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April 8, 2014 – Review
Deimantas Narkevičius’s “Cupboard and a Play”
Laura McLean-Ferris
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 …