Kuratorystė kaip vaizdų tvarkos praktika : Alfonso Andriuškevičiaus parodos "Mitas dabarties tapyboje" (1988) ir "Nakties ir dienos tapyba" (1990)

ENThe history of curated art exhibitions in Lithuania begins in the late 1980s. The emerging curatorial practice (then disguised as “concept-based exhibitions”) was for art critics a way to show their own peculiar approach to actual art processes and art heritage. The intention behind it was to create an alternative to survey (or “national”) and other then ordinary art expositions (“thematic”, “anniversary”, etc.), to promote visual art, to define its value criteria, and to attract larger intellectual audiences outside art circles. Art critic Alfonsas Andriuškevičius pioneered exhibitions based on a clear concept and compiled of artworks of high quality and artistic value (that he himself has found in art studios by then famous artists). His approach to the whole of Lithuanian painting was that of a structuralist, searching for eternal, universal meanings and their most accurate signifiers, i.e. certain paintings. By dividing them into several groups according to particular visible and/or verbally describable traits, he believed to have found a suggestive way to demonstrate the persistency of the mythical thinking in Lithuanian painting (The Myth in Painting Today, 1988); or to spotlight visual manifestations of primeval existential categories and the equilibrium between them in the field of painting, that was then about to “get rid of its official stance” (Day and Night Painting, 1990).Against a background of the grand political changes Andriuškevičius seemingly endeavoured to establish a particular, unofficial part of art from soviet period (since then known as “nonconformist” art), to present it not as a historical heritage of a questionable value, but as an integral part of the present art and culture; in other words, he tried to accommodate it to new audiences and perceivers. Nevertheless the response among art critics and especially artists was highly polemical; many questioned the curator’s right to speak in the name of artists and their works. The art field throughout the period of the Reform Movement (Sąjūdis) was dominated by modernist art postulates of originality and pure expression, and the art critic has traditionally been seen as of a lower rank compared to the artist. Hence an art critic’s ambition to order paintings according to some preconceived verbal scheme must have seemed literally despicable. Individual efforts to enhance the value of curatorial work by comparing it to artistic practice did not help out either. From today’s perspective both exhibitions curated by Andriuškevičius hold a momentous position in the landscape of Lithuanian art at the end of the previous century. They conditioned a novel approach to the exhibition making as a creative and scholarly practice by art critics, which was able to foster new attitudes towards art history and the present. [From the publication]