Compiled by Gintaras Didžiapetris, 2016

Agnė Narušytė

Algirdas Šeškus always surprises. When it looks that his archive has been exhausted, he places a new book on the table and I can see that it is endless, and even the previously seen photos change their identity within the new context. For example, that man with glasses and a lucent face, neatly sitting behind an office desk – his pen is ready, he is going to write a rebuke. In the book compiled by Margarita Matulytė, “The Archive (Pohulianka)“, he had already become the “zone director”: “Without a name, without a face, without a place, without years” [1]. Now he is only one of many people exhausted from the television lights. Perhaps a presenter of some sort.

Yes, I am talking about Šeškus’ book “TV”, released at the end of summer in 2016. It is dedicated to the 60^th anniversary of the Lithuanian television, counting back to the first broadcast. But this is where its identity as an anniversary edition runs out. The page turner (because there is nothing to read) will not almost any “stars” of the screen. They will only be noticed by those who remember the faces of the presenters, actors, dancers, because there are no titles, no subtitles, no dates – no references that would direct the attention from the photos to the object. Only a short paragraph on the last page informs that Šeškus short everything between 1975-1985, while working as a TV operator. Everything else will need to be read on one’s own from the images – some clear, some mysterious, some open. It will disturb those who are used to the visual gossip style pushed by the “Žmonės“ magazine. This is an unusual format. Even Šeškus himself looks at a different direction than everybody else, pulling out only the part of reality usually seen only by the corner one’s eye. There is also the compiler of the book – the conceptual artist Gintaras Didžiapetris, for whom “medium is the open file: an ethereal, evolving device that can assume one format or another depending on the artist’s decisions“, wrote Javier Hontoria in the “Artforum” magazine[2].  Out of perhaps 7000 frames short by Šeškus, he crystallised his own narrative.

I have read the book three times already. When reading it for the first time, I saw how strange television is when shown in this way, how it is almost guaranteed to be unacceptable for the contractors, the distance of the grey past, locked inside the analogue photography negative boxes, the existential sadness of the glimpses from the past because of the already unfulfilled dreams about the future. I also felt waves – how the topics roll over one another, how the photographs, filling the pages of the book, scatter as if a layer of reality debris. I marvelled at the compiler’s courage to cut a beauty’s face with a suture line (“the left eye is kissing the right one”, said Šeškus) or the only human figure (“it only disappears even more”, said I).

When reading it for the second time, I understood that perhaps it is not the figures that are the most important in the photographs, but perhaps the emptiness of the studio, sneaking in from the depths of the stage and overcoming the characters, drawing me in. Inside these empty boxes, it is cold and uncomfortable. The television people look like they were misplaced from their everyday life, from the time, and placed here –they are ballet dancers, who turn and turn to the same melody when you open the lid. Just like recurring childhood memories, - it occurs to me, - and their meaning becomes even more fragile. 

And only then I could read the photonovel about the day of the operator. It is announced even in the first shots: a man is sticking his head out the window and scratching his bare back, while another is soundly sleeping with his palms under his face, somebody is pouring tea. Such a beginning is so unexpected for a book about television, even shocking, that I did not immediately recognize its simplicity: it is the morning of the operators in their shared room, after waking up in iron beds surrounded by grim walls somewhere during a working trip (probably Moscow). The lazy scratching gesture shows that the operator is convinced - nothing special will be happening today. Everything is already boring. And for me, it is the opposite – it is interesting, very interesting, what the day will bring to the photograph, because the boredom captured in it becomes the aesthetics of avoiding boredom[3].

So it is morning. It begins from the daily exercise, which is led by gymnasts standing on their mats. During my childhood, I would turn off the sound of the radio whenever I heard a command to exercise, not to mention watching such a show on the television. Mass exercise meant being forced to do something. Here, for the first time, I see how it used to look: a woman with a leotard, a man wearing shiny briefs, both standing seriously, as if they know that they’re posing for the eternity. Page after page, slowly and expressively, they make a move – turn the arrows of the history clock. Year after year, their facial expressions do not change. In the 2013 Venice Biennial, in the Cyprus and Lithuanian pavilion curated by Raimundas Malašauskas, these figures greeted the guests from the stairs of the sports palace, like aliens from an abstract – cosmic – past. There are more of them in the book, they are joined by the dances – here they stand, calmly, calmly… and suddenly they are caught by an invisible gust of music. As if it was not a dance, but a bout of desire distorting their bodies. Then it lets them go again. And it keeps pulsing like that.

After that, there are flashes of the day’s fragments – flat and round military hats, slightly raised by the crowns of the heads, above people gathered in the sports palace, and, further away – the operator. A conversation in a stairwell. A sad smile of a beautiful girl while waiting for somebody in the vestibule – she covers her face with a handbag. The melting reality of the office, phones, doors, a shiny singer’s dress. The audience – fashion display, the backs of the gymnasts, elaborate flower composition, and women behind a white curtain, as if in a Japanese engraving… While shooting, the operator sees what usually remains behind the frame: the loneliness and sadness of the artists, the artificiality of their beauty charm. He moves away, and the popculture glamour reveals itself from a different angle. Instead of seducing in bright colours, like Marilyn Monroe, multiplied by Andy Warhol, the television icons captured by Šeškus shrink like visions of fake luxury. In their stupor, they try to deceive the destiny, to ask for the impossible.

While turning the pages of the book, I notice not what is captured in the images, but the operator’s gaze which is off the mark, just like when looking at the blind-spot. The way he photographs is not allowed when filming – television has to create the perfect image, an alternative of the reality – or the “altreality”[4] of Margarita Matulytė – without cracks. It appears that, for the operator, photography is a possibility to deconstruct the illusion, although not by revealing the procedures of its production, but by capturing what it is the most unfamiliar to it – the state of stillness. It lingers like a phase of suspension before the stresses of the working day, and like the condemnation to be constantly waiting in these spaces – waiting for something a priori meaningless. In the morning, it is already clear that, like always, the glitter of the raging bodies will become psychedelic, as if a rising nausea from this meagre image factory.

But this is not the end – for a conceptual artist, it would be banal to end a book about the operator’s day with images about the evening and night. Suddenly he brings us outside, where the life is unexpectedly colourful, conforming to the nature and weather, which dresses everybody in the same plastic raincoats. There are demonstrations in the streets, but it is unclear what they are for and against them. Among them there are faces of black people that you will not see in Vilnius even today. That is right – the operator Šeškus on a working trip to film the Moscow Olympics. Like always, he captured people from the outside. After that – monochrome vestibules, corridors, their temporary inhabitants. As if the day did not end but, halfway asleep, continued indefinitely. Didžiapetris said that he did not want to end the book in a culmination – it would mean reaching a goal, untying the drama. While the purpose of television – even the soviet one – is to fill the time, therefore its employees and viewers have to give in to indefiniteness. The day simply passed by in the broadcasts, of which nothing remained.

These frames of the outside, captured by the camera of the operator, usually are what remains of the television from that time. They cover up the reality of the television life of that time as if a surface that was stitched together from fragments and has not faded yet. Today, we can step on photographs like on cracked ice floes, with bodies absorbed by the illusion machine glittering in-between them. This is probably why this book mostly disturbs people who draw strength from the television spectacle. The temporality of its props and the working power needed to keep it up is obvious. Therefore the aesthetic impact of the book is also complemented by the ethical one – two artists are telling two contemporary television directors about the ignored workers on the “lower chain”, which stays behind the screen – they stretch the cables on which the television spectacles balances, crawls, performs its acrobatic numbers, unable to change its patterns. These images of humble existence are printed on rough velvety paper, which invites to keep touching and to not put the book down, to turn its pages from the beginning till the end and back again, until you give in to this two-way flow.

The markers between different parts of the book also help – images of empty corridors, door frames with nothing inside. Perhaps only the blurry outlines of the openings. They draw in and absorb the unimportant, non-visual, not-photographed moments of the operator’s day. These time tunnels rapidly carry the reader through the galaxy of the modest hopes of that time.