Liudvikas Buklys
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Work from his oeuvre.
“Let us say we have chosen to speak nothing but the truth. Immediately, there is a Freudian problem: should we just speak the truth as it is, or should we first take into account the circumstances and the audience to which we are speaking? There is a great difference. If we just indicate the reality, we risk of being eaten by the wolf, just like this boy from Aesop’s fable who screamed for help but whom nobody would believe because of certain previous misadventures. If we go for the second option, we risk of losing the literal meanings of words. Communication of truth becomes something of a strategical activity. You have to know how words will be heard before you even start using them. Imagine trying to convince your psychoanalyst that you are finally healed! Wouldn’t it be like speaking with language itself instead of speaking within it?
You might think I started writing about Liudvikas Buklys’ practice in a roundabout way, but believe me – it is to the point. Buklys is interested in how things take place and in the coordinates of possibilities that allow them to take place. His peculiar research might concentrate on anything from material structures to historical maps and the field of treasure hunting, but there is always an underlying thread of investigation: where are the true grounds of a given reality? Mind you, for Buklys this is a completely empirical question. The most basic material object is situated within a certain field of expectations. This field orients our perception and lets us behave in a particular way. An exhibition is one example of such a field. Furniture design is another. Offbeat archeology of modern treasure hunters is yet another.
But what if an exhibition starts to act according to a logic foreign to it? And what if we have to remove an object from its original context in order to fulfill it?” – Jonas Žakaitis