Conference Papers
Paradoxes of Lithuanian Arts and Culture
Vytautas Martinkus
| Vytautas Martinkus, President of the Association of Lithuanian Artists' Unions. |
One of the most important causes of the contradictory development of Lithuania culture and art has been history of Lithuania and new economic and social conditions of the last decade.
I have found some paradoxes in the situation of artists and their status. On the one hand, traditional values are (sometimes) recognized in Lithuania. Yes, that does not happen every day. Museums, concert halls, exibition, literature form a multicoloured stream. And there is a lot skepticism in it. A lot of ruins that keep this skepticism alive. On the other hand, skeptic experiments remind me of longing for values. Nostalgia for those values, which still have a halo, is necessary to both the state and it citizens, as well as to the artists themselves.
Such a traditional experience of artistic autonomy and artistic vitality is today contradicting the experience of modern society. Modern technologies, new ways of reproducting art had undecut the traditional roots of art. Freedom of art underwent a change. Art became expansive. It began spread horizontally, Lithuanian art could interest the Western audience only as a case of marginal art. Works of art are becoming more and more accessible to everybody. They are absolutely unrestricted and equally short - lived, phenomena of consciuosness, coming into being and soon disappearing. The codes of art are transformed into mechanisms of transmission and receival of certain information. Is that not the "death" of art ?
I would like to add to this context the expansion of Western art to the East. Participants of such an expansion - citizens of the world - demonstrate the attitude of a superior man.
The Lithuanian artists are aware of this context. Moreover, they are reacting to it correspondingly. Some of them try to become citizens of the world, others shut themselves up in their own - individual or national - shell. It is not new in a certain respect. During the Soviet period artists were pushed towards "international" art. I should be added that it was much easier the to follow the course of "international" art, than to realize the potentialities, conditioned by one' s actual place and time.
New Lithuania - new art. I find it easy to illustrate and explain this thesis with facts. And with any discortions. Arts is a phenomenon determened by its time and place and the particular conditions unfolding there. Why, another speaker might instead enumarate quite different facts of artistic life. Facts that would cause neither joy, nor the impression, that the situation of arts in changing. Lithuania has essentially improved. Let say, we can find a notice that a book of poetry, published in Lithuania, runs on overage two or three hundred coppies only, while in Soviet times the smallest number of copies for a such a book was six or seven thousand.
The status of a postcommunist country, Lithuanian' s geopolitical situation raises questions, what is the artist' s relation to the government, politics and - above all - to moral standarts.
In the earlier, totalitarian order artists had to be in oppossition to the regime. Now they feel a certain obligation to support the policy of the new leaders of independent Lithuania. On the other hand, they cannot forget the "eternal artistic resistance". It is not easy to choose. Maybe it is difficult because the art, seeking for new ways, has to remain sufficiently conservative.
In the Soviet period the artist felt his freedom restricted. Freedom is the essential condition for the existence of art. For a long time the main treating in this sphere was telling of the truth. After the Restoration of Independence one is no longer a forbidden fruit for Lithuanian artists. But when our art lost this mission, it faund itself in a quate different or strange situation. Telling the truth remains a value. But the way to the truth is different. One has to tell the truth is universal and with all possible shades which corresponds to the nature of art. But the task is more difficult than earlier, since such a truth is also sought by philosophers, essayists and politologist in their own ways.
Freedom has demanded from the artist something more than simply the truth.
It is mentioned preservation of the truth in the relative world of installations, obscureness an meaninglessness, artistic noise and broken mirrors.
Freedom has demanded from the artist to defend the moral standarts, while sometimes it is extremelly difficult even to trace them. And last freedom has demanded from a Lithuanian artist to protect the nature of arts itself, its essential features. Not to let art be eliminated from the list of humanistic values.
Two years ago The European Council of Artists asked for information about the social status of the Lithuanian artists. Next was the asking of the Council of Europe : the National eport "Cultural policy of Lithuania" has been presented and adopted. Unfortunately, we have not been so far able to give such data. There has been no sociological researches in this area. It would cost a considerable sum of money, and the state is short of money for everything. Actually, the artists themselves know best about the conditions of their life. But it is very personal, individual information and it is unknown and mystery for our sociologists.
It is evident, that an artist is poorly paid for his professional work. It is evident, that there are too many artists that they could hope for success and money in a little country like Lithuania. Everybody knows that, but the number of artists is increasing. On the other hand, the number of artists committing suicide is not increasing (though Lithuania has one of the highest percentage of suicides in Europe) . To be seems to be more important imperative in the artists life than to have. Why ? That is a why, at least from my point of view, artistical thinking as the transformation of traditional (based on Romantism or Enlightenment ideas) intellegentsia into individually thinking intellectuals.
Still, I would like to mention certain figures.
There are seven national prizes, won by artists each year (each ten thousand USD) , The Ministry of Culture has established about 200 scholarships, which can be paid to an artist during one or two years (150 USD a month) . Organizations of proffessional artists can also apply to the Ministry of Culture and get money for the realisation of certain projects (for this purpose - about 400 thousand USD in 1998).
Why is it important ?
Lithuania is not one of big countries. So, proffessional art and its national identity cannot be left wholy dependent on an adventturous market. Today we have new expierence : arogant and oppressive wave of senseless marketing. Indeed, lots of money is being made somewhere, but it' s distributed through society in an entirely undemokratic fashion. As essaysist Horward Jarvis has said, "a condition of wild capitalism exists here (as it does even more dangerously in Russia)".
A state that understands that is probably dreaming about the future as traditional concerns : there is need to preserve the language, the national identity, to help it' s citizens to find strength when they are faced with a choice between good and evil, between truth and lie, between genuine and false, between the temporal and the eternal.
A state can (and must) invest in the arts withs fool confidence. As the poet Marcelijus Martinaitis has said, art is the only bank in Lithuania that is not threatened by bankruptcy.
I do hope that this saying is truth in all countries.
Vytautas Martinkus