The Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt
Darius Mikšys. Behind the white curtain (Venice, June 2011)
Page 3 of 5
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It is just like life, but a little bit off-life. Turning the process into the play, Darius Mikšys asks of the national pavilion to, itself, start answering some questions for once. He contacts all the artists who have, over the past twenty years, received a national state grant from the Lithuanian government, and proposes that they lend a work to an exhibition that does not yet exist, but in its unrealised and multiform state, resides, temporarily, behind the white curtain. Of these, 173 artists, including Mikšys himself, lend a work. Guided by a catalogue which reproduces a caption and an image for each artwork, visitors select, organise, move and switch the pieces to be exhibited, giving mutable solidity to an exhibition that will not exist in its complete form but that, in its potential, holds the promise of national representation. The viewer, both an agent (in front of the curtain) and a spy (behind it) simultaneously gives shape to, and reveals the impossibility of, that promise.
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