Performing the East: AABS Scholar Examines Performance Art in Latvia
In 2011, Dr. Amy Bryzgel was awarded an AABS Emerging Scholar Award to assist with the completion of her book, Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980. The book dedicates one chapter to an analysis of performance art in Latvia as viewed through the works of contemporary artists Miervaldis Polis and Gints Gabrans. The funding was utilised to offset the cost of copy-editing and indexing of the final manuscript.
Performing the East examines the phenomenon of performance art as it emerged in Eastern Europe by examining distinct case-studies of artists working in Russia, Latvia and Poland. While Performance Art is a thoroughly theorised and codified genre within the Western Art Historical canon, there has yet to emerge a comprehensive study of the meaning and significance of this art form to artists and audiences in the 'East,' where it emerged under entirely different socio-historical conditions. This book is one of the first efforts to fill that gap in the scholarship.
The chapter on Performance Art in Latvia focuses on two artists working nearly two decades apart. Miervaldis Polis, the painter-turned-performer, embarked on a series of performance in the 1980s as the Bronze Man, wherein he walked around the streets of Soviet Riga covered from head to toe in bronze paint. Nearly 20 years later, after Latvia had already regained its independence and was about to enter a new Union - the EU - artist and set designer Gints Gabrans selected a homeless man from the streets of Riga and turned him into a TV star by giving him a makeover and finding as many opportunities as possible for him to appear on TV. Both performances confront the viewer with visceral manifestations of self-made (or re-made) men, and challenge him to question the truth behind appearances presented. While Polis' performance functioned in concert with similar disputes being raised by citizens during the Soviet period, Gabrans's reinvents this question during a period when Latvia was just gaining its footing in a free-market democracy.
From 2004-2009, Dr. Bryzgel lived in Riga while completing research for her PhD dissertation on the resurgence of the avant-garde in Eastern Europe after the Thaw. Since 2009, she has been a Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, where she specialises in Modern and Contemporary Art from Eastern Europe and Russia.
The 2010 Emerging Scholars Award assisted Dr. McKenzie in financing his travel to Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius to conduct field research about Dark Tourism. The field studies in Estonia included interviews with owners of a firm that provides Soviet Tours in Tallinn; an interview with a tour guide who conducts Soviet Tours in Tallinn; and an interview with a representative of the Tallinn tourism bureau. In Riga, he conducted an interview with a representative of the Latvian Institute to discuss the role of Soviet tourism in Latvia and an interview with a representative from the Latvian Tourism Development Agency. In Vilnius, he conducted an interview, and a tour, with a guide at the Museum of Genocide Victims, an interview with a tourist who visited Grūto parkas ("Stalin World"), and an interview with a representative of the Lithuanian tourism bureau.
According to the recommendation by reviewers, Art in Vilnius is a "pioneering study in art history and the city of Vilnius. It presents Vilnius as a multicultural city in which different ethnic-national cultures overlap but also pursue their own agendas, and it is beautifully illustrated." The review noted that the period 1900-1915 is a crucial one both for the development of art and for the development of national identity in the city. "What is particularly interesting is the book's sophisticated approach which begins with different national groups producing art in the city (Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Russians), then goes into specific artists in more depth (two Poles and one Lithuanian), followed by a discussion of the "Avant-Garde" and "Belle Époque" in Vilnius. It is a informative, stimulating, and engrossing read."