Artothlon, Summer 2009

Three things that happened today:

1. Just now at dinner, the new boy, Darius (filmmaker) was practicing his English. It’s not strong but he likes to make the effort. He says – Fiona – that’s a beautiful name.

Do you think so? Says I. Oh yes, he says. I know a Fiona – Hollywood.

Oh – what’s her name, says me.

He says the name of a film but I can’t catch with the pronunciation. She is very beautiful, says Darius.

I look puzzled, since I didn’t catch the name. Monica (who could pass for Angelina Jolie) asks him again for the film or the actress. It’s Shrek.

You are beautiful too, he says. On the inside.

He was all set to carry on this line of discussion but I asked Monica to ask him to stop right there. Eero decided to move all the knives.

2. I’m writing, a few people are having lunch in the communal area (lounge would be too strong a word) and a Lithuanian folk singing competition is on the TV. Andreia’s talking on the phone in the backround. The ads come on and Justin shouts to Andreia to pipe down as we can’t hear the ad.

It’s the ad for Artothlon and we’re all on it. Who could have imagined that a few months ago.

3. Saulius parks his car at a 30 degree angle – always. It’s embarrasingly bad. This morning at the laser firm, I can’t bear to walk out of it jutting that far into the road. He gives me the key and I park his car. We meet Donatus the director – sorry about that, I say, I was just parking Saulius’ car.

Why? It was sticking out into the middle of the road.

Donatus is puzzled, and asks – is that an English thing, to be concerned with how a car is parked?

Tonight we (Saulius and I, Andrus if he’s back) will draw a line of light through a location in the city.

I found the spot on a tip from Anja Westerfroelke – an artist from Linz who, with Marie Francoise Stewart Ebel from Brussels, is here for the project “ON SITE in Vilnius” in a recently-vacated prison. One part of this prison is a domed church that the Soviets converted into a sort of three storey activity centre for the prison. At the top, you’re standing at the apex of this baroque dome.

It’s about to be returned to some nuns and Anja has mapped the interior. The work, which looks like a huge sewing pattern, is moving through the building from being draped and hung to being folded in order to be packed away.

We’re using the laser beams I brought with me and some special, highly technical and very flat glass disc mirrors that we’ve rented from Geola, a laser and holographic firm in the city whose details I acquired before I left home – just in case. The mirrors come from Belarus and they’re gorgeous – we’ve been playing “catch the beam” with one that I borrowed, all weekend.

We were asked to respond to history and memory in the city. After that it’s open. Our location is a passage that leads from a street to a park. There’s a car park for a diplomatic apartment block on the one side, an ancient decrepit warehouse complete with Dickensian wooden lean-to shack on the other. It leads to a small area of trees and parkland which, at the other end, houses that odd Soviet underground toilet block.

The shack is shelter to an old man who started to grumble when we sketched out some ideas last night – God knows what he’ll make of the TV crew, magic arm clamps and (hopefully) several people milling around for a few hours that’ll hit him tonight.

Our task is to draw this line through the location, to make this line work, to acknowledge these buildings and to be strong enough at the end of this passage to turn a corner and beam up to the sky.

The beam will, of course, refract and get larger the further it goes, though these mirrors will help to minimise that (the compact mirrors that we began experimenting with last week didn’t work so well).

For sure, we’re working very much at verb level, but the process ahead of us has me wondering how Richard Wilson might approach it. Maybe we pierce the carpark, taking the beam in to it, along the inside and out again.

The director Donatus will be there with a steadycam and we have rented magic arm clamps to hold our mirrors. Fantastic to have access to such resources without worrying about the money.

For the first time, I’m really beginning to feel like, however simple it is, I’ve started to do what I came to do. And that’s very exciting.

Relaxed in Kernave, yesterday evening. Here are some pics.

A few notes on language:

It’s impressive to watch people switch from one language to another in conversation.

Pretty much everyone on this project speaks from native or fluent to at least functional English – which is a relief for a mono-linguist like me. It’s just so embarrassing not to be able to communicate in another language.

Commonly, people will communicate in English, or revert to Russian if it’s a common language, switch to Lithuanian for chit chat.

Some people appear to be more comfortable speaking English than they really are and will rely on others to translate for them. I’d probably end up doing the same, if I had more than my own, English, sadly lacking as it is in clarity.

Despite there being three Americans on this project, it became clear that I was the native English speaker who is most difficult to understand. I speak very quickly by habit, for a start (I know this already). More interestingly, (I hadn’t realised this) I use, without thinking, a lot of idiomatic words and expressions that just don’t make any sense to someone who isn’t familiar with them. Americans don’t.

Having begun to write this, I should now give some examples, but I can’t actually think of any. I’ll have to start taking notes.

So is idiomatic language a bad thing? Is it insular and exclusive, keeping out anyone who isn’t in the know? (There you go, there’s one.) I think of Cadogan, Greenwich and Southwark and it makes me shudder (yep, Tom asked me yesterday if I knew the South-Wark cyclists – and I can remember mis-pronouncing it when I first arrived in London and thinking what a poncy thing it was to have words that are pronounced completely differently to how they’re spelt).

Words and expressions can be such a simple pleasure. But I need to think before I speak (as it was ever thus).

On the look-out for locations today – both of my team-mates are away (for a baptism and a wedding). Was delighted to find the Viva Esperanto mark. Esperanto was invented in the 19th Century by Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof, a Pole of Lithuanian Jewish descent. He was saddened by the constant arguing between Poles, Germans and Belarussians and figured that a common world language could help people to communicate.

So it was popular round these parts. And hated by Nazis and Stalinists because of its anti-nationalistic tendencies.

So Esperantists were up there with Jews, Roma, homosexuals and partisans (Lithuanian nationalists) on the Nazi/Stalinist hate lists.

Continued from last post…

Tom’s team did a performance that articulated the US outsider artist Henry Darger. One of the jurors suggested it had been done before (what hasn’t?) but Rafal had never performed anything before and he did the whole thing. They won the audience votes this week and got the prize. (A massage. Each.)

Pavel tattooed a stencil of the face of the host (art student turned pop producer) on to belly pork and invited him to eat it at a set table in the studio. Pop will eat itself, etc. They also took an unpopular public sculpture and covered it in a popular free newspaper called “15 minutes” – to the annoyance of the local police, the entertainment of onlookers and, of course, the delight of the camera crew.

My team, sadly, was the runt pup of the week. We invented a new brand, a product. It was a drink, we named it after a play on the Lithuanian word for possibility (Galimbe: switch the light on), and the strapline was that with this product, you can do anything if you want to, or not – it’s up to you. Of course, there’s nothing in the product – it’s 20 per cent packaging, 80 per cent you. It reminded me of Omid Dhajili’s story about Beckett in The Times not long ago. Anyway, the jurors – and presumeably the viewers – felt that this was lost on them – we came last.

There’s more to say on the project in general – the resources, which can be fantastic if you have the wherewithal to ask for them, the relationship between reality TV and making art and the attitudes of the jurors who have been picked to talk about what we do. But these will have to come when I have more time.

There was a local dispute in my team, too. It didn’t involve me directly, but, after a cry to me for help from one of these very young people, I tried to keep it from the damn cameras who were sniffing around like terriers down a rabbit hole. And in my attempt to protect, the camera focused on me. Horrible. Anyway, there have been some team changes and I don’t want to go through that again.

It was an utterly exhausting week – a real head-f**k. I very nearly came home in despair but for the support and understanding of the group – the artists who I’m living with.

I’ve been asked to be involved with making a book of the project. I think there’s a good one to be written about collaboration – using this project as a hook and narrative. Eero’s the man to write it. We’re going to talk to the man with the money next week. It’s another good reason to stay on.

ps Gotta go with Saulius to a laser company and then the forest, so pics will have to come later…

Sometimes, the things that can really tire you out are the ones you least expect. Hence the recent silence – sorry ’bout that.

And I don’t have long… once Saulius has finished his freelance work, we’re off to some forest by some suburbs (of soviet-era apartments) to play with lasers. We’d been out in town till four this morning to find out what their limitations and capabilities are, and we want to try and find somewhere with less light so that the lasers are stronger.

Work is being made. Justin, Eero and Monica are getting right in to confronting a few local controversies, like homophobia, which I can only stand back and marvel at. It’s what I’d thought about before I arrived, but they have the combination of artistic and technical experience and a strong team connection. Their work this week was a performance, in private (you could look through the window) where they were to spend 20 hours together, communicating by any means other than using speech. Documentation was a minute-or-so video (as Eero said, who would want to see any more than that?) and a huge print of a polaroid they took of the three of them touching tongues. It was fabulous – not least because it emphasised the importance of the experience of learning to connect with people who you don’t know well and gaining something very strong and intimate as a result. It’s the basis, surely, for making very strong work. And of course, editing documentation is crucial.

I observe and try to learn. It’s easy to think of documentation as an afterthought, but so much gets missed that way. But then… When Saulius and I were playing with lasers last night, should we have made more effort to record the process of what we were doing, or was it more important to just get on with the job in hand?

More on next immediate post…run out of space…