Contradictions: The Creative Work of Valdas Ozarinskas

Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis

Abstract

The period of artistic momentum for architect and artist Valdas Ozarinskas (1961–2014) can be described as both the extended end of the 20th century, which lasted for at least another decade in Lithuania as the country gradually integrated into the political, economic, and cultural space of the European Union, and as the threshold of the 21st century. Artists who began their careers during this transformative era reflected in various ways on the end of modernity’s utopias and the new challenges of contemporaneity. This article aims to define the critical and analytical approach characteristic of Ozarinskas’s artistic practice, highlighting the means of expression and imagery typical of his contemporary art projects, which convey flashes of modernist utopias, the effects of their conclusion, and the associated contradictions, treating these inconsistencies as an ambivalence in the artist’s relationship with this liminal period.

Applying the grid of architectural categories (space – scale, module – series, function – form) to the analysis of Ozarinskas’s contemporary artworks reveals his critical view of the aspirations and values of modernity, particularly its Soviet version, and the aesthetics of Modernism. The artist’s (and his collaborators’) ambivalent relationship to this worldview and its physical forms is evident in his dual approach: he acted as a curious, even fascinated excavator of the (already) historical legacy of modernity, while also deconstructing it through various means as a conceptually minded contemporary researcher. Straddling the line between high-tech aesthetics and the melancholy of industrial relics, between the mundane, purely practical aspects and the new poetic functions of various objects, between the analytical decomposition of modernist architecture and attempts to destroy it, between the conceptualization of the series and system and its perception as an apparatus of power, and between the perspective of (space) flight and the narratives of crashing and failure, Ozarinskas’s oeuvre represents the contradictions inherent to the turn of the epochs. On one side are the flashes of futuristic visions of modernity; on the other, the uncanny, frightening reflections of their utopianism in the present.

The dystopian imagery in Ozarinskas’s work – from domesticated military equipment, the terrifying light of a nuclear power plant, and repulsive industrial materials to a mutilated body, a ruined building, and the senselessness of a giant black pillow – also points to the then unnamed but rapidly approaching crisis of the Anthropocene. In this respect, his works can be seen as the precursors of the critical imagination of the Anthropocene, which is particularly relevant today and is unfolding in the work of a new generation of artists.