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THE FEAST
Installation consisting of series of digital prints and resin objects
2017
at the abandoned supermarket Slenis in Kartena as part of the experimental engineering camp eeKūlgrinda closing exhibition
Exhibition text: Monika Kalinauskaitė
Somewhere right now, at this very moment, a hungry dog is running through some exhausted field, through an urban forest. There is no need to be an all-knowing eye to make sure of it. Even a very stupid eye will suffice — it’s just that somebody does not store their meat in the refrigerator because do not have a refrigerator, they do not even have door, actually, and there’s no need to stare like that, they were not brought in from another planet.
The story that I am writing opens through such an intelligent eye, back when we were separated by a huge distance. Then the eye descended and now it has been here for a while, a little lost, but still corporeal and sharp. Yearning to look around, it slips into a dog’s skull. There’s lots to be done there, it says. The experience is chaotic, but important.
Life and spirit wears down in the state of lack. When the dog catches up with the meat, he sees what I do: a towel, a piggy bank, a deer’s head, some chairs. Perhaps he even discerns that those are items left by humans and envisions what a place formed through them means. It is not a monument, it is a portal. Through here we end up everywhere: in a feast, in the past, in pain, in hope, in Twin Peaks, in Kartena. This is a world which is not welcome in our world.
After rain the dog sometimes gets anxious. He feels as if the city is congealing in foggy puddles as the evening falls. It is soaking, dissolving there, thickening, crawling. A worm from tomorrow is chewing on a nine-storey block. All the smells of human activity in one shaky mass which does not even resemble meat. The dog’s eye is getting crusty, he’s thinking of the clotting seas, while the diluted urban forest is housing a feast.
A feast is a wonderful state of excess and the dog does not know anymore if he has ever been not there. All lives welcome him with ease, nobody takes him for a spectator. The intelligent eye is ashamed. Something must be pried out of it. Something that would allow to enter the feast without superstition, to stand on the edge of a portal even when it is just an opening of an empty pipe. When the sea will finally congeal, the eye realises, we will all return to campgrounds. Until then we must learn to read stories up to the present and not around it, enforce a strict separation of writers from preachers, keep a close watch on foggy puddles after rain and, most importantly, befriend dogs.
The eye itself cannot do this. The dog pulls it out during the night and brings it to Anastasia. An apparatus accommodates the eye. Its journey from the top always leads to the same: human mechanisms, excess, signage and future, which will inevitably inherit something indecipherable. Just like how any feast is indecipherable, especially one which is attended by an unwanted guest — the intelligent eye.