Arturas Bumšteinas

"Words and Music"

Arturas Bumšteinas (lives and works in Vilnius / Lithuania) works on the intersection between visual arts, sound and music. He is an educated composer yet his artistic activity surpasses to a high degree the scope of music. His field of interest covers video, photography and performance.
 
The invitation card to this exhibition shows Jakov Bumsteinas, the hero in two of his installations, lightening the way to the exhibition, a biographical note that hinds towards the notion of history and personal encounters. It is one particular sound, featured in Story of one Sound, which heavily influenced the artist’s and his parents’ lives. “An ordinary sound with an extraordinary power!” like the artist describes it. He started to like the song, not only because the discovery was amusing but because it also took him back in time. In all his works, Bumšteinas is more interested in the composition of fundamentals than in the surfaces of style. He takes electronic sound as a paradigm that encapsulates exceptional possibilities of digital sound generation, manipulation and composition. In his work, sound becomes not just a musical, but an architectural, physical and conceptual unit, an object of open-ended intuitive improvisation, conceptual design, or quasi-scientific research.

 
In „XIX, XX, XXI”, our hero, the artist’s 60 years old father, is singing. Accompanied by 19th Century instruments, he tries to remember the songs of his Youth. His singing and the background music are being played from two separate sources, thus creating various musical combinations and an illusion of passing and reappearing memories. He often uses very direct and at the same time strong metaphors, transferring newspapers into sound pieces, like in Organ, creating a primitive, individual version of Brussels “Atomium” or, in his piece My road to Bayreuth (Vilnius – Warszawa), working with the 9-year-long waiting period to get tickets for a Wagner opera. Since then Bumsteinas is engaged in the process of waiting and while waiting he is also working on various pieces related to Wagner’s theme discussing the momentum of high culture. Here, we see a picture of artist hibernating on the streets of his hometown Vilnius together with the reproduction of the original letter reply from the Bayreuther Festspiele. It is a type of subjectivity that intertwines with an aesthetic of the everyday, the feel of an involuntary displacement, the insistence on group practices, the critique of conventional concepts of identity and therefore with a clear political approach of what art can mean today.
 
In Kalbos Krūva (R.Smithson’s “Heap of Language” translated into Lithuanian language), Bumsteinas turns his focus to the old intellectual master of 20th Century Art in the Western World. The piece consists of a translated text drawing by Robert Smithson and its interpretation as a musical score. One of the most important concepts Smithson advanced was that of the 'site,' a place in the world where art is inseparable from its context. One site can represent another site which does not resemble it - this is exactly the Non-Site. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor – from A is Z. Transferring this picture into different languages – Lithuanian and music – leads to even more displacements and gives space to Bumsteinas’ own artistic perspective.
 

His artistic practice is highly informed not only by Smithson but also by artistic movements like Fluxus, artists like John Cage and John Baldessari or the early experiments at the Black Mountain College. In 2005 he made an instrumental reinterpretation of John Baldessari’s recordings called Bumšteinas Plays Baldessari Sings LeWitt. Baldessari aimed to address the mass audience with the theories of high art and, in 1972, sang “Sentences on Conceptual Art” by Sol LeWitt. In this piece, Baldessari appropriated the subversive legacy of Duchamp and applied it to the false orthodoxy with which conceptualism was about to install itself as the new authoritative movement – a move Bumšteinas seems to feel is appropriate nowadays as well.
 
Bumsteinas – like the artists of the Fluxus movement - emphasizes the fictional character of cultural divisions into so-called popular and high culture. The projects of Bumšteinas deal closely with institutional and social critique. And that always in a very convincing and thoughtful way.