Erika Grigoravičienė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/MIS/2024.16.2
Mindaugas Lukošaitis has become renowned in the Lithuanian as well as international visual arts scene for his numerous series of drawings—a kind of wordless comic strips or silent animated films—in which he recreates the extreme events of Lithuanian and world history by using his imagination. These include the post-WWII struggle of the Lithuanian freedom fighters (Resistance, 2004), the Finnish resistance against the Soviet invasion in 1939–1940 (Talvisota. The Winter War, 2013), the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (Rwanda 1994, 2013) and the Holocaust in Lithuania (Jews. My History, 2010–2012; Jews. My History 2, 2014). In March-February 2022, Lukošaitis presented his new series Z on social media: 60 drawings, this time digital, in which he drew from memory/imagination the bodies of the invaders of Ukraine mutilated by explosions. The latter work is the main object of this study. In order to ascertain its aesthetical and political effectiveness, it is interpreted with regard to the author’s commentary, the entirety of the artist’s oeuvre, art researchers’ texts dedicated to it, as well as certain visual phenomena (from representations of the theme on social media to symbolic iconography of death) and theoretical discourses (Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of the imaginary, the critique of non-representability by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière, and posthumanist, ecological concept of death).
Russia’s war on Ukraine—another invention of political insanity—outbids any notion of justice; thus, one has to use political imagination again to develop a new sensibility. Lukošaitis’ zest to draw, his goal “to twist, wrench, crush, mangle, scatter even more imaginatively” (M. L.) is a kind of psyop, a consolation and therapy for all who are tormented by the constant fear of Russian invasion, psychological tension, grievance, and hatred. The direct connection between the routine of artistic practice and the passion for creation could also be the key to a better understanding of Lukošaitis’ earlier series of drawings (in which the prolonged, persistent, exhausting work of imagination and drawing was supposed to assist in coping with collective trauma and atoning for collective guilt).
The remains of the invaders in the series Z, drawn in the aesthetic regime (Rancière), change the viewers’ attitude towards the sapiens, death, and contemporaneity, as they prompt a reconsideration of the notions of environmental grief and disenfranchised grief. The deterritorialisation of the work, the transfer of its subject matter from the current geopolitical context to the discourse of the history of visual art and photography enables it to manifest a distinctive interaction between the energy of forms (lines) and a peculiar lifelessness, an expression of absolute nonexistence. Carcasses in rags and the semantic function of drapery emphasised by the artist, as well as the animated dance of the whole series, brings to mind not only images of casualties of war or other disasters, but also the traditional symbolic iconography of death that has been developing in Western art since the late Middle Ages—the allegorical figure of the Grim Reaper, danse macabre, and the like. However, the corpses of soldiers are not the undead, resemblant of dancing skeletons; they will never rise. Their shroud-like uniforms have more vitality, but they, too, are doomed to entropy. Lukošaitis’ Z merges quasi-baroque anthropomorphism and bataillesque informe, the possibility of transcendence and its collapse, the semantics of burial shrouds and emerging cultural imagery of environmental grief.
Keywords: Mindaugas Lukošaitis, the imaginary (Jean-Paul Sartre), critique of non-representability (Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière), post-humanist concept of death, symbolic iconography of death, informe.