Artists rewriting art history through artistic research and collecting in Lithuania: from pavilion to museum to cemetery

ENThe practice (and the necessity) of collecting is inherent in the writing of art history: accumulation of more artifacts in one place, whether a museum or private collection, allows for more stable narratives that are the basis for all kinds of history. In principle, a collection is an opposite to yet-uncollected artworks dispersed in artists’ studios, storages, basements, and attics that await their time; if a collection is a statement (of choice and preference, of cultural and memory politics, of economy and well-being, etc.), uncollected works (despite being statements in themselves) are like separate words that are always on the brink of being forgotten, deleted, or replaced by others. “Collecting is a form of practical memory,” stated Walter Benjamin (in Crimp 1993, 202), and the word “to recollect” settles any doubts. For an art historian, it is a very challenging task to write a history of art that is gone, destroyed, or undocumented; the latter counts especially for the several last decades of the 20th century with its numerous ephemeral art forms and technologies that were not always reliable. And although digital technologies, the internet, and social media nearly turned this problem upside down into a nightmare of redundancy, the problem of accessibility remains due to ever-changing hard- and software. It would be long writing to talk about the particular importance of (non)collecting in post-Soviet space, where a number of novice capitalist countries rushed to rewrite their art histories, to omit what seemed to be repressive and embrace what came with a new era. Or, actually, would have rushed if many necessary factors, such as political will, economic capability, infrastructural means, competence, and critical foresight, etc. would have been fulfilled. [Extract, p. 137]