Ar tai menas, arba Paveikslo (ne)laisvė

LTŠis veikalas apie poros paskutinių sovietmečio dešimtmečių tapybą ir jos recepciją nepriklausomoje Lietuvoje - tai bandymas savito dailės rūšies gyvavimo tarpsnio istoriją papasakoti kaip meno, o ne sociokultūrinėje laikotarpio terpėje giliai įsišaknijusios kūrybos praktikos istoriją, nes šios rezultatai galiausiai tampa tik praėjusios epochos dokumentais ar net liekanomis, o šiandien mums labiau reikėtų kitko - gerų modernizmo ir (ar) postmodernizmo kūrinių.1 Didysis instituciškai puoselėtas XX a. Lietuvos dailės istorijos pasakojimas nutrūko 1990-aisiais, kai buvo išleistas 9-ajame dešimtmetyje dar LSSR Mokslų akademijos Istorijos instituto Menotyros skyriaus parengtas trečias ir paskutinis jos tomas, skirtas sovietinei dailei iki 1960 metų.2 Vietoj jo vėliau atsiradę daug įvairių pasakojimų ar raidos modelių, dėmesys niekuomet į "didžiuosius pasakojimus" nepatenkančioms moterims dailininkėms ir specifinei jų kūrybos problematikai, įsitvirtinusi istorijos mokslui artima sociokultūrines kūrybos aplinkybes nagrinėjanti socialinė prieiga, diskusijos dėl sovietmečio dailės paveldo vertės liudijo naują dailėtyros savimonės pakopą, bet kartu - nutolimą nuo dailės, kaip meno, istorijos. Šiame veikale iš dalies tą trūkumą ir stengiuosi kompensuoti. [...]. [Iš Įvado]Reikšminiai žodžiai: Lietuvos dailė; Sovietmetis; Tylusis modernizmas; Tapyba; Skulptūra; Grafika; Rezistencija; Dailės tyrimų metodologija; Tinklaveika; Meninis laukas; Lithuanian art; Soviet era; Silent modernism; Painting; Sculpture; Graphics; Resistance; Art research methodology; Networking,; Artistic field.

ENThe subject of this book is the history of Lithuanian painting in the late Soviet period, that is, the last two decades of the Soviet period. The aim was to write it not as a history of artistic practice closely related to the sociocultural context of the period, but as a history of art. In other words, not from the aspect of production, but from that of reception, in the belief that the interpretation of a work of art constitutes an integral part of the work. The new works by Lithuanian historians that analyse the position of intellectuals during the Soviet period or the organisation of society through networking allow us to define the activities of painters in the Soviet sociocultural environment quite succinctly and clearly, and to claim that some works of art created during the Soviet period are still interesting today. On one hand, most painters conformed to the Soviet regime well enough in order not to pay any attention to it. On the other hand, if, according to historians, a non-Soviet society really existed during the Soviet period, then non-Soviet art, its creators and interpreters constituted a very important part of that society, a sort of elite. By combining the approaches of networking and Bourdieu's art field, and employing the oral history method, it would be possible to analyse in detail the life of this ‘society within a society'. But would it help us to negotiate the meaning of works of art? The history of painting in the late Soviet period, which was the most important branch of art at the time, is written here in the understanding that ‘great narratives’ are both impossible and crucial to the collective consciousness and the cultural memory. In other words, it is constructed and deconstructed at the same time; it is told at least four times from different angles.The voice of the author is only one voice in a large chorus of interpreters, and it acquires the main role only in the second part of the book. The first chapter discusses shifts in the dissemination of painting from the late 1960s to the 1980s in the art field of independent Lithuania from an institutional point of view, observing how painting was transformed from being irrelevant and marginalised 'contemporary' art to valuable, already historical modern art. The second chapter analyses histories of the late Soviet period that have already been written (not in book form, but as articles and PhD dissertations). The local 'grand narrative' that dominated the 1990s was invented by Lithuanian art critics and historians at the end of the Soviet period. It was based on innovative achievements by each new generation of young painters. Painters who made their debuts in the 1970s and 1980s also constituted informal groups of Four and Five. Since the 2000s, histories have been written of different artistic movements that are local versions of different currents in Western Modernism (such as Expressionism, Abstractionism, Surrealism and Pop Art). The third chapter comprises short stories in alphabetical order about looking anew at paintings by seven artists, and the different fates of their works. These Soviet Modernists became renowned in the cultural media in the 2000s, due to large solo exhibitions or for other reasons, but their works are not included either in histories of different movements or in the narrative about the generations and/or groups of young painters. It is more a possibility for new narratives. The second part of the book is devoted to the already mentioned 'grand narrative'. It exists in painting, where the reflection of its development is expressed through the appropriation and transformation of motifs and visual polemics.By interpreting paintings, the problematics proper to every specific generation of artists are analysed: experimenting with form, a personal look at the everyday visible reality and the pictorial conditions of its representation, and the infernos of the imagination and the memory. All the protagonists in the second part (Valentinas Antanavičius, Vincas Kisarauskas, Kostas Dereškevičius, Arvydas Šaltenis, Algimantas Švėgžda, Mindaugas Skudutis, Henrikas Natalevičius and Šarūnas Sauka) started to paint (to show, to tell) personally in an emphatic way (signs of a diegetic narrator, characteristic neither of modernism nor of Socialist Realism, appeared in their paintings, together with a reflection of the act of communication), the viewer and the act of perception became an integral (and risky and unpredictable) part of their work, and painting as a certain paradigm of meaning was in a permanent productive crisis. [...]. [From the publication]

• Docendo discimus: tapytojas ir pedagogas Kostas Dereškevičius (1937-2023) / Emilija Vanagaitė. Krantai. 2023, Nr. 1, p. 20-25.
• Intermedialumas ir bioįvairovė XX a. 9-10-ojo dešimtmečio Lietuvos dailėje, arba Dviejų kengūrų pasakojimas / Erika Grigoravičienė. Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis 2020, t. 99, p. 224-260.
• Modernizacija, (post)modernizmai, naujasis modernizmas: Lietuvos dailės nuo XX a. 6 dešimtmečio pabaigos istorijos sąvokos / Erika Grigoravičienė. Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis 2019, t. 95, p. 53-85.
• Rancière’o iššūkis Lietuvos modernaus meno istorijoms: naujų juslinių struktūrų galimybė / Karolina Rybačiauskaitė. Problemos. 2020, t. 97, p. 198-208.