In this chapter David Mabb’s exhibition Art into Everyday Life, held at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania in 2006 is discussed. For the exhibition, five paintings were produced, three of which were made into carpets. They depicted images of modernist Soviet era buildings in Vilnius, intertwined with William Morris designs

Mabb, David

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David MabbArt into Everyday LifeThe exhibition Art into Everyday Life was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, in 2006. It presented a series of paintings and tuAed wool carpets in which moments from the history of modernism are both juxtaposed and intertwined: Lithuanian Soviet-era architecture and the fabric and wallpaper designs of the nineteenth-cen-tury English designer William Morris. ,ey are worked together in Art into Everyday Life to form dialectical montages, where ‘third meanings’, abstractions resulting from simultaneous fusions and juxtapositions of the separate representations, are produced.138 David MabbLithuania,e exhibition is named aAer a movement that occurred during the Kruschev thaw known as Art into Everyday Life. AAer Stalin’s death, the Soviet authorities relaxed their control of art and design. Artists were given the opportunity to collaborate with textile, carpet, glass and ceramic factories, as well as organizations such as publishers, to create one-of fs or designs for their product ranges. ,e resulting objects departed from of Ncial Socialist Realism, in which Soviet heroes and boys on tractors were the staple ingredient, and looked to local traditional or international modernist inf luences such as the English Festival Style. Architects were also able to look around for inf luences from Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. Many of the buildings constructed at this time are light and airy, and incorporate some of the best elements of International Modernism. ,ey can be considered as much a part of the history of modernity as the earlier modernist buildings photographed by Richard Pare (2007) and discussed in David Cunningham’s AAerword to this book.Because many of the buildings from this era remain associated with the Soviet occupation, they have been threatened with destruction through redevelopment. ,e artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas from Pro-test Lab, an organization that campaigned to save Vilnius’s Lietuva Cinema, describe the processes behind the redevelopment of buildings from the Soviet period:Since independence in 1991 Lithuania has been caught in an insane period of pri-vatization, property development and demolition. Like a Wild West land-grab or a gold rush, speculators and real estate tycoons have joined forces with corrupt municipal bureaucrats to redevelop the country at a mad pace. ProNt has been their only motive. Public space, landmark buildings, cultural life, and public opinion have been the principal victims. ,eir method is simple: tell the population that economic development is good for everyone. Convince them that Capital is King. Remind the public that making Lithuania look like the pale shade of a Western European city is the best way to scrub the Soviet past: and make the country attractive to even more investment and development. (Lovink, Urbonas, Urbonas 2005)Art into Everyday Life 139,e exhibition focused on four of Vilnius’ Soviet-era buildings, two of them cinemas.1 ,e Lietuva Cinema (1959–1965) was an important cul-tural centre for people in Vilnius during the Soviet period. It has a long modernist-type glass pavilion that fronts the ground f loor of the whole building. ,e 1,000-seat cinema auditorium with a screen size of 200 square metres is spread behind, tucked beneath the hill at the back. ,e title of the cinema, ‘Lietuva’ (Lithuania), was also an important signiNer of national identity. Even in its empty dilapidated state, the complex generates a feel-ing of serenity and calm.2,e United Colours of Benetton Mega Store previously housed the Vilnius Cinema (1963) before its conversion in 1996. ,e concertina-like frontage of the building has become the victim of facadeism and is intact. ,e interior has been completely gutted and no trace of it remains. ,e shop faces onto Gedeminas Prospect (formerly Lenin Prospect), Vilnius’ main shopping street, and to walk around it now is to be transported into any other of the 5,000 Benetton stores anywhere in the world.,e Sports Hall (1971) was controversially built on top of the old Jewish cemetery and cemetery headstones were used in building the entrance stairs. ,e roof sweeps upwards towards the sky and is quite an imposing presence on the north side of the Neris River when viewed from the opposite bank. ,e foyer has walls of glass on three sides and hence is an open, brilliantly-lit modernist space with an extraordinary f luted organic, plant-like wooden sculpture installation on the walled side. ,e open-air swimming pools next to it are derelict and overgrown. ,e building is no 1 More than NAeen cinema theatres disappeared in Vilnius, including such urban landmarks as Ausra (Dawn), Zvaigzde (Star), Spalis (October), Pionierius (Pioneer), Pergale (Victory), Tevyne (Motherland), Kronika (Newsreel), Aidas (Echo), Planeta (Planet), Neris, Vingis, Lazdynai, Vilnius, Maskva (Moscow) and Lietuva. In replace-ment, by 2006 two multiplex cinemas had been constructed: the suburban Coca Cola Plaza and exurban Akropolis Cinemas.2 At the time of writing (March 2012) the cinema is still standing, its original sale having been challenged in court. However, it is due to be demolished and replaced by a multi-storey apartment building.140 David Mabblonger in use as a sports hall and is mostly empty; it was being used to house a Nlm set for a British Nlm company when I was there.3,e National Art Gallery (1980) stands on the north bank of the Neris overlooking the centre of Vilnius from a low hill. Built in 1980, it was formerly the Revolutionary Museum of the Lithuanian Socialist Soviet Republic. ,e building became in 1991 a Museum of Resistance and was then converted into a gallery for contemporary art before closing in 1995 and remaining unused and derelict until the beginning of substantial rebuild-ing. It has now reopened as the new National Art Gallery of Lithuania.,ese buildings constitute part of a history of Soviet modernity. In Vilnius, the buildings dominated the city and aspects of everyday life towards the end of Russian occupation. ,ey continue to do so, either empty and seemingly abandoned or in newly reconstructed forms. ,eir spectres continue to haunt Vilnius.England,e nineteenth-century English writer and designer William Morris thought that design had a fundamental role to play in the transformation of everyday life. ,is essentially political motivation – a commitment to the radical potential of design – is behind much of his work as a designer and craAsman and the setting up of Morris & Co. He was a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), the Nrst building preservation society, which was established to protect buildings from Victorian redevelopers. In English political life, Morris was known Nrstly as a member of the National Liberal League. As he moved leAwards he became a leading member of the Social Democratic Federation, and in 3 At the time of writing (March 2012) the Sports Hall is still standing. It now has a preservation order on it. ,e owners, again aAer a court case, have proposed to restore and renovate the building as a National Congress Centre.Art into Everyday Life 1411883 he founded the Socialist League. ,is political work was an extension of his work as a designer as he increasingly recognized that social change could not be achieved by design alone but required a revolutionary transi-tion, organised by the working class of capitalist industrial society.Morris’ designs for carpet, fabric and wallpaper constituted a radi-cal break with the orthodoxy of neo-Gothic of his time. ,ey are highly schematized representations of nature, where it is always summer and never winter; the plants are always in leaf, oAen f lowering, with their fruits avail-able in abundance, ripe for picking, and with no human labour in sight. ,is is a utopian vision, an image of Cokaygne, the medieval mythical land of plenty, easily acceptable to the middle classes. Today his work is seen as safe and comfortable, and his wallpaper and fabric designs are widely reproduced in machine-printed form. ,ey can be found in an array of domestic environments and uses, furnishing the middle-class and con-servative semis of England.142 David Mabb,e ExhibitionFor the exhibition, I made Nve paintings where elements of a Morris fabric design have been over-painted with an interpretation of a photograph of one of the buildings described above. Images of three of the paintings were projected onto backing material and made into large tuAed wool carpets. In Lietuva, the cinema of the same name is juxtaposed with Morris’ Willow Bough (1887). ,e design f lows around the image of the cinema, with only the twigs, stripped of their leaves, intertwining with the building. Similarly, in United Colors of Benetton Morris’ Fruit (1866) is depicted around the building. Again, only the twigs in the pattern seemingly appear embed-ded in the façade of the building. In both carpets, the fecundity of Morris’ designs has died; where the patterns intersect the buildings, summer is turned into winter. In !e Sports Hall, Morris’ Honeysuckle (1883) sur-rounds the image of the building, but here only the honeysuckle f lowers are represented over the image of the Sports Hall; isolated from the rest of the pattern, the f lowers appear like the explosions of strangely organic Nreworks bursting, f loating, suspended forever. ,e combinations of build-ings and patterns produce unstable spaces that are never Nxed, where the Morris patterns and the buildings are unable to fully merge or separate.AB Kilimai made the carpets, at Lentvaris just outside Vilnius, where part of the carpet factory survived the decimation of Lithuanian craA and manufacturing begun in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a medium, carpets are not a rareNed high art form like painting and are more part of the furniture of everyday life. As part of Art into Everyday Life, the paintings and carpets were hung in the Cinema Hall of the former Art Exhibition Palace, opened in 1968 and now the Contemporary Art Centre. ,e Hall, with its cast-concrete f luted decorative interior and its usually shuttered stained-glass window, formed an entirely appropriate context in which to view the work. ,e paintings were traditionally hung, but the car-pets were hung from the ceiling, away from the walls, as three-dimensional objects, appearing to f loat, suspended in space. ,e images of the build-ings appear like contemporary ruins, melancholic, transient and nostalgic.Art into Everyday Life 143144 David MabbIt is now over six years since the exhibition opened. ,e carpets are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, the National Museum of M.K. Ciurlionis, Kaunas and Paisley Museum and Art Gallery in Scotland. ,e paintings, made as studies for the carpets, were lost in Germany by the shipping company that should have delivered them back to London. ,e exhibition worked as a protest against the buildings’ destruc-tion and as a memorial to them, but in retrospect, this aspect was an exer-cise in premature nostalgia. ,e exhibition no longer exists, at least in its original form. But Lietuva Cinema and the Sports Hall still stand empty in a state of slow decline, with damp stained concrete, occasional boarded-up windows, leA-over, out-of-date advertising and litter blowing against graf Ntied walls. ,e former Vilnius Cinema facade still fronts the United Colors of Benetton shop. ,ey are still present as possible sites of social intervention and transformation, as alienated symptoms of the present and utopian signs of a possible future (Roberts 2006: 62).ReferencesLovink, G., Urbonas, G., and Urbonas, N. (2005). ‘Hacking Public Spaces in Vilnius: Politics of a new media space inside the Lietuva (Soviet) cinema’. Interactivist Info Exchange. <http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/weblog/2005/06/22/hacking-public-spaces-in-vilnius/> accessed 24 September 2011.Pare, R. (2007). !e Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture 1922–1932. New York: Monacelli Press.Roberts, J. (2006). Philosophising the Everyday. London: Pluto Press.Art into Everyday Life 145Figures1 David Mabb. Art Into Everyday Life, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2006). From leA to right: !e Sports Hall (2005). TuAed wool carpet, 400 x 253 cm. Collection: Paisley Museum and Art Gallery. United Colors of Benetton Shop (2005). Oil paint on Fruit fabric mounted on linen, 114 x 94 cm. !e Sports Hall (2005). Oil paint on Honeysuckle fabric mounted on linen, 142 x 90 cm. Lietuva (2005). TuAed wool carpet, 400 x 236 cm. Collection: National Gallery of Art, Lithuania. Photo: Paulius Mazuras.2 David Mabb. Art Into Everyday Life, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2006). From leA to right: Lietuva (2005). Oil paint on Willowboughs fabric mounted on linen, 142 x 84 cm. !e Sports Hall (2005). TuAed wool carpet, 400 x 253 cm. Collection: Paisley Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland. Photo: Paulius Mazuras.3 David Mabb. Art Into Everyday Life, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2006).United Colors of Benetton (2005). TuAed wool carpet, 321 x 264 cm. Collection: National Museum of M.K. Ciurlionis, Lithuania. Photo: Paulius Mazuras.

Art into Everyday Life

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Art into Everday Life

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