A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 05 – Things, Where Things Don’t Belong

On the 31st October, 2013 at 5 pm atKlaipedaArtCenter– KCCC (Didzioji Vandens str. 2,Klaipeda) the fifth  exhibition/episode of a project “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick” called “Things, Where Things Don’t Belong” will be presented. The project will proceed through the end of the year 2013 and one after another will present cycle of exhibitions or episodes, should we consider it a series.

The author of the exhibition “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 05 – Things, Where Things Don’t Belong” is an artist Mindaugas Bumblys (born 1983) based inKlaipeda(Lithuania). While peering through a thick cultural stratum and referring to art history as well as to local identity, M. Bumblys rethinks possible points of intersection and interchange between a thing as a handy object and an artwork as unhandy thing in the white cube situation.

A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick

We might think of a trick as something fraudulent. But then, as with a modern conjuror, fraud too requires an exact mimesis of nature. Think of the airplane wing. Think of the blue feather ensuring that the arrow flies straight. So we need to be thinking of the trick as something scientific and real, bearing a scrupulous understanding and manipulation of things, including the human body in relation to such things. But the trick slides, it seduces, it cajoles (“Hey Duchess!”), it knows and enjoys the leap beyond the thingness of things.

Michael Taussig¹

A plasterboard box, four and a half meters long, two and a half meters wide and of the same height, situated on the grand floor of Klaipeda Art Centre, is actually a room in a room. The space isolated from the inner space of the building is as an island. A bit like a boat, I would say. Just like a boat, it is stimulating imagination.

Physically it is a remnant from the French-Lithuanian exhibition “Prestige: Phantasmagoria now”, which was held during the autumn of 2012. Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud in his text, published in the catalogue of the exhibition², adverts that the term ‘prestige’ came from the vocabulary of illusionists and is one of three component parts of a magic trick; its outcome, to be more precise. A prestige follows a pledge, when at a first glance ordinary objects are presented in a particular situation; and the trick itself that transforms conventional situation into an extraordinary moment.

I do not consider magic literally. I think about things, about stories things tell, how they tell them; about   relations of those objects, stories and storytelling techniques (with subjects), and dynamics between them.

I am thinking about situations that have the ability to create a pretext for rapture or difference to occur in a flow.

The box left from the latter exhibition (being part of the last stage of the trick) here, through the trick itself, turns into its germ – the pledge.  Now it is a trigger for another project, which is extended in time for a season, like TV series.

05 – Things, Where Things Don’t Belong

The whole room

Is things, even

Where things

Don’t belong.

What is that old

Man’s public face

Doing sorrowing,

Secretly a little,

A little above and

A little back from

A limp arm?

What is that thing

Doing sorrowing

Where things

Don’t belong?³

Author of the exhibition: Mindaugas Bumblys

Curator: Neringa Bumblienė

The exhibition will be held until 24^th November, 2013

Organizers: The Purple Swamphen, KCCC

Sponsors: Ministry of Culture of theRepublicofLithuania,KlaipedaCityMunicipality, L’Institut français de Lituanie, Ambassade de Lituanie enFrance

[1] Michael Taussig, The Stories Things Tell And Why They Tell Them, e-flux journal#36, 07/ 2012, www.e-flux.com

[2] Prestige: Phantasmagoria Now, exhibition catalog, Klaipėda: KCCC, 2012, p. 24.

[3] Re-edited poem “The Last Pietà, In Florence” by James Wright