 Untitled, Riga, 2002 Arnis Balcus To Be Continued in Private If the photos are any good, it is always you who has taken them - you becoming a Grand Vouyeur, a pornographer. You cannot help it you are turning into a camera. As the Masturbatory Eye, you are indulging in the foreplay for the masses. As the Great Caressing Glance you are sacrificing yourself to the ultimate sex machine of the 20th century, to the picturing apparatus. Being in touch with humans for no other reason than becoming a camera... I have this postcard somewhere, a self-portrait of Arnis Balcus, which I used to keep on my working table in the museum for some reasons. Of course I liked the picture, even before I came to know more about the rest of his work. There was more to it than that, nevertheless. With the picture I was testing my colleagues with whom I share a room, two decent middle-aged middle class ladies, a researcher of Dutch painting of 1640's and a researcher of Estonian painting of 1920's, respectively. If I had not been at work for some days, I always found it turned around when I came, the picture discreetly facing the table. It could not have been the lady who later asked if it is really me, naked on this picture who did it. I remember mumbling something close to "no". If it was their way of getting even on me, it was wicked. That moment of embarrassment finally made me take the postcard home with me. It must have happened before "Adaptation", a young Latvian art show in Tallinn in the spring of 2003. That's when I got to know the work by Arnis Balcus. But even now Karin, my girlfriend, keeps putting the picture away when her mum comes to visit our place. So the story continues in private. What was it all about, the fuss? About sex, of course, like most of the work by Arnis Balcus, in one way or another. Have a look at the picture. In the middle of it, close but out of focus, is this slightly violet piece of throbbing meat shadowing the somewhat more sharply defined features of the photographer himself, leaning backwards. Indeed, it is a self-portrait with a dick. There is a touch of ingeniousness in the way the simplest narcissist gesture widely introduced to popular use by the arrival of snapshot cameras - stretching out your hand and shooting yourself - is used here. It serves as an allegory for all the similar moments of relying on auto-focus. I guess everyone getting a hold of one of these handy little tools has tried shooting oneself. It is now even becoming almost a universal gesture, as snapshot-culture is rapidly getting an obligatory part of urban communication now that the latest models of mobile phones come only with camera. No wonder. It is perfect for flirting. The snapshot culture is process orientated, pictures are for participating. Mostly the results of taking snapshots of oneself are hardly even worth mentioning. Neither is the process too interesting. The moment of elevated vanity, passing impulse leading to taking the picture, is the only thing actually revealed besides the red blink of the eyes wide open, responding to the shock of the flashlight. It often makes you feel a little ashamed, assures the blankness and banality of existence you probably desperately tried to escape at the moment of shooting. Indeed, Arnis is balancing on the verge of self-mockery in this picture, but comes out of it clean. And if there is an element of quiet parody in his self-portrait with a dick, it is a parody of us all, men and women with snapshot cameras. We must not forget that one can do a lot of hasty communication with pictures too. We must not forget that there are many artists out there shooting themselves, their friends and their lovers often ending up with pathetic sincerity of someone like Elke Krystufek or Tracy Emin. There is this huge difference in acknowledging narcissism as a general condition of society or using it as a way to expressionist self-gratification. Arnis definitely must know all about getting in touch with other people with the help of camera. But in doing this he comes to results that are mostly elusive, rather than straightforward. Even if you know the motive chosen by the artist personally, it doesn`t really lead you to him. He avoids talking about mommy and daddy to please his psychoanalysts. Stepping on and off the stage throughout his oeuvre, he is melting his self-portrait with the portraits of his friends and lovers. They all become indistinguishable, in the long run. The little stories the pictures are hinting to continue in private, indeed. Without the promise of a little story a photo is just a little piece in the rich texture of reality consisting of clothes, environment, codes of behaviour, lifestyles.... There is no denying of that. But we can only imagine how much is his own life directed by his camera. Through scattered displacement within exhibition display all things you might recognize, all the evidence, becomes substitute for something else. His work is all about the desire to fix desire, an impossible task in itself. At "Untitled Video No 1" a looping fragment from the footage filmed at the sunny court, digital zoom function is bringing the texture of the video-image into the game, balancing in between an act of voyeurism and a certain fragile truth about sexuality and innocence intertwined. The short sketch format relying on the immediacy of the captured moment, is something valuable in itself, something possibly underrated. It works as an intro to a certain mood of reception Arnis would like the viewers to approach his work - so what is it all about, you ask, did I miss it? The piece somehow depends on interaction with the rest of the exhibition, triggering something and then borrowing its content contextually, from the other pieces. "Xionel", a 16 minutes video shown together with 8 black and white gelatine silver prints, seems far more independent status. This might be the point for redefining the interests and the manners of working of the artist, a step towards something coming up next. "Xionel", who at first instance appears as an astonishingly beautiful Asian girl, in line with friends rather than lovers, turns out to be a boy in the process of transsexual transformation preparing for this trip, an encounter with a man (s)he loves. I guess all the other bodies in this exhibition will be understood in the light of her confessions, her search for her body image. The documentary is made in Vienna, the city which has contributed so much to our understanding of sexuality and which was also a place where the first transsexual operation was made. It provides a link to the unaesthetisised reality of the brave new world of multicultural and multisexual identity. We might be facing a predecessor of the future with sexuality finally totally liberated from the reproductive function, which is left to gene-technology. We might face someone from the past, there things were yet a little too complicated with changing identities like costumes. "It is only when I loose myself, I find myself, I find myself", spins the song that has somewhat undeservedly haunting me while writing this article. What is the message, if not that our identity and sex is grounded on an image, which besides having a decisive role in our life might also be perceived as beautiful, in all the dangerous ambiguity of the word. Hanno Soans, August, 2004 Exhibition: 12 October - 14 November, 2004 Opening hours: Tue-Sun 11 am - 5 pm Closed Mondays State Museum of Art Exhibition hall Arsenals Torna street 1 LV-1050 Riga (Latvia) Telephone/Fax +371 735 75 20 www.vmm.lv |
 |