objects I made have a certain relation to Ceyzik, but it's more about installing his story into the gallery space, and about how people retell the story. Ceyzik's work is not really in museums. His appearance is primarily within a criminal list, so I thought to use what I know about him to make a portrait that appears in space, but also wills conversations into certain shapes.
C.F. From what I understand, Ceyzik elevated the status of clay in a time when it was rather unfashionable. Did that have some bearing on your interest in Ceyzik?
L.B. The way he understood ornamentation at that time is also important. It was the beginning of the nineteenth century and he was thinking completely through structure. For Ceyzik, ornamentation was a fragment of structure.
C.F. There's a certain sense of mystery around Ceyzik that I also find present in your c-print, Meeting a man who knows where the gold is buried (2009). The title is suggestive enough, but whose gold is the man looking for? It's a good time for gold, certainly more than for clay, with the recession and all.
L.B. It's a true story. After the studies for flowerpots, which were more about context, rectangles, conceptual art, '60s modernism, flowerpots, and functional design, I was thinking about how to enter a certain space that is more about things that do not exist, or about stories, legends or myths. By chance I got in touch with treasure hunters, who took me with them on some trips. One time we went to a village and met locals who said they knew where some gold was buried. We went to the woods, but in two cars. Another car came with friends of ours, so the treasure hunters didn't want to show the gold to all of us. My girlfriend took a snapshot from the car and, when I found it later, I saw this beautiful objectless situation in which only conversation and myth appear, and the landscape. Now I think of exhibitions as more of a conversation space where certain language ideas or ways of understanding things can develop.
C.F. Gold is another kind of buried sculpture.
L.B. Yes, and what I like is that they use the term "lifting"? They never say, "We dug it out." You lift gold from the ground. You lift things in a certain way, so there's a kind of visibility. Still, what interests me about things that are buried or hidden is not that they're old or anything related to archaeology or nostalgia. For me, it's not about the past.
C.F. Because I couldn't see the gold in the photograph, I started thinking about the relations between people and objects ? the searching, the speculation, the entering of black markets, and mapping things that may or may not exist. It's less about the gold than the meeting itself ?
L.B. That's the main idea, but maybe it also asks that you react to the space you are in when you see the photograph. It's about meetings, but about how those networks and relations can lead you somewhere.
C.F. In Jonas Zakaitas' text for your solo show Bindweed in 2010, I read that everything is an optical device. Do you agree?
L.B. I agree in terms of that show. Jonas wrote the text and I thought, yes, it's so universal. It makes a good layer ? an optical device sees you, and you see things through it, and yet it obscures something else. The flowerpot study is an optical device to see flowerpots. In a way the text works separately as well. Bindweed was a show with a text for any other show.
C.F. And of course the text itself is also an optical device. Do you ever find that your work has an effect on itself ?
L.B. The architecture you mentioned earlier, Untitled (Architecture of the Exhibition: A Thing Spins a Leaf by the Wind?) (2010), was made for an exhibition in Riga, with Gintaras, Elena [Narbutaite], and Antanas. It was a kind of self-created show, which we chose to display in a conference room. We didn't want to use the white rooms. Gintaras asked me if I wanted to create architecture for the show and then we thought it could be portable and reusable later. I went with this idea to the woodshop and said, I have a problem. I need to make portable architecture, but there will be nothing hanging on it, just the piece. So we started making sketches and we ended up with this shape. I thought about how exhibitions generate a certain language or introduce certain terms or ideas, and this is the shape of those ideas in the show.
C.F. So it's architecture of thought?
L.B. Well, it's not a maquette or a proposal. It is architecture and it was architecture in space. It has materiality. Part of the idea was how it could travel later, being the architecture of a show in the past. So, to answer your question about the causality between works, or how something can have an effect on itself, I like to see what happens when the titles appear in a list - whether it's in a portfolio or somewhere else - because you can see what kind of language appears between them. Sometimes the relationships are unexpected. Sometimes there's a kind of silence.
C.F. Do you know Nicolas Matranga?
L.B. Yes, I know him. He was just in Vienna.
C.F. He had an interesting misinterpretation of your portrait of Ceyzik. He said the wall drawing had the shape of a rainbow, but that there was no rainbow. I think he meant that there is often a blue sky behind a rainbow, but that this non-existent blue sky was only visible through the arc of a rainbow that wasn't there either. His description reminded me of the movie Predator, and how you can see the aliens, even when they're in invisibility mode; the visibly absent presences of the aliens abstract the jungle. His is one example of different readings of your work.
L.B. A blue rainbow, okay.
C.F. Well, I guess a rainbow for looking at blue skies through an abstraction arc.
L.B. I use the terms "backup strategies" or "backup structures" to refer to the stories I tell you or the information that emerges from within the conversations about my work. In a way they can appear as characters, which can participate with a certain amount of independence - with their own lives - and that can be called a strategy for making things. For me, what's more interesting is the language itself, and how it can lead me to make decisions. How can we build this shape? Can we keep the character of this drawing? Then they gain their independence, in a way. Then they can appear as a blue rainbow.