Farming today: vodka, nudity and surrealism in Lithuania

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Grimaces of the Weary Village

Rimaldas Viksraitis and Martin Parr

‘This is life on the farm’. So writes Lithuanian photographer Rimaldis Viksraitis in the introduction to Grimaces of the Weary Village, a collection of his photographs, taken over a 30-year period, describing the manners and mores of rural existence, Baltic-style. On reflection, perhaps ‘manners and mores’ is somewhat misleading...

We are in Valakbudis, some time in the late 1990s – an elderly man sits on a worn bench in a dingy interior. He is naked, removing a pair of tangled, very large, no-longer-white underpants. On the flaking dining table behind him there is the suggestion of a meal: some enamel bowls, a dish, cutlery and a three quarters empty bottle of vodka. The floor is uncovered and stained. From an equally filthy doorway to the rear a crouching (or squatting – is it the toilet?) woman glares, and a grime-covered child in grime-covered T-shirt and pants eats from a bag of fruit. The chicken standing on the bench doesn’t look necessarily out of place.

Here we are in Kudirkos Naumiesitis, 2004: an elderly couple are sitting in what might be a luxuriant meadow. Behind them the sunlight catches the handlebars of a bicycle propped against a nearby tree. Maybe they have sought its shade, possibly its privacy. For the man is naked from the waist down, his flesh dangling unhindered in the grasses. She meanwhile maintains an expression that is hard to read; nor is it entirely clear what her right hand is up to...

In a photograph from 1999, its location undisclosed, two men sit at a table. Before them, the head of a pig gazes upward from a chipped bowl– the younger of the diners has its ear in his mouth. The elder is leaning over his companion, shouting perhaps, or trying to get his own bite of ear. (It’s OK – he’s toothless.) Between the fast-emptying bottles on the table someone has fashioned a condiment holder out of the open mouth and furry gullet of some dead local wildlife. Nice.

In the main, these black and white pictures are made with available light, or occasionally with rudimentary flash. They are often, as the war photographer Robert Capa might have said, slightly out of focus. Many appear to be informally or hurriedly composed. Some of the negatives are scratched. The photographs are barely more finished than basic workprints; the ‘torn’ design of the book’s cover, and the inexpensive feel of the paper, compound the impression that the work deliberately avoids many of the traditional signifiers of photographic ‘quality.’ In this respect it is instructive to recall the comments of another onetime Soviet photographer, the Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov, addressing here the issue of the technical adequacy of his own pictures:

 ‘Art can compromise an ideology by aesthetic means. Here “poor quality” was used as a means of subversion. Not even poor quality but rather a “statistically average” quality such as poor printing, crudeness, inadequacy, etc. Inadequacy can be read as an element of Soviet life, of the entire culture. Inadequacy and ignorance. Accentuating poor quality is a known method in contemporary art worldwide, but we were concerned with its Soviet version.’

Further parallels can be found between the work of Viksraitis and the Ukrainian: for example, both photographers have included naked self-portraits in their projects. Most obviously though, running throughout Grimaces and Mikahilov’s Case History, for instance, are an abjection, a dissolute alcoholism, and a sagging, wretched nudity that – under different circumstances – might have made the projects exercises in exploitative voyeurism. Grimaces of the Weary Village defies such categorization; it stands instead as a description, by turns damning, wry and trenchant, of the fate of post-Soviet, EU-embraced Lithuania.

This book is published by White Space Gallery, £25.