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EGLE VERTELKAITE
A line as a tool of poetry and politics
В курганах книг,
похоронивших стих,
железки строк случайно обнаруживая,
вы
с уважением
ощупывайте их,
как старое,
но грозное оружие.
Влаидмир Маяковский, ВО ВЕСЬ ГОЛОС, 1930
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When in mounds of books,
where verse lies buried,
you discover by chance the iron filings of lines,
touch them
with respect,
as you would
some antique
yet awesome weapon.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, At the Top of My voice, 1930
Eglė Vertelkaitė takes graphic art back to its source. Grapho in Greek
means to write. Eglė is making a print the same way a Russian avant-garde
poet Vladimir Maykovsky (1893-1930) was writing poetry – just seen from the
reversed perspective. To cut easy-flowing stanzas and to make graphics
structures from words for Mayakovsky meant to call masses, to speak at a top of
his voice. Eglė Vertelkaitė is cutting up the space with her extended horizontal
planes. She is bringing linear structure back to graphic works. Not a line as
means of self-expression, but a time-line, a notebook, which looks like endless
staffs. Sometimes even a timetable. Instead following the line a viewer is asked
to read between the lines, to contemplate the space in-between. Her parallel
lines do not define shape or measure the distance – they are counting time (18
and half year).
Lineal, historical and cyclical, mythological time, repeating the same motives
and patterns.
However, Mayakovsky was not a point of reference for Eglė. A key figure in the
art world for her is Cindy Sherman, a photographer with a thousand selves.
Contemporary art is all about performative identity, repetition, killing the
original and searching for plurality. In Scream by Vertelkaitė we see
Cindy Sherman performing Lithuanian folk song (just her big mouth and the sound
waves), and then Cindy is rising to heaven and is reflected on the water – but
we don’t know which image is a reflection. We all consist of bits and pieces of
information. And when the sound or image is transformed to the sequence of
numbers, one can hardly tell the difference between a folk song and a communist,
futurist or any other manifesto. Eglė Vertelkaitė is breaking visual and
conceptual codes juxtaposing different contexts. Legs of cancan dancers reflect
the multiple gesture of fascist salute – both dancers and solders are merely
body-machines under total control of power structures. Drawing a line is always
already a political gesture. It implies order and separation, ruling and
borders.
Still, the artist draws the lines. The lines of the body and the battle lines.
Minimalist and non-referential parallels in Vertelkaitė’s prints turn to hidden
messages and metaphors. Line of soldiers is transformed to laugh lines –
hundreds of faces in the photograph became happy smiles (When
Soldiers...).
And these smiling faces look similar to small dots in flower (Target).
A
line of politics and a line of poetry are not interchangeable, but they can have
similar rhythmic structure. One needs a special linear scale to combine the
steel wool poetry and a masquerade of thousand selves. But everything is
possible between the lines. When plurality takes over perspective, deadlines are
baseless.
Laima Kreivytė