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Giorgio RuggeriThe Case of Pavel Pavel2016—2017
A short essay by Giorgio Rug-geri about the artistic practice of
a Lithuanian artist who uses his facebook private page as an
artis-tic medium. This text serves as an introduction to a web
residency by Pavel Pavel which will be hosted soon on this same
page.
Giorgio Ruggeri is an Italian de-signer and scholar. After
gradu-ating from ISIA Urbino, Italy, he enrolled at the Vilnius
Academy of Arts, Lithuania, and then spent one semester at the
Hochschule Düsseldorf, Germany. His practice ranges from print and
web design to critical writing and curatorship. His current
research investigates the relationship between digital culture and
curatorial practices.
giorgioruggeri.com
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Pavel Pavel, My new art machine, video, 2016
When it comes to social net-works, images created or selected
with artistic ambitions can be easily confused with the pro-duction
or the appropriation of pictures made for other purpos-es, such as
fun or propaganda. Things get even more complicat-ed when on the
one hand users emulate and manipulate works of art, and on the
other hand, artists adopt visual languages properly taken from the
Internet culture like selfies and memes.
But what happens if someone uses a social network as an
ar-tistic medium? Can a Facebook post be considered as a piece of
art and can a private profile be seen as an exhibition room?
Moreover, what are the possibili-ties offered by this tool for
expe-riencing new modes of authorial, archival and curatorial
practices?
These inquiries constitute a fun-damental part of the
experiments conducted by the Vilnius-based artist Pavel Pavel.
Pavel Pavel, posts from the series Identiteto paieškos (Search
for identity), selfies, 2016
Born in Lithuania in 1976, he has Ukrainian and Polish roots but
his mother tongue is the former lingua franca of Eastern Europe:
Russian. For this reason, Lithu-anian people often mistake him for
a foreigner, although he has spent his entire life in Vilnius. Yet
this condition allows him to question his own identity and play
with it. For instance, Pavel Pavel is a Facebook nickname that
should destroy the artist’s given name by simply repeating it
twice. By his own admission his virtual identity has begun to break
away from him, develop-ing its own personality, will, and needs. In
order not to confuse the issue too much, let’s try to focus on what
this man/character does.
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His occupation could be de-scribed as an alternative social art
practice which fights against the concept of property (both
material and intellectual) and which focuses on phenomena and
practices on the verge, with a particular interest in the
bound-aries between art and non-art, in the marginal, in the
peripheral. Indeed, according to him, the art world is something
that limits the work of artists and often narrows the view at
someone’s activity. This conviction makes him high-ly
skepticalabout the art market so that he avoids any contact with
art institutions, refusing what the New York-based curator Daniel
S. Palmer has described as the “cynical view of art as property—and
specifically as a functional financial instrument”.
Pavel Pavel, Reklaminis tentas#1 (Advertising tent),video,
2016
Searching for an ideal place where action and observation merge
– and where observation becomes an action itself – he has shaped an
artistic language that perfectly reflects his intents, and has
chosen a platform where he can put it in place. His works emerge in
the digital space of his Facebook personal profile, but far from
being promotional reproductions of artifacts, his posts are rather
to be considered artworks themselves. By seeing the page as an
artistic platform, ideally, everything that appears on it becomes
part of his art project – even friends’ posts on his wall. However,
it should be noted that this curious use of the page is not
publicly declared, and thus it is often not understood; sometimes
its comprehension is not facilitated by the visual characteristics
of the published content, at first glance so easily mistakable with
ordinary Face-book posts. That makes it quite hard to identify the
case of Pavel Pavel in already existing artistic genres. What is
sure is that his work mimetically hides itself, playing with the
rules of the sys-tem in which it occurs. Its value lies only in the
intentions of the author and in those who decide to recognise them.
One may ask:
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Who is his public? At the be-ginning of 2017 Pavel Pavel has
merely 128 friends and 16 fol-lowers on Facebook, and he does
nothing to enlarge his audience. In the era in which everyone
cul-tivates hundreds if not thousands of friendships using the web
for self-promotion, he only cares about playing with this tool as a
repository for the imaginary that surrounds him and that populates
his mind. “For me, these things only exist when I publish them”, he
confessed.
Pavel Pavel, DELETE, photo, 2016
The grotesque, disturbing nar-rative he has generated with a
strong sense of humor seems always to hover between fiction and
documentary. His obses-sions and phobias are filtered by an
archival need to accumulate other people’s visual memories through
which he reads and rein-terprets the reality. Not to men-tion the
strong desire for appro-priation and manipulation as acts of
resistance to his surroundings. What emerges in the end, is es-
pecially his capacity and need to possess, share and annihilate
his own personality. Looking at the whole Pavel Pavel’s production
of images, the private memo-ries he borrows from strangers’ old
family photo albums col-lapse with echoes of Soviet and post-Soviet
pop culture. At the same time, the way he manip-ulates and
recontextualises his body in the ironic self-portraits that he
takes (see the series Vo-nios kambarys, literally “Bath-room”)
intertwines with the sarcastic and cynical gaze over society in his
short videotapes taken in the urban space.
Pavel Pavel, From URANIA UNIVERSUM, scan, 2015
Pavel Pavel, Vonios kambarys#23 (Bahtroom#23), selfie, 2015
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Pavel Pavel’s eclectic and non-disciplinary activity takes
different forms such as straight photography, video art, and
per-formance, using the tools at his disposal: A scanner, a
printer, a laptop, a smartphone, and an an-alogue photo camera. The
artist is working on various series of posts, and each of them is
always consistent in terms of technique and aesthetics – thus it is
clearly distinguishable from the rest. Yet there are many
exceptions: For instance, Homelife is the only se-ries in which he
uses the gif for-mat, while videos are more fre-quent and sorted
according to the specific subject or theme. Never-theless, most of
these projects are carried on simultaneously, but not separated in
albums. In this way, it is impossible to browse the images of a
single series – we can only go with the flow and enjoy Pavel
Pavel’s twisted path. This does not mean that the con-tent is
messy. On the contrary, he writes the title and the date in each
post, adding also the loca-tion when needed. In this man-ner he
ignores the Facebook’s intrinsic and mechanical archival function,
in order to stress his own role of active archivist. In a similar
way, some of the words he uses in his titles, such as “In-
tervention”, “Documentation”, and “Copy” highlight or clarify
some of his actions.
Pavel Pavel, World Trade Center / Intervention, modified
picture, 2015
There is something genuinely na-ive and profoundly revealing at
the same time in what Pavel Pav-el is doing. And this
contradicto-ry attitude dominates his produc-tion, which seems to
be always intimate and universal, local and globalised, basic and
intricate, shy and provocative. Curating, showing or even just
talking about his work outside its orig-inal context can be quite
tricky, properly because where and what he does are inseparable
elements. For this reason, this article is above all an invitation
to visit his Facebook page and eventually send him a friend
request. Let’s spread Pavel Pavel’s word.
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Pavel Pavel, Plastic heart#1, video, 2016
