Fairy Tales for Adults

Laisvydė Šalčiūtė’s Bestiary is an inverted zoo. Biped and quadruped creatures graze on canvas and paper, observed by the all-seeing eye of an ape. Or an elephant. Or a lion. Or a viper. Or a swan. Or-or-or-or. Animals from medieval bestiaries and the artist’s imagination, mythical accounts and the expanses of the Internet. They cry crocodile tears and cuckoo from broken clocks, show the middle finger to the homo sapiens who have come to the exhibition and pierce them with their gaze akin to a golden scalpel. It is a 21st century bestiary in which chimeras have turned into hybrids and centaurs have become quadrobers. The Little Red Riding Hood is hoodless and saint Wilgefortis is beardless.

Where is this garden of earthly delights located? In a sinking ship, as it should be. The slanted deck of the Titanikas exhibition hall, just as Tatlin’s spiralling tower, is an ideal set for the laisvydian rampage. The artist’s name and surname form the conceptual frame of her work, innate and perfected. Absolute freedom of the flower children and of wolves – this is Laisvydė frolicking among canvases, texts, objects and screens. And a refrigerator wrapped in a polar bear’s hide, where Šalčiūtė stores the ears of a lamb and a deer leg. This is frozen, fermented, pickled uncanniness with a vacuum-packed ox heart. Because loving hearts stay alive only in the vacuum of pain.

User’s Manual

How should one view this exhibition? From up close and from a distance. From above and below, from the front and sideways, lying down and from a ladder. Flying by the works like a comet so that they start to spin like celestial bodies in a space movie. But the best way is to stick one’s nose into a work (at a distance of Pinocchio’s nose) and explore the miraculous world of flora, fauna and the virtualised humankind. Since every work contains numerous scientific, esoteric, mythical, religious, literary and artistic references that paradoxically blend into a meaningful narrative. Or a horror tale – usually meant for adults (as children are frightened by fifth legs protruding from trousers). Or for children (because adults have forgotten how easy it is to turn into a panda). Your imagination, knowledge and examples of interpretation offered in this text will help you unlock them. Every work is like a lock on a bridge whose key was thrown into the river.

Space Swallows and Other Avians

The bird-human travels from myth to myth, exemplified by the Egyptian god Horus with a human body and the head of a falcon. Or the Greek Icarus. In our region we remember Ikarus, the Hungarian-made wax-coloured bus brand that proudly carried the name of the Greek mythical hero. Symbolically, the latter was doomed to perish with his wings made of wax and feathers – the closer to the Sun he flew, the more the scorching rays melted the wax. It remains unknown what kind of future the Hungarian bus manufacturers envisioned for their vehicle. There is a painting by Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which at first sight contains neither the bus nor the mythical hero. Because there is a plowman which occupies half of the painting’s foreground. Only upon careful inspection does one see the legs of Icarus sticking from the sea in the distance. When dreamer artists fall from the clouds, the plough of the green farmers does not stop (the sentence was paid for from the election campaign fund of a respective party). The flight of Laisvydė’s imagination extends several mythical threads at once to our days and spaces. Icarus’ legs are also seen in Šalčiūtė’s work, wearing ballet pointe shoes. Staring at them is a contemporary reincarnation of the plowman – a pinocchioesque hockey player. Mothlike multiplied humanbirds are flying towards the glowing yellow FUCK sign, which curses eternity because there is no escape from it. Lurking for the bare-breasted swallows are a cat and the family of bears from Shishkin’s painting, the eagle from a certain country’s coat of arms, and grannies riding a carousel. I am tempted to call them ‘putin’s army’ (because bears, ballet and hockey are integral parts of his empire’s propaganda), but this would oversimplify the multi-layered image and tear the net of references. After all, swallows are also a fixture of the Lithuanian politicultural imaginary – from the conservative party to the Cooltūristės art collective. From Giedrius Kuprevičius’ musical Fire Hunt with Beaters (‘swallows, swallows, living scissors of the sky’, libretto by Saulius Šaltenis and Leonidas Jacinevičius) to Sigitas Geda’s poem The Thrush: 

And Drazdauskas dared –

The sublime nature was still, –

When the Human returned to the Bird,

And the Bird strove for the Human.

The Human’s eyes were opened,

The Bird’s heart expanded,

The two wings were beating in the skies

Like the entire whole of Creation.

There is a conspiracy theory claiming that in 2045 Juozas Mikėnas’ sculpture The First Swallows will be stolen by terrorist propagandists from the former red empire, and a glass apartment high-rise facing the TV tower of Gediminas (two in one) will be built in its place. This dystopian work depicts a future real estate advertisement luring naive consumers with material goods at the expense of eternal values.

Display spiral 

The architect of the exhibition Ieva Cicėnaitė spins the display like a spinning top, and the works are thrust by centrifugal force to the walls and columns of Titanikas. In the eye of the tornado stands a winding tower constructed from cots – an allusion to Tatlin’s spiralling Monument to the Third International. Ironically, the utopian revolutionary structure is composed of two spirals: ‘the same path goes up, the same path goes down’, as in Dante’s Inferno. Tatlin’s monument is an inverted funnel of the circles of Hell, while Laisvydė’s cot structure is hell on Earth, the infantile humanity’s self-incarceration in the mirror stage. Quite symbolically, the cots were thrown away and salvaged by the author near a full-week nursery in the neighbourhood of Žvėrynas, which she herself once attended for one year.

The cot railing is a recurrent motif of the exhibition, becoming a see-through wall between the wanted and the possible, the desired and the prohibited. Meanwhile, the bestial herbaria on the walls are animated by a moving image in the dark – a toddled carried by a bird of prey against the background of roaring deer and ballet dancers’ cancan. And Handel’s soprano aria Lascia ch’io pianga, familiar from the movie Farinelli, in which it is performed by the legendary castrato, while in Handel’s opera Rinaldo it is sung by the abducted Almirena, imprisoned in a tower: 

Ir iš filmo „Farinelis“ pažystama Handelio „“ soprano arija, kurią filme atlieka legendinis kastratas, o Handelio operoje „Rinaldo“ gieda bokšte uždaryta pagrobtoji Almirena: 

Let me weep

My cruel fate,

And that I

should have freedom.

Laisvydė is a sorceress and poet who rhymes images and sounds. An elephant-man stands in a painting with a big protruding… trunk! You will see for yourself what else is protruding, or you can guess from the rhyme. In her works, an eye and a breast rhyme – both radiate piercing golden rays. Women – nuns and belles, ballerinas and grannies, love monsters and pilots with halos of saints. Pinocchio-men, long-nosed and long-groined. Women – witches, seeresses. Men – rhinos, all-smelling. But all of them are smaller, as if multiplied in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings and arrived to the Anthropocene era in a time machine. Welcome to the ice-age desert of the real! Where it is not human but other species that rule the world and the imagination. Giant cats, cangaroos, buffalos, koalas, deer and vipers are looking at us from the canvases and screens, while we are living in their dream.

Curator Laima Kreivytė