Art Review Issue 18

REVIEWS
HOLIDAY IN
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As I walked in the main gallery of the CAC Vilnius, the huge white well as with the contemporary globalised world of Zygmunt Bauman’s
space resonated with the sound of balls on cricket bats, with shouting Liquid Modernity (2000). But Medeiros’s Irka (2007), a passport-size book
and cheering, an atmosphere more redolent of the Oval than a Baltic based on the artist’s email exchange with a Belorussian student from Vilnius
arts centre. This cricket training session is Darius Mikšys’s contribution to whom she invited to London, follows its namesake’s endless dif_f_iculties
the final of the three Holiday In exhibitions. Playing out the idea that idle in getting a visa and reminds visitors that this liquid modernity remains
�� time is the most creative, this project was initiated by Triangle in Marseille beyond the reach of all but a very few.
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to examine ‘the phenomenon of artistic mobility’ through a residency- Armand produced an ensemble of objects faithful to the poetics
exchange programme, realised in collaboration with Gasworks in London of the absurd developed in his former pieces. In London he presented a
and CAC Vilnius in Lithuania. In contradistinction to standard residency telescope with directional signs – Wellington, Mar de Plata – inviting the
practice, where production is all-important, here two artists from each beholders to envisage locality not as a fixed but as a transitional space, a
host country were invited to literally holiday for three months in one of step towards other localities and potential travels. Simarik’s floor installation
the other locations; London-based Brazilian Flávia Müller Medeiros and Shadow One (2007), adapted to each exhibition location with a dif_ferent
Frenchman Quentin Armand travelled to Lithuania, Briton Oliver Bragg material, is the elongated shadow of a lonely figure, reminiscent of the
and Lithuanian Juozas Laivys chose France, and Frenchman Nicolas artist’s solitary peregrinations throughout the British Isles.
Simarik and Lithuanian Mikšys went to the UK. Prodding at the link between artworld and leisure industry, Holiday
The three resulting exhibitions, taking place in the three venues, In takes a step further from Maurizio Cattelan’s 6th Caribbean Biennial
gathered the artists’ responses to their travelling experience; here was a (1999) by attempting to fully endorse the holiday as a pivotal concept. But
Romantic vision of the artist as an exceptional being, worthy of attention it was caught in its own contradictions very early on: ‘holiday’ and ‘travel’
even in his leisure time. Bragg, who spent most of his time in Paris, were often confusingly taken as synonymous, and the ‘holidaymakers’ had
responded to this nineteenth-century postulate by becoming a sort of to take part in three exhibitions, an obligation potentially more burdensome
ironic Victorian explorer, sketching the locals in their natural habitat and than any residency Nonetheless, and beyond the idiosyncrasies of its
mingling the Parisian cliché of the lonely artist in Montmartre with some conceptual framework, Holiday In raises some urgent questions about the
sharp observations on French nationalism. relevance of the residency system and the status of artists’ production,
Romantic also is the project’s conception of travelling as a fluid and between ‘working’ and ‘being’. Coline Milliard
easy experience of discovery, resonating with the historical grand tour as
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