tvvv.plotas_02: tvvv.plotas: artist / education
TV project / discussion / videoconference
broadcasted by LTV / March 3, 1999 / 8.55 p.m. CET
SCHEME FOR EDUCATION:
In front of us are two notions of discipline. The first one is a blocking discipline, a closed institution, raised on the margins of society, and executing just negative functions: stopping the evil, suspending the time. The second one is a discipline, a mechanism, an apparatus, with the function to make power more dynamic, more efficient. These two disciplines draw the outlines, making the enslavement structure of the future state visible. The “longer-term” effects of Soviet-era isolation, semi-literate discourse and submission to hierarchical structures has become a counterpoint of contribution by Arturas Raila in collaboration with the Lithuanian Institute of Perfection and other local artists. If the school is considered as a small scale model of a society, then what about the art school and its methods and functions? Artist Arturas Raila taught at Vilnius Secondary School of Fine Arts for almost a decade. For “Education” he is presenting the footage of a teachers’ conference held in the autumn of 1998. The video releases anti-Western undercurrents usually withheld from public screenings, although demonstrating rather than denouncing, it demonstrates well enough to unmask, and resulted in his subsequent expulsion from this pedagogical collective.
As a balancing parallel the narrative switches to the contributions of those having different kinds of experiences from the so called Western school, representing a well functioning model in everyway. Students from the art schools in Vilnius and Kokkola in Northern Finland discuss whether to become artists or not .
>Laurynas Dalgeda /art student /M.K.Ciurlionis art gymnasium/Vilnius: Personally for me art is a way to relax or a hobby. Sometimes the other things can’t satisfy enough. All of this could be implemented through art. The reason I study, is purely for the sake of knowing, overtaking knowledge from those who are already knowledgeable about ways the art is done, and in order to master my all abilities. I do have abilities you can say, that because I am able to study here… I’m not going to connect my life entirely with art. I’m thinking of businessman’s career… Yes, Hitler was painting, Churchill was painting, all famous people tried to paint, because they found it pleasant. Some time ago I was thinking of studying art, but when you meet the reality, you realize it’s too difficult to live on art…
>Emma Kyllonen /art student/Nordic art school /Kokkola/North of Finland: About starting to make real art, so to speak, I have no idea how I could do that. It is like a concrete idea. I think that I just have to continue like being a student, knowing that I’m literary on the right tracks that I’m in the art school, I’m learning the things that should be learned. And then I hope it will come and I know it will come after I have reached a certain level. I don’t know if I’ll got any better, but I have at least get used to the art world. But the thing that I would not like to loose is this fictitious world or like trying to meet my ideals. Not like becoming the perfect artist, but in a way getting into the world that I’m looking after. And I know, it’s fictitious, it basically consists of illusions and I know these illusions can’t be made truth. But somehow the true world and illusions should be combined and so, I could be satisfied. Ye, if I could do that, wow, man…
>Vytenis Jankunas /independent artist/New York/Vilnius: How I feel, to be honest, sometimes I feel like a villager. There’s a lot of gaps and you try to fill them. And it’s really difficult, as we were prepared for different situation at our school . And now absolutely different things are going on. And I think in the art world in Lithuania everyone is self educated…
Here some people were doing sincere, good, traditional art, because they couldn’t realize it can be different. The way Lithuanians react when they see a black person. They’re scared, because they haven’t seen any before. It could be natural reaction to contemporary art (which generally hardly exists). When you are abroad and If you see a black man and you are scared, because he is different from us, we haven’t got any of such kind. You feel somewhat tension. I’ve never felt it, but I was told, that other Lithuanians feel tension and that is how racism starts, which could also be opposed to art. I am not, but other Lithuanians are. That’s how art racism is born.
They are taken to Paris, these lecturers of ours, they run to a gallery and what they see… There is roughly speaking a shoe, so they start feeling tension, because whatever is beyond your understanding causes fear. Ignorance is frightening.
You’re afraid to die, since you don’t know what will happen. The same is with art. They see it and react suddenly, they start feeling tension, the fear and they start denying it.
Because you’ve got to take a deep insight anyway there are many things, information, plus its forbidden, plus not tolerated, and then you try to conceal it. Yet the external form for action, that modernism becomes more similar, partially approaches something, there is that effect. The same thing when I saw a porn magazine for the first time. I thought: wow! And now I can look at any and nothing. As long as nothing is fearful in that contemporary art. We have to stop judging, one says it’s a good art, another says crap, and learn to discuss things normally.