TRANSACTION
One could describe the work of Lithuanian artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas as a process of information acquisition, revision, analysis, and visualization. The result: a model or an archive of images, voices, narratives, and interpretations. A collection of statements that together constitute a platform for exchange that can generate discussion, new networks, and perhaps even change.
In the work Transaction it is women who are addressed. Or to phrase it more accurately: what is the story of women? Which images of femininity circulate within society, and how do these images produce reality? The material comes from interviews with female Lithuanian intellectuals a historian, an art critic, a journalist, a sociologist, a law researcher who describe their situation in contemporary Lithuania and how it has been shaped and formed by culture’s mediated images of women. These images appear in the work in the form of excerpts from archival Lithuanian feature films from the women’s childhood and they emerge in their stories. The movies are a number of popular dramas that, through their dissemination, have come to be part of a sort of collective unconscious scenario in Lithuanian culture. The clips isolate the female characters; and each woman encountered is familiar from the history of cinematic female personages: the innocent, the childlike, the maternal, the rebellious one who naturally winds up in trouble. To this the artists add another layer. A number of Lithuanian psychiatrists were presented the films as though the images were patients to be diagnosed. Their analyses of the films form yet another stratum of reality representation and interpretation in the complex model of human communication created in the work.
As with all intellectual processes, Transaction assumes a method a method that, here, is also a key to the psychiatrists’ participation. One point of departure for the artists was the observation by Lithuanian psychiatrist Raimundas Milaðiûnas that the image of oneself as victim was central to the self-image of Lithuanian culture. Borrowing from the psychological interpretative model of transactional analysis, based on work by the American psychologist Eric Berne, Milaðiûnas defines the victim as a part in a sort of mental script that is performed over and over. This model of interpretation that certain mental scripts can define human relationships is also the basis for the system of relationships formed in Transaction. And comprehension of psychic relationships as a mental script also lends the film a particular role as an arena for visualizing an unconscious drama.
The model functions visually and spatially as a demonstration of the complex network of linguistic and cultural conventions that weave together human relationships. And by exposing this it creates a space for the reflection of how these structures are created and maintained. When considering the work’s various layers, it is evident that they can scarcely be assigned any particular place in a hierarchy of reality and fiction, substance, and representation. Instead, it’s striking how the different levels interact and trade places with one other in a constant exchange. The film’s images produce the psychic drama that the women must play and which in many ways has become synonymous with reality. The psychiatrists may analyse the content of the images, but their interpretations, in turn, reproduce notions about the expectations for femininity. And their objectification by the camera transforms them, too, into images to be viewed and analysed.
On one level, Transaction can be read in a politically concrete manner as a visualization of how femininity is constructed and how women live in a post-communist Lithuania with massive social and cultural upheavals and only nascent discussions on the topics of feminism and equality. All the women in the film are part of an informal network for professional women. But on another level of course interconnected to the first the work makes manifest the degree to which contemporary reality is mediated via images and how this stream of images is also a process whereby meaning and content are translated, altered, and reinterpreted a process that embodies both cultural power and cultural change.
By setting different types of filmic images in contrast to one another documentary material contrasted with clips from feature films, the video of the psychiatrists’ diagnoses with the taped interviews of women Transaction also reflects on the role of the moving image and its use in contemporary culture. How do we draw the line between documentary and fiction? How is our reality altered by the ubiquitous presence of images? How do images create and reinforce certain visual cultural structures?
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas have worked together on a number of art projects that do not merely depict or contemplate a social reality but also directly participate and interact with a situation. In 1993, in Vilnius, they started jutempus, an independent meeting space for production, dialogue, and exhibition. In 1998 they started tvvv.plotas, a series of transmissions for Lithuanian national television, the Internet, a video-conference, and chat rooms that considered the condition and role of art in the new Lithuania.
Reflected In the artists’ work is an obvious consciousness that one possibility for involving art in a cultural process of change lies in securing access to and participating in the shaping of the information channels opened by the new technology. Their art does not use new media merely as a technique. It also participates in the networks created by the new information technology. A social intervention is visible in Transaction in the manner that dealing with the artwork itself initiates discussions and dialogues that carries the potential of change. A process that can continue because the work itself becomes a place where the viewer is a part of a discussion that can disperse likes rings on the water.
Sara Arrhenius
Translated by Kathryn Boyer