 | by
|
| Translated by Agnieška Leščinska | |
Darius Žiūra. Diseris (Dissertating). Kitos knygos, Vilniaus dailės akademijos leidykla, 2024, p. 168.
The words of Chinese artist Wu Shanzhuan, printed on a tote bag I bought as a gift at Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, read: “Everyone has a right to refuse to be an artist.” Everyone also has the right to refuse to be a writer. Darius Žiūra doesn’t hurry in calling himself a writer, either. “I spent my whole life thinking I could never be a writer, because I simply didn’t have what it takes,” he says in an interview. And yet, with his very first book, Diseris (Dissertating), this artist was formally inducted into the literary world by esteemed institutions. He received the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore Prize for the most creative book as well as the Antanukas Prize for the beauty of a nonfiction book and was shortlisted for the Book of the Year Awards in the adult prose category. Even writers who spend their entire lives publishing books often do not receive such recognition. His list of awards is further solidified and crowned by the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts, awarded for his body of work to date.
Žiūra studied painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, but in the field of contemporary art, he is better known as an artist working with photography and video art. In 2017, he defended an art project for his dissertation: SWIM, Monument for Utopia, Gustoniai, Metatext (supervised by Prof. Dr. Agnė Narušytė). It’s a project that later became the foundation for his book Dissertating. One of the privileges of a fine arts dissertation is the fluid boundary between academic and artistic language. And yet, it is still framed by the mandatory elements of scholarly work: an introduction, conclusions, a summary, and visual material.
In preparing the book for publication, all these elements disappear, leaving only a black frame on a white cover. The title itself, according to Žiūra, signals an informal approach to doctoral studies. As a book, Dissertating stands on its own, breaking away from academics, while the knowledge of its context helps the reader appreciate his scope. Both in his dissertation and in Dissertating, Žiūra pushes further and looks from a wider perspective, asserting his right to write in a way that serves the text and the experience. Had he remained within those academic bounds, written as expected, and written while thinking of himself as a writer, perhaps this book would not have received such recognition.
It turns out that the best books are written not by being a writer, but perhaps by refusing to be one – by simply writing. You must be patient if you want to be a writer. You must master language and memory while understanding that both are uncontrollable, slipping through your fingers like water. A writer’s tools are language and memory; a photographer’s – light and time. Žiūra knows how to wield all four. In Dissertating, time’s light illuminates both what is remembered and what is forgotten. The artist captures time and within it, himself and us.
As an artist, Žiūra erases the boundaries between photography and video art, while as a writer, he blurs the lines between literary genres. On the back cover, Dissertating is labeled as autobiographical prose, yet it appears on both fiction and nonfiction award lists. It’s because the book reveals the fluidity of genres, the interplay of reality and fiction, the way art and life merge and dissolve into one another.
It’s the artist’s creative journey – a documentation of existence and everyday life, of threshold experiences – both personal and others. It’s a reflection on biography and the creative process, where experiences are transformed into art, and art into literature. Or, as Žiūra himself contemplates in the book: “a text is like an artistic project that could simultaneously be a film script, an autobiographical novel, an intellectual read. A text is like a drawing, a spatial sketch where different spaces and images intertwine” (p. 41).
The narrative unfolds chronologically, without artificial structuring or excessive literariness. Žiūra has said that “all my works are about time, and time is a chronological thing.” In Dissertating, fragments of childhood memories, years of studying at the Academy of Arts, and the writing of his dissertation emerge alongside reflections on the wild 1990s in Lithuania, the genesis of artworks, the vulnerability of text and body, and the body as a map of experiences. The book illustrates dangerous, liminal spaces and experiences like courtrooms, hospitals, squats, and drowning. Experiences from the margins give birth to marginal forms of expression: the book is a hybrid literary work that appears between fiction and documentary, expanding the boundaries of literary discourse.
Žiūra is drawn to the liminal, yet in writing, he does not seek suffering, nor does he enjoy it. Instead, like any other object of study, he observes it from a distance, examining it with curiosity. Likewise, he does not assume the role of the tormented artist, nor does he complain about the difficulty of writing. Rather, he states it as an unquestionable fact: “(…) over time, it becomes clear that writing is incomparably more difficult than creating images. It is intense intellectual labor, demanding far more energy. The worst part is that when you write, you cannot rely on any productive algorithm. Every word must be written by hand. There is no writing chamber, just as there is no text-producing device that, once aimed in the right direction and calibrated with the proper light sensitivity, aperture, and shutter speed, would yield a result of corresponding quality” (p. 71).
He approaches writing with the fresh enthusiasm of a beginner, the curiosity of an artist who has discovered a new medium. As he says in a conversation with Agnė Narušytė, “[Writing] reminded me of the feeling when I first picked up a paintbrush. It felt as if a new, magical infinity had opened up. But then you write, and write, and write, and suddenly you realize that some word combinations have already been used, that these paths have been walked before, and you don’t want to tread the same ones. The puzzles begin, and infinity gradually shows its limits.”
That infinity Žiūra speaks of is the freedom to not be a writer. Not being a writer means escaping the boundaries that demand attention to structure, literariness, image, audience, and the literary community. Writing without being a writer is like swimming against the current, crossing from one shore of text to another.
Žiūra is a writer who has the right to not be a writer. Then again, he was a writer even before Dissertating was written because writing, first and foremost, is observation. Just as the villagers in his art project Gustoniai (begun in 2001) face the camera without performing, by simply existing, Žiūra, too, sits before his own lens and is able to exist in both spaces at once: as the observer and the observed, as the writer of himself and the one being written about. He bears witness to his own identity and to the identity of the time he inhabits. “The power of an artwork is to remind us of life. Then, life begins to resemble an artwork” (p. 41).
One of Žiūra’s early works, Lydinys (Alloy), involved melting down coins fished from a Palanga fountain into a single brick. The craftsman tasked with the job insisted that such an alloy was technologically impossible – and that removing coins from the fountain was a crime. And yet, the result – much like Dissertating – is both expansive and open to interpretation, its gleaming, mirror-like surface reflecting questions of self-will, legality, and the boundary of art back onto the person who asks them. Through the black frame against its white background of Dissertating’s cover art emerges the art of fusing creation with life, personal and collective experiences across decades, quotes and contexts, marginal existences and their reflection, as well as body and text.
An artist’s gaze turned upon himself and his work can just as easily decenter the individual as it can center art, cities, streets, people, and objects. A person’s own story, the stories of others – these are the life of this text. Frames are an illusion – dead water. The recurring acronym SWIM in the book serves both as a reference to Žiūra’s exhibition and as a symbol of swimming as a motif: the act of drifting in text as well as in life and out of it. Swimming toward the past self, present self, and imagined self, the unwritten and the never-to-be-written, toward Someone Who Isn’t Me (another meaning associated with SWIM, a way to avoid speaking about illegal actions in the first person). “His art is swimming with others,” says Jurij Dobriakov. This book is that, too.
There’s a temptation to call Dissertating a singular book – not only in the sense defined by Roberto Calasso in The Art of the Publisher, where he describes a singular book as one in which it is clear that something happened to the author, something that permeated him and that something ultimately settled into the manuscript, inscribed in a distinct style. Dissertating is singular within the context of Lithuanian literature as well; it moves through time and through the transformations of its creator. The personal becomes universal, and Dissertating writes us into its pages. This can be achieved by the best autobiographical texts. I hope to read more books by Žiūra, but even if this remains his only one, it both fills the frame of expectation and spills beyond it.
“I just document,” reads the quote by Chinese photographer Lu Nan on a canvas tote bag I bought for myself in the same gallery – a reminder of what writers do, especially when they refuse to be writers.
