Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė
Counting Seasons
9 March – 8 May 2022
For their third exhibition at the gallery, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė present a series of paintings and sculptures. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online screening of the video work Mouthless Part I, 2020.
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are naturally collaborative. Their work initially manifested as Young-Girl Reading Group, a serial performative project and a fragmented collection of texts engaged with feminisms and its weavings into queer and minority positions and the more-than-human. The texts were read out loud and the performances were distributed online or recorded using mobile phones.
Their early interest in amalgamating the organic with technology continues in this series of new works on canvas, in which they collaborate with artificial intelligence, breeding images using Generative Adversarial Networks. These images are used to make paintings that reference depictions of nature in the Western painting tradition, which are applied to the canvas through the layering of gesso. The paintings respond to the sentimentality of artificially bucolic pictures and are a reflection on the historical representation and framing of the landscape as well as the algorithmic systems that increasingly structure our understanding of the world surrounding us. The chromed steel sculptures also presented, shaped as farm implements, are broken and incomplete. These shiny metal objects have been rendered impractical, yet act as ghostly reminders of labour next to the saturated verdant paintings. Ideas of nature and technology are further explored by the use of LED fans to reveal animations produced by the same Generative Adversarial Networks technology. Shapes metamorphose into strange creatures; techno monsters produced by algorithms recall creatures from earlier mythologies.
Through their alchemical blending of materials and references Dotota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė present works that both seduce and unsettle. They gesture toward the past, to folklore and myth, and to traditional depictions of the pastoral and of monsters, but also toward an unknown future that includes the presence of nonhuman intelligence. In doing so they produce a sense of radical destabilization. As one performer calls forth in one of their recent video works
The Earth is wretched
Our ground
Idzie bobo, złapie kogo?
All levelled
All vanished, all settled,
Contaminated, eroded,
Drained, exploded.
Dorota Gawęda (PL) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (LT) are based in Basel, Switzerland. They have a forthcoming solo opening at Kunstraum Neideroesterreich, Vienna in April 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Instituto Svizzero, Palermo; Germany; Swiss National Library, Bern; Swimming Pool Project, Sofia; Kunsthalle Fribourg and Cell Project Space, London. They were the recipients of the Swiss Performance Prize 2021 and the Collide Residency Award, CERN, Geneva and Hangar Barcelona 2022/23.
An essay written by Michael Charlesworth written in response to the exhibition Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė Counting Seasons
Heraclitus said that everything changes : nothing remains the same.
The blooming gallery
On the walls are works of art, extruded from a machine and fixed to canvas with a very traditional material, gesso. Together with metal copies of two traditional wooden tools from Poland and Lithuania, closely related to the rakes I saw being used in Czechoslovakia in 1976, and not wholly unlike rakes that have been used, god knows, by huge numbers of people (most of them in the past). Tools from the days when farms were hand-made; when craft(smanship) and its products stood supremely important. Our hands were never quite spades, perhaps, but our "tough hands" fed the glebe. Yet the rakes hanging on the gallery walls are de-natured: metal models rather than the original wood. Instead of thinking of them as usable for hay-making, we can take them as signs of the pastoral and the bucolic; not least because hay is a staple of keeping cows and sheep. The turn that is suggested by the fact that they are works of art is towards an idealised image of pastoral farming, the pastoral as a literary and artistic tradition; and the bucolic life conjured within it, of course, strongly connotes happiness. The cowherds and shepherds of centuries of poems, paintings and prints have little more to do than to fall in love and therefore celebrate, lament, or just grumble (see Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, 1579). Perhaps it is the happiness within the bucolic tradition that conjures up, in one of the works on the walls of the exhibition, what looks rather like a version of the seventeenth-century blue bird of happiness.
It hardly needs to be said that artistic evocation of rural life goes a long way back in European painting and poetry, further, indeed, than the date of the adoption into English of the word 'landscape' in the seventeenth century to help discuss it. In Britain at least, relations between the realities of rural existence, on one hand, and fantasmatic conjurings-up of ideas of rural existence in visual and verbal art, on the other, become vexed. In visual art from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rural workers tended to be depicted in the 'dark side of the landscape', - as exploited, or of little interest themselves - or, conversely, shown in the sunlight of optimism and an apparent social acceptance (oil paintings, after all, were intended for a ruling-class market) unrelated to actual conditions of economy and class-relations on the land. Gainsborough and Stubbs vs. the radical painter George Morland (I'm having to paint with a broad brush myself, here). John Constable, son of a local small landowner and businessman, liked to keep the rural workers in his paintings at work rather than showing them at leisure (lazy rather than leisured, and if shown at rest: idling). Unlike in renaissance pastoral poetry, a neat and clear definition of depicted country life as pure fantasy cannot be maintained from the late eighteenth century onward. The psychological urgency of the rural labourer John Clare's poems amounts to the hyperbolic touchstone of this: testifying to an urgent connection between art and rural life, rather than separation. And in Gawęda & Kulbokaitė’s video work it is specific groups of people (the witches of Mouthless I) or nature itself (in Mouthless II) that are documented as victimised and brutalised. Injustice and ecological disaster are real enough.
The pictures exhibited in Counting Seasons, except for two, show blooms, perhaps in tribute to gardens that are hand-made. The blooms are big, absorbing, delicious. The works seem to invite us in, stimulating urgently the sense of touch. We want closer contact with these petals. Yet the printed finish announces a boundary. There seem to be many gaps in the rendering of the flowers - white space, part, indeed, of the making of the works, and which achieves a special function. They look like imperfections. The works seem full of flaws. The white gaps, the absences, are incompleteness. Let's remember something Oscar Wilde said, on the threshold of modernism:
It is through its very incompleteness that Art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole . . .[Rather than narrative, anecdote or literary content in a painting], the aesthetic critic . . . seeks . . . for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true and no interpretation final.
In this respect the process of making the works has not been neat and tidy. There seem to be inexplicable gaps in the extruded prints, corners torn off and the treated canvas showing. Plenty of gesso has got itself on top of the images - a deliberate impulse by the makers, clearly gestural in some of the works, that increases the wish to touch, pushing the surface into the viewer's space, drawing us into the works; it also shows us something of how the works were made, a process otherwise invisible to us because of the digital processes used to generate the figurative element.
Strange digital shapings in two of the works produce what I have called the blue bird of happiness; and what looks at first like an abstraction, although the features of a rodent manifest themselves eventually. The artists lead us on a tortuous path, however, in their exploration of the contradictions and inconsistencies of our present environmental dilemma. The predominant works in Counting Seasons are of flowers that never were, loosely connected to daisies and sunflowers, and perhaps a wild artichoke. While the works can strike us as attractive, inducing desire for closer connection, the de-naturing of flowers has a sinister quality, also detectable in these pictures. The visual de-naturing apparent in them amounts to a direct enough musing on the stresses already introduced into the natural world by genetic manipulation, which goes back through millenia of selective breeding. In our time, however, genetic 'splicing' now seems to tip the balance towards instability, not least on farms. At what point will supposedly rational purpose spill over into inadvertent uncontrol, for example as the cause of mutancy?
However, the background milieu here in the gallery is the garden; Britain at least used to be famous in continental Europe as the land of small individual gardens, in housing estates and behind terraced houses, where every inhabitant aspired to some favourite flowers in no matter how few square yards. On a larger scale, there was the landscape garden. In both cases, or rather, on both scales, a few square yards to several hundred acres, nature was constrained and restrained. Its wilder or less congenial aspects were pruned away. (Moles were trapped or poisoned, nettles uprooted, rocks and stony parts smoothed over, brambles suppressed). As images of nature, gardens have gaps. Thomas Bardwell, the Dutch topographical artists in seventeenth-century England, Constable and many others became painters of landscape gardens, with the gaps suppressed. Two women artists, Berthe Morisot in nineteenth-century France, and Dame Laura Knight in twentieth-century Britain, set the standard very high for the painting of smaller gardens: Morisot by her dynamic radical approach, unafraid of gaps, Knight through the intensity of her vision and sympathy with her subjects. Knight commands a high place in larger bucolic landscape too, as her Spring in Cornwall shows: an image of exultant feelings in the countryside. In the last century or so, plentiful supposedly minor artists such as Beatrice Parsons, Lillian Stannard, Eleanor Brickdale, Fairfax Muckley, (and, generations earlier, even the luminaries James Tissot in political exile and Samuel Palmer) tackled the smaller end of the scale - small gardens, or individual plants and flowers; as did more recent artists such as Cedric Morris and John Maxwell. There have been many contributions to this tradition, though fewer painters than there are enthusiastic domestic gardeners. Is there a touch of satire in Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s response to this gardening obsession, this no doubt valuable aspect of British culture? Perhaps, but we can laugh at ourselves too. And if these exhibited works arise partly from a satirical impulse, the price is for us well worth paying.
And yet - things have now changed in the natural world. The pace of change seems to be accelerating. Neither gardens nor farms are as cosy as we'd like to think they used to be. And are many farmers and gardeners part of the problem, when they could be, and should be, part of the solution?
Austin, Texas, Springtime 2022
SOURCES
Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus
George Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie (1589, quoting Thomas Campion)
The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (Oxford UP, 1912)
John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist (1891)
Michael Charlesworth, “Nature, Landscape, and Land Art” in Art in the Landscape (Chinati Foundation).
Professor Michael Charlesworth has taught the area of nineteenth century Europe at the University of Texas at Austin since 1993. An authority on landscape and the history of gardens, on photography until 1918, and on landscape drawing and painting, Charlesworth is the author of Derek Jarman (Reaktion Books, 2011), Landscape and Vision in Nineteenth Century Britain and France (Ashgate, 2008), The Gothic Revival 1720-1870, (3 Vols, 2002); and The English Garden (3 Vols., 1993). He has also written articles about early cartography; book illustration; the late twentieth century artists Derek Jarman and Ian Hamilton Finlay; panoramic representation of landscape; and photographic history.
