Artothlon, Summer 2009

The good news is, all our Lithuanian artist friends are great. And Miga has organised for us to present our work to each other at the Contemporary Art Centre, the CAC, tomorrow afternoon.

The bad news is, we’re very worried, now, about what we’ve let ourselves in for.

For a start, we had bought flowers, vodka and pickles to welcome our eight fellow artists. Ten turned up – which didn’t seem to make any sense.

It got more bewildering when the director put us all into the studio with the sofas and started calling out names. This was in Lithuanian, but Renate, our facilitator, whispered a translation for us. He called out two men, then a woman.

Then he announced that the remaining seven people had to find bananas – if they found one, they’d be in – otherwise they were out. It became apparent that the crude foil packages that looked like giant Hershey kisses on the floor were key to this.

Some had bananas, some had sweetcorn cobs.

Devela, who the lads had met in the bar the night before, was not in.

Aukse, who had a banana, decided she didn’t think she wanted to be in this show any more, and gave her banana to Romeo, who’d found only sweetcorns.

Each of them then had to say something about themselves, on camera.

It was excruciating – we squirmed, and so did they. Whoever updated our facebook page got it right – it was totally disrespectful to the artists.

Turns out that these guys had only recieved an email the day before, telling them to be at the studio at the alotted time. They had no idea what was going to happen after that.

There’s more. The director spoke to the remaining Lithuanian artists while we looked on and they told us, later, that he said they all should stay in the dorm – because they want to film us there.

As far as we’re concerned, that’s just NOT going to happen. It’s not what we signed up for. What’s more, most of them don’t want to, and why would they? As it happens, our communal area can barely accomodate us as it is.

They were also told that the project goes on till the 7 September. Er, no it doesn’t. We’ve all made arrangements to be back home at the beginning of September.

Strangely, only me and Tom were miked up, but the filming only stopped half way through our barbeque.

Right now, none of us are kicking our heels with joy – and neither are our new Lithuanian friends, who, it appears, are even more guinea pigs than we are.

It all reinforces our concern that the new producers aren’t concerned with making a show about art, which is what we came here for, but intend to go for sensationalism – of the most crummy kind.

Let’s just say, we’re considering our options.

A bunch of us are just back from the flea market, and we’re ready to help Paulius carry some old furniture from the dorm to the studios. We ain’t just the talent – we’re talented labourers, too.

I’ve always wanted long hair.

So today’s the big day. We may be doing some aesthletics morning exercises, once everyone’s up.

A few who went out on the town last night met one of the Lithuanian artists, mid 20s, very nice, lives in Vilnius, hopes she can stay with us.

We think we get the contracts today. The original idea, thought up by two Miga and Vylnas. They’re pretty prominent in their fields – we’ve not met Vylnas yet but for sure, Miga’s got integrity. He’s planning a project on migration, involving travelling across Europe in RVs, down to Linz (where Emily is). God, I’d love to be involved with that.

But like I mentioned before, the original team are no longer in charge. There was, thanks to (apparently) absurd restrictions put on the original producer by the TV company, a last-minute walk-out and the runner-up producer brought in with his own team. Hence the vague plans, non-appearance of contracts and general all-round uncertainty.

The new guys that we met the other day, I think their portfolio is the usual run-of-the-mill reality tv shows, with an emphasis on FREAK.

Talking of contracts, we’re worried. We all signed up to do an arts/TV project. Dining out on being on a Lithuanian reality TV show for artists at home before the event isn’t the same as being in Lithuania and realising, en famille, that we’re being turned over to a production team that intend to put out a “REALITY TV SHOW” involving weirdo artists.

We’ve talked about it, and we all think that the most important thing about the project for each of us is collaborating with each other and the Lithuanians. In fact, we’d be pretty happy all round if the teams were to rotate so we all got a chance to work with each other.

That’s happened already – Justin and Nat on their radiohead, thinking up ideas together and playing wiffle hurling in the park, some random play and lots and lots of documenting…

We’re all agreed that we have to stick together to keep some control over what we do. The production team are talking about monetary fines, for example, if we don’t do as we’re told. We think they can go jump in the River Neris.

Can we be in control or have we been naive?

So we find out this evening that we’re meeting the Lithuanian artists tomorrow. All eight of them. And then they move in with us.

We’re wondering – do we take shots of vodka? or flowers? or both?

Meanwhile, the TV company’s PR team are very taken with our facebook group.

At the moment, our PR seems much more pro-active than the TV company’s.

We’re planning a glamour shot for facebook. It might be my only chance to get out my whore heels.

Staring at an empty browser window is never good for the soul, so I’ve de-camped to this excellent little internet cafe round the corner.

After the filming session yesterday it all seems to be getting even odder than it was before.

We still haven’t met the Lithuanian artists, the “home team”, and with no assignment until Saturday, we have nothing to do for three more days. We’re getting tetchy – not with each other – but to get working.

A couple of the guys thought it’d be good to get some publicity going so we’re going to set up a session to draw each other and use the results as publicity for the project.

They’ve set up a facebook group too.

A group of us took a long walk around the city this morning, to a) find an electric components shop and b) find the city beach by the river. We found both, eventually.

It’s an interesting time to be in Vilnius. The city’s changing rapidly and radically, and the pic I took on a bike ride illustrates this – a mix of medieval Old Town in the foreground, corporate capitalist shiny tower blocks to the right and soviet-era apartments in the backround.

If we can capture a sense of that energy in our work, we’ll be rockin.