Archetypal pretty boys with guitars play a gig in a second-hand bookshop. T-shirts hang off their limber bodies, their pale skin wrapped tightly around their cheekbones. An audience, primarily made up of young people, occupies the space, nodding their heads, smoking and clambering over one another while the band bounces, sweats, and wipes their faces. Washing over the crowd is the sound of the band’s jangly, post-rock pop, provided by friendly bass, shimmery lead guitar, clipped drums, and endearing shout-singing, resembling a gentler, lusher Franz Ferdinand sound.
It’s difficult to fathom what the members of the band, which is called Without Letters, are saying when they speak to the audience in their native Lithuanian. But more importantly, watching this 40-minute documentation in Deimantas Narkevičius’s video installation titled Books on Shelves and Without Letters (2013), it is difficult to place the video historically. There’s an artful 1980s aesthetic about the quality of the footage. And there’s also something so deeply, suspiciously photogenic about a band playing music in a vintage bookshop populated by young and attractive people that it makes the video seem more like a sweet, hipster dream than a reality, suggesting that this might not be a real band with a real audience. Indeed, Without Letters were, to some extent at least, created by Narkevičius. Homemade pop and rock music has never really taken off in Lithuania, so the artist offered to create a video for a group of guitar-jamming boys who didn’t have a name, in order to shepherd their music to a wider audience, a work which would become the music video for the band’s first single Ausgeträumt (2010). In other words, there’s not a shortage of young people playing music, only the lack of a platform that would allow them to flourish.
In a two-screen projection covering a gallery wall in the lower floor of gb agency, a pair of video images roll back and forth, growing and shrinking in size, shifting along with the movements of the video cameras as they pan around the room. The angle of the viewer’s head also shifts in parallel. Shot on Betacam SP, a video format commonly used during the early 1980s, the footage has a vintage feel, and the moving rectangles have something in common with the aesthetics of early music videos and video games, rather than the digital slickness of the present day. This is less the kind of time filter that one finds with Instagram, with a simple wash over an image, and more a kind of structurally material means of looking at the world with the aid of machines, which make the present appear like the past through an alteration of the image’s very grain.
Every now and then one of the cameras focuses on the photographs reproduced in the books on sale, which members of the audience occasionally break off from watching the band to browse. We see the inside pages of vintage recipe books with pictures of fussily-styled food, and coffee table books featuring black-and-white photographs of couples from the 1960s looking as purposeful, attractive, and aestheticized as those who lovingly gaze upon them while they stroke and point at their pages. Just as the band is itself recorded with a video format that sets them at a temporal remove from us, these images, too, are captured at an even farther remove.
The back-and-forth movement of the camera and the boyish energy of the video are brought into dialogue with an earlier work by Narkevičius, Game No.1 (1995). Assuming the shape of a bronze soccer ball, each section of the sculpture has been made by casting a part of the artist’s sprinting, flexible body. Likewise, hanging nearby like a postcard from the past is a film still depicting a landscape from one of the artist’s previous 16mm films, Keimetis (2002), which collapses memories into an ossified object. In another work, Open in Six Parts (1993), a postwar armoire has been dismantled into six pieces and precariously stacked in a narrow gap between two walls usually used as an entryway to the space. Acting like a barrier to viewers, it would seem to gesture to the breakup of the Soviet bloc countries that was simultaneously taking place in the post-1989 years in which Narkevičius created it.
White Revenge (2008)—an aggressive work in an otherwise gentle exhibition—is a luxury design company’s recreation of a desk with a black ash veneer, originally designed by El Lissitzky in 1930, which Narkevičius has shot with an old Mauser C96. This weapon, which leaves scar marks on the wooden surface, is infamously connected to the White Army faction of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its aftermath. That modernist designs such as these, crafted with emancipatory ambition in mind, are now preserved in corporate offices and the homes of rich collectors, is a well-worn irony often flagged by artists; however, Narkevičius forces the bullet to collide materially with an object that was replicated decades later, suggesting not only that the violence of that period informed the young Lissitzky’s work (his roughly contemporaneous poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) shows two shapes in explosive collision), but also that through the act of shooting Narkevičius takes action on a fictional past. Moreover, his shooting of a young object with an older machine is analogous to the softer “shooting” that takes place in the film Without Letters.
As an exhibition title, “Cupboard and a Play” draws together the more silent, solemn objects of his practice, and those that have the naiveté and energy of Pop bands and sport. There’s a subtlety to individual works, as seen in Open in Six Parts, which borders on extreme tight-lippedness; the viewer must make a significant effort to prise open and access the these works. But in this show the dominant atmosphere is one that is generous and open-ended, particularly if we consider that in Books on Shelves and Without Letters, the 1980s Betacam stands in for the eyes of the artist as a younger man. It takes time to see the compromises and gifts of different generations—each one in different ways freer than the next, and each one more strangled. But such ideas are gently conveyed in this kind portrait of youth, one that can only ever be made once it has been left behind.