ON REINIS LISMANIS’ THRIFTY AND BEGINNING TO THINK ABOUT FRAGMENTARINESS

WORD OF MOUTH · TOM LAVER
· May 10, 2020


Reinis Lismanis, Thrifty, 2020, installation view at Brockley Gardens, London. Courtesy of the artist

It’s the Friday evening ending my first full week back at work of January 2020 and I’ve come straight to the artist Reinis Lismanis’ studio. It’s a long, light grey room with his stuff organised at each end and plenty of space to sit and stand. The speakers on the desk play The Streets’ Original Pirate Material and I listen in, anticipating my favourite moments. Lismanis is telling me about his most recently completed works on paper and we unroll some, placing the larger ones on the floor to look at. I ask a few questions, trying to feel my way. Conversation turns to frames, watering the pot plants and where we’re off to next. In the background, Mike Skinner’s vocals bring in Who Dares Wins, overture to the final track of Original Pirate Material, a minute-long distillation of the bravado and fun that defines the album. Skinner jumps between ideas with a fast-paced turnover of images: ‘Got the latest Nikes on my feet/The streets merely reflect this bass line and beat/Lock on to 102.6 the streets/Kronenburg double doves and herbs actions speak louder than words/Get fucked up sat on the curb/Street geezers.’ The lines are a kind of patchwork in which indirectly related allusions hang together forming a summation of everything heard to this point. Their fragmentation is likely more down to Who Dares Wins’ compression than a fundamental set of aesthetic decisions, but it piques a long-held interest in how such representations make meaning. Indeed, as a non-paradigm case, it may be particularly useful. Two months on and I am considering Lismanis’ installation Thrifty. Is there something in the way I encountered Who Dares Wins which is appropriate to the analysis of his new work?


Reinis Lismanis, Thrifty, 2020, installation view at Brockley Gardens, London. Courtesy of the artist


Thrifty is displayed at Brockley Gardens, a project space in a garage in South East London run by artists Billy Crosby and Thomas Greig. The work is, amongst other things, an assemblage of pre-existing elements, both material and conceptual. It comprises a recently decommissioned studio filing cabinet decorated with offcuts from Lismanis’ earlier “Archival Pigment Prints” series. This is set against a wall painted to look like a studio green screen using the contents of ‘a pot that was just gathering dust in a friend’s studio.’ There is a looping audio accompaniment playing the out-of-broadcast-hours TV test card music and, outside, photographs of graffitied writing are displayed on the garage door. Those familiar with Lismanis’ 2019 book Trial and Error (Skinnerboox) will recognise the aestheticisation of photographic production mechanisms. Thrifty, as a composition of recycled elements, also continues the earlier work’s discourse on means and process.

My analysis of Thrifty employs two sets of guiding assumptions. Firstly, I think about the work as a cluster of constituent parts creating a whole. The filing cabinet is a part, as are the offcuts. The green screen is a part both as evocation of an idea and as a recycled thing, in effect two separate parts. I understand each part to refer in the way a sign does. Secondly, I distinguish between the realm of these referring constituents and the work’s formal character. This formal character is supervenient on my perception of the sensory properties of the work; the filing cabinet as focal point, the green screen background, the musical accompaniment, the garish utilitarian colour scheme, maybe also my ‘organising understanding’ as a viewer with certain expectations of the situation I am in. This formal character has primacy in the sense that it unifies the referring constituents. The notion of form as primary and unifying is part of my own working (compelling, if not perfectly successful) understanding of what an art object is.

Despite having suggested a kind of primacy to this formal character, I am particularly interested in how the referring constituents in Thrifty function. These elements each allude to Lismanis’ practice but do not resolve into a narrative or message. They are distinct ideas in the orbit of a common subject. What most importantly unites them qua constituents of an artwork is how they look and sound rather than what they mean. Whilst they coincide, there is not harmony. The result is that Thrifty has a tone rather than a meaning. In this sense, you could say that I understand the work as a kind of collage.

Thrifty’s collage-likeness is fragmentary in a way more fundamental than Who Dares Wins yet they both create an indistinct but powerful evocativeness. It may be asked what the basis of a distinction between something fragmentary and something merely confused is. A productive suggestion seems to be that the fragmentariness itself has an aesthetic quality and that that quality makes plausible sense in the context the work sets. There are at least two ways in which you can aestheticise the fragmentariness of Thrifty which function in a peculiar tension.

A work with an unclear relationship between referring constituents gives the viewer a specific kind of experience which is different to the situation one might find oneself in looking at a piece of narrative work. Should a viewer attempt a resolution at the level of meaning, they are endowed with a markedly liberated creative role. The filing cabinet may be monolithic, the green screen may be about to provide a contextualising image. The role of the soundtrack is to be decided by you in either case. Interpretation is especially available.

Though not essential to it, Thrifty’s humour is complementary to this kind of experience. The test card music is familiar to anyone who, like me, used to get up at 5am on a Saturday morning to watch kids’ TV. I hear it and am primed with a kind of embarrassed nostalgia. There are photographs of funny graffiti and the mock rigour of the artist’s statement is irony straight from the mouth of the source: ‘a tower of Bisley AOC Filing Cabinets (Foolscap, 470 x 1321 x 622 mm and 470 x 1016 x 620 mm) in Goose Grey.’ In an unresolved cluster of referents, humour, particularly with ironic self-effacement, makes sense; it says, ‘this is an unauthoritative thing and I am no authority’.

Deposing an ultimate interpreter could also mean completely abandoning the attempt to make sense of the relationship of referring constituents. The alternative to the ‘make up your own mind/irony’ account is to consider what the experience of the work yields if the viewer does not attempt a resolution. Embracing this possibility means embracing Thrifty’s dissonance, a quality which not only makes the work funny in a different, slightly absurd way but also makes it loose and playful. The aspect of the concept of dissonance which I am employing is that of an unhappy combination. The dissonance of Thrifty comes from a lack of resolution between referring constituents. In the realm of meaning, unhappy combinations can amount to comic absurdity. This is partially true of Thrifty, yet the constituents’ shared subject matter, of Lismanis’ practice, is a mediating factor. However, the inbuilt potential for relationships which work less well make for a playful quality of experimentation which makes Thrifty feel light and nimble. The dissonance succeeds in giving the work an aesthetic of looseness.

The tension between choosing and not choosing a resolution of reference is not a serious one. No one is pressing us to decide and, in fact, there is a sense in which the tension itself is consistent with the tone of the work. Interpretation is not a game with winners and losers despite many of its greatest rewards coming from thinking as if it is, whether mistakenly or by suspension of disbelief. In contrast, the relative efficacy of different approaches to communication can be more readily verified. Thinking about Thrifty and Who Dares Wins’ fragmentariness allows me to begin thinking about the possibility of identifying fragmentariness in general and its virtues for conveying meaning. · This essay is adapted from Some Notes on Reinis Lismanis’ Thrifty

TOM LAVER is Assistant Curator at Southampton City Art Gallery and has previously worked at Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne and The National Gallery, London. In Autumn 2020, he will be working with Niagara Falls Projects, Brighton and Reinis Lismanis on an exhibition of the artist's new work.



© 2020, TOM LAVER
& GUEST ROOMS

Website by MARCEL KACZMAREKfacebook  instagram