Ready for History #1

Graphics project Ready For History is about identifying a person through the clothes he/she wears.

At the same time it is an attempt to say thank you to celebrities for their strength in being different, for their impressive works and great creations, for their goodwill and striving for the better future, for their courage and persistence. I want to thank them and also to immortalize these personalities through the clothes they had been wearing, through the stories of these clothes.

Clothes donated by Lithuanian and international celebrities were used for this project.

While making relief imprints of these clothes I am not only trying to produce textile surfaces, but also to create the former owner’s emotional prints, identify his/her personality, revive the charisma, character, shadows and auras of the clothes that had been worn or are still being worn by this person.

Clothes for me mean much more than simple means of covering the body. They are tools for symbolic self-revelation, hiding and/or revealing personal biographies.

In this project I am not trying to take possession of these personalities, but readily recognize their uniqueness, charm and subtlety.

I want to read secrets of these great people in their clothes and to immortalize them in my works.

Jūratė Rekevičiūtė
Kaunas, March 10, 2008

Casting the cast-offs

Primeval scene: clothes – shirt, jeans, lingerie – that just slipped off from the lovers’ bodies, lying in piles on a Turkish carpet. Small caps, adorning flowers in pots. Wriggly rags, more naked than the skin – like cast-offs, scattered around by muscles of passion, by nerves of lust. “De-objectised” installation on life’s surface. Expressive abstractionism in the world, hostile to all the –isms. A bra equals a quote from Othello. Meyerhold would have loved this; that’s how he used to say: “Handkerchief on a carpet – this is all there is to Shakespeare’s tragedy!”

This bra (pardon me, this handkerchief) could have been given by a blonde called Desdemona to Jūratė Rekevičiūtė, so that the latter made its imprint on paper and preserved it for future generations. Casting and catalogising the cast-offs rules! It’s name is Nekrošius.

Clothes are not only (supposedly ennobling) soft shells, forced on us by civilization, not just a uniform of fashion that killed the dandy, not some criteria of personal unstylishness measured in britney spearses: it’s I minus the body. Jūratė takes this particular minus and makes it an icon of our beings.

Cortázar’s socks, dried lizards, picked up by a jealous Ugnė Karvelis; Sabas’ tee – dripping with sweat of many victories and losses – hurled away on the tiles of the gym floor. Patina and patience.

And these clothes (sometimes accessories), full of the energy of its wearer, reveal everything about him/her. This is graphics of energy, bordering between sneer and pastiche: something sticks by pure chance and becomes a wing, a fossil, a logo. This is how uninentional becomes intentional. And vice versa.

We will rot and putrefy, turn to ashes, but by the mercy and generosity of the graphic artist the imprints of our bodies will glare like souls with triumphant spots instead of eyes. These Jūratė‘s spots are true sports.

Rolandas Rastauskas
Palanga, March 11, 2008