Counter-argument V

About

COUNTER-ARGUMENT V

Participants: Jonas Meškauskas, Agata Orlovska, Mantas Valentukonis, Šarūnas Baltrukonis, Rasa Deveikytė, Emilis Šeputis, Adelė Urbanavičiūtė, P1ge3on, Ieva Jaruckytė, Liudas Matijošius, Aurelija Bulaukaitė.

Curators: Vita Opolskytė-Brazdžiūnienė and Kazimieras Brazdžiūnas.

Art historian: Emilija Vanagaitė.

"I move only as much as the floor shakes with the movement of other people. I stand among them only because it would be cold if I left. I throw myself into these situations and I always think that I will not do this to myself anymore, but inertia – it creeps in slowly. Not only for me. And the slow creep of inertia is just a stolen song title.

I have not been to any counter-argument exhibitions. I knew about them from photographs, texts, I recognised them from the faces and names. I did a lot of talking, certainly more than seeing. It has always seemed that the aspiration is a counterbalance to the obsolete, a platform for the youth that they themselves are building. To question the medium, the field of art, to draw attention to the individuality. Illusion? We all receive more or less the same stream of information, images, and sounds – sooner or later we will meet. I try to trace the intentions through the texts, to not exaggerate – the richness of the late conversations and only their testimony of the counter-argument remained the only source, hardly true, but alive and rarely formal. I trace it.

The voice of the counter-argument is mostly concerned with communication, uniqueness, interaction, contradiction, and consent. Unique and talking, perhaps agreeing, perhaps conflicting, but most importantly, impassive – it is something special, is it not? Take a look at how the artists themselves articulate their work. Summary – 9 pages, 2653 words. These artists are impressed by reality (23), experience (18), personal (16), relationship (14), human (11), culture (10), creation/creativity (24), capitalism (5), game (6), mundanity (7), nature (8 ), household (6), materiality (7).

(You know, I would not even dare to take my own texts and put them into the programme. Here, if you have read carefully, the beauty emerging from cynicism begins to develop. Modus vivendi of a contemporary man.)

Therefore, these chosen ones are basically examining the same issue, the difference appears in the technical, formal solutions. And here possibly lies the answer, perhaps a strange rivalry at times, maybe I would not have realised, without reading the texts, that the themes the painters are dealing with are the same. However fragmented and difficult to articulate the everyday life, identity, and everything else of a contemporary man may seem, everything comes into one mass, from which only the combinations of words or the selected key, self-positioning, create the difference. The essence is the same.

Trying to create a counterargument to the counter-argument, I turn to myself as a reader and see that I have failed. I went around the circle, bumped into the wall, and met myself. My body continues to move only because other bodies are moving nearby."

Art historian Emilija Vanagaitė

The exhibition is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Lithuanian Artists' Association.