Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Liudvikas Buklys






Liudvikas Buklys

Work from his oeuvre.

"Let us say we have chosen to speak nothing but the truth. Immediately, there is a Freudian problem: should we just speak the truth as it is, or should we first take into account the circumstances and the audience to which we are speaking? There is a great difference. If we just indicate the reality, we risk of being eaten by the wolf, just like this boy from Aesop's fable who screamed for help but whom nobody would believe because of certain previous misadventures. If we go for the second option, we risk of losing the literal meanings of words. Communication of truth becomes something of a strategical activity. You have to know how words will be heard before you even start using them. Imagine trying to convince your psychoanalyst that you are finally healed! Wouldn't it be like speaking with language itself instead of speaking within it?


You might think I started writing about Liudvikas Buklys' practice in a roundabout way, but believe me - it is to the point. Buklys is interested in how things take place and in the coordinates of possibilities that allow them to take place. His peculiar research might concentrate on anything from material structures to historical maps and the field of treasure hunting, but there is always an underlying thread of investigation: where are the true grounds of a given reality? Mind you, for Buklys this is a completely empirical question. The most basic material object is situated within a certain field of expectations. This field orients our perception and lets us behave in a particular way. An exhibition is one example of such a field. Furniture design is another. Offbeat archeology of modern treasure hunters is yet another.

But what if an exhibition starts to act according to a logic foreign to it? And what if we have to remove an object from its original context in order to fulfill it?" - Jonas Žakaitis

1 comment:

  1. This artist is very conceptual. As you said, the works are about investigating the idea of an object, our expectations of what the object should be; this seem a lot like the work of someone like Joseph Kosuth. One of his installations that I am thinking specifically about here is 'One and Three Chairs', in which the artist investigates the chair as an object through taking a photograph of a chair, portraying the definition of a chair, and finally, installing an 'actual' chair. In doing this, the artist is questioning these three codes that indicate an object and how the objects that indicate the actual function differently then the actual. The neon blue sign by Buklys, "Five Words in Neon Blue", reminds me of this attempt to investigate an object's meaning, indicator codes and function.

    ReplyDelete