Attachment is the Most Valuable Thing
29/07/2011
A conversation with Sarmīte Māliņa and Kristaps Kalns, whose collaborative work What Do I Have to Hide, Sitting Alone in a Rose Garden is on view through August 14 at the Old Barn of the Cēsis Castle during the 2011 Cēsis Art Festival.
You drive by the new library every day. Do you like it?
Sarmīte: I like it from the opposite bank of the river.
But when you come closer?
Sarmīte: I’m befuddled by the little windows.
Kristaps: Now with all those workers there, it looks like an anthill.
I didn’t ask that unintentionally. Your previous work at the Cēsis Art Festival was a bed set up in an enormous organic glass box (Love Never Ends, 2009). That wasn’t the first time you worked with glass. Sarmīte, you once make a work called Unfounded Joy (1995)—a cone-shaped hole in the ground, covered with glass. It was driven over by a truck. Was that the first?
Sarmīte: I’m not sure. Perhaps the first was Language, with a mirror [1989–1996, collection of the forthcoming Contemporary Art Museum –V.V.].
Is this some sort of special passion for glass?
Sarmīte: I’ve always wanted to make objects from a transparent material. But there isn’t a material like that in Latvia—one that is large, transparent, and of a single piece. Not ice sculptures, of course. I’d need meters and meters of a glass mass, well, not glass, but something big and transparent.
Why?
Sarmīte: Maybe because it is the most unnatural material. You won’t find anything in nature that is so clear and sterile. Ice melts.
And what would you make from that material?
Sarmīte: First of all, a cube. A whole chunk.
Do you have a plan of where to find it?
Kristaps: You first have to decide what you want, and then you search for how to realize it. I guess it’s not the other way around: when someone introduces you to the newest materials, and then you’d have to figure out how to use them.
Wasn’t this precisely the case at the Berengo studio in Italy? [Sarmīte Māliņa and Kristaps Kalns were part of a group of artists in Venice who created works from glass for the first exhibit at the forthcoming art museum Rīgas Birža –V.V.]
Sarmīte: That’s a separate project, curated by Helēna Demakova. She chose the artists.
Kristaps: That’s not a case which we thought up ourselves.
Was it exciting?
Sarmīte: We weren’t there for long.
Kristaps: I think the biggest surprise was how easily and carefree all that happens there.
Sarmīte: I have a story for you. The most beautiful object I’ve ever seen was little silver spheres from Valmiera. When I was a child. I lived in the countryside, not far from Valmiera, and you could find those little balls here and there on the country roads. I don’t know how they had gotten there. I found them and felt enraptured by beauty.
Kristaps. Only the neighbor boy had those. He always had more valuables than I did.
Sarmīte: What else did he have?
Kristaps: His father had been in Africa and showed slides of photos.
Glass is a beautiful and fragile material. For some reason I think this could also describe the work you are showing this year at Cēsis—a bouquet of flowers whose shadows move on the walls.
Sarmīte [long pause]. I watched a film this morning. In it, a traveler met a little monkey during one of his trips. Then he had to go, and he had to leave the monkey behind. He told the production crew, “Don’t film!” and went aside to cry. The monkey ran up to him, embraced his leg, and [Sarmīte’s voice breaks] burst into tears.
Kristaps: So they filmed it after all, the bastards!
Sarmīte: Of course. And the monkey—so little, it made a face like this, looked upon at the man, and…
They both cried?
Sarmīte: Yes. But he left the monkey in its homeland. How awful. And I thought: there’s nothing more valuable than attachment. And as always, it is pulled apart. Why does it always have to be wrenched like that?
Kristaps: Everything ends sometimes. Only when there’s been an attachment do you really feel it.
Sarmīte: Attachment is the most valuable thing. That is also the content of our work What Do I Have to Hide, Sitting Alone in a Rose Garden. Somewhere the title was misrepresented as “What Do I Have to Lament...”
Sarmīte: Kristaps and I have also noticed that flowers always take part in all our works.
Kristaps: We really like them.
Sarmīte: And their ruination participates too.
Usually when flowers start to go bad, they are moved away from sight. For you, the opposite is the case: they either rot, or they wither.
Kristaps: In Rose Garden we changed them when they wilted. But perhaps we shouldn’t have.
Sarmīte: We were afraid that viewers might not like wilted flowers. Everything there is so sad, and if the flowers were dead too, then..
Too sad?
Sarmīte: See, Kristaps often says, “Why can’t we afford to do it? To make it beautiful? Or sad? Why not?”
Kristaps: I think this work was never meant to be sad.
Sarmīte: There’s precisely the essence of all beauty: beautiful flowers; young, beautiful faces; a beautiful song sung by a young girl.
Kristaps: Two wedding photos, one non-wedding photo, but also youthful. Like in the expression “Is the joy over joy greater than the fear of losing it?” I associate those flowers with Morrissey’s rocking out at his concerts: At the beginning there is a huge, beautiful boutique, either in his pants pocket or somewhere else; but then he sings and moves around, and at the end of the song everything has fallen apart. All that is left are some remnants, because he really rages with those flowers.
Sarmīte: Now we’re thinking about marble and granite. That’s planned for the Arsenals Exhibition Hall, at a show called Be Patient!
Why that title, and not, for instance, Take it Right Away!?
Sarmīte: I guess I’ve had more contact with being patient.
Kristaps: I was listening to Imants Ziedonis’s epiphany about being patient, and I almost felt uncomfortable that we had chosen that title. Everything there was put so concordantly. But we had already thought of it, independently.
Sarmīte, is there something you regret that you have put off?
Sarmīte: Yes. Purchasing a country home.
So you have one now?
Sarmīte: No, I don’t, but there’s still time. (To Kristaps): What have you been patient about?
Kristaps: When the title was already thought up, I often caught myself in situations where that would happen. For the umpteenth year in a row I’d think, Well, next summer I’ll ride my motorcycle more. But I have to be patient. It didn’t work out.
Sarmīte: For all Latvians, winter is a time of patience. Though now we’re waiting for the fall.
What’s in the fall?
Sarmīte: It will be beautiful. You won’t have to worry that…
Kristaps: That summer is passing by.
Sarmīte: With art, you have the biggest “be patient.” From one project to the next.
Why? There isn’t a chance to realize something?
Kristaps: In our case, it’s the regime of our lives.
Sarmīte: Here you can write: “Both of them work for the newspaper Diena.”
What are you going to do with a country home, working for the newspaper Diena?
Sarmīte: I’ll be retired by then!
Let’s return to the work Language, where there was a mirror and lots of lipstick. Sarmīte, what is your relationship like with lipstick?
Sarmīte: I hope it will be renewed.
What holds you back from using jungle red lipstick?
Sarmīte: Perhaps my self-esteem is too low (laughs).
But that is exactly what can be raised with lipstick, like they say in those women’s magazines!
Kristaps: The lipstick effect!
You once said that the thing you can’t stand most about people is womanliness. What did you mean by that?
Sarmīte: Womanliness in a negative sense. A sort of…dullness of the mind. But men have dull minds, too, and what should that be called?
Kristaps: Manliness!
But still, people tend to consider works by you and Sarmīte as, if not womanly, then at least placed in the feminist discourse. Is there something good in womanliness too?
Sarmīte: I think that art is very sexual. What do you think, Kristaps?
Kristaps: A chauffeur once told me that, when he bought his first Volvo in the early 1990s, a saleslady opened the hood and said, “Look at that sexy motor!”
Sarmīte: Yes, that’s design too!
What is a manly perception of sexiness?
Sarmīte: Well, think for yourself—Ivars Heinrihsons’s paintings are very sexual. The best sexual manifestations of womanliness and manliness can be seen precisely in art. I think that they blend together. There are no longer any boundaries.
Kristaps: All this talk of the sexual depresses me.
What’s wrong with sex?
Kristaps: Well you shouldn’t say that a motor is sexy. If I think it is, then I’d rather keep it to myself, instead of someone telling me that it is.
Sarmīte: Yes, you shouldn’t that. Wait…how did we even get on this subject?!
Kristaps: I’m not afraid to say that art is a making public of that which you kept to yourself and keep to yourself.
So that means manliness and womanliness should be kept to yourself in daily life, so it can be expressed in art?
Kristaps: No, let everyone do what they want. Many years ago, my friends and I drew up a list of the ideal woman’s character traits. Now the list is on my desk. There was also a certain impracticality.
And what to you think a woman should be like, Sarmīte?
Sarmīte: She should have an outfit that covers her body.
Kristaps: That doesn’t rule out a tight-fitting outfit.
Why?
Sarmīte: This is exactly why summer isn’t my favorite season, because I have to look at something disagreeable.
What scares you away?
Sarmīte: Ninety percent of what I see on the streets during the summer.
Doesn’t a woman’s body have beautiful forms—in the Renaissance, for instance? Why couldn’t a woman appreciate it?
Sarmīte: I mean, both exposed women and men.
Why don’t you like that they are exposed?
Sarmīte: I don’t want to talk about that.
