Tautvydas Petrauskas (Lithuanian Culture Research Institute)
The relationship between art and history is one of the fundamental problems of art history: is art, and to what extent, a historically determined “product” of its own time? Is the time lived-experienced by artists reflected in their work, and to what extent? In the view that socio-cultural factors determine, or at least influence, art, it is important to identify the most salient features of the time in question: social, historical, political, etc. The late 1980s and 1990s are seen here as a phase in Lithuania characterised by fundamental changes and the transition from a communist to a democratic-capitalist reality, influenced by the rise in criminal offenses and domestic crime and the publicity given to these activities in the media; economic instability and high unemployment; the scarcity of goods and services; the lack of democratically based legal and political structures; the pervasive discourse of ‘cultural delay’, which is a discourse that is pressurising and rushing, etc. These factors encourage us to see the beginning of modern Lithuanian independence as an objectively (measurably) insecure phase for the country. The category of security thus emerges as fundamental in the state and society of the time, of which artists are also a part. The presentation asks whether and how representatives of the visual arts of the period of “Sąjūdis” and the beginning of Independence (1988-2004) reflected on this particular issue of (in)security in their work. What and whose security and what are considered threats? Is it possible to talk about “expressions of security” as an aesthetic category? Using social art studies and phenomenological approaches to the analysis of artworks and the art field, as well as examining the sources that testify to the sensibility of the time, the presentation will seek to discover and highlight the relationship between the dynamics of security in the social atmosphere and the visual arts practices of the period under analysis. In this way, it will aim to show that Lithuanian (contemporary) art of 1988-2004, which embodied a sense of (in)security, represented the fundamental changes in the “social body” of Central and Eastern Europe.