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In the 1920s and 1930s, Latvian magazines featured original textile compositions by renowned male artists. Through my research of textile compositions of the famous Latvian artist and designer Jūlijs Madernieks, it became apparent that during this period, Latvian magazines also showcased textiles by lesser-known artists, particularly graduates of the Graphic Arts Workshop of the Art Academy of Latvia. Despite the significant role played by graphic artists in the formation and promotion of Latvian national textile art, their contributions remain largely unexplored. This research focuses on the popular women's magazine Zeltene, which presented numerous original textile designs by Elza Druja, Marija Muceniece, Otomija Freiberga, and Kristine Pāvulina. Another focal point of this study is the state of textile crafts education in the third decade of the 20th century and its role in encouraging women to engage in textile art or crafts. The contributions of women to Latvian textile art during the 1920s and 1930s have not received adequate scholarly attention due to the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the 1940s, as well as subsequent constraints imposed on Latvian art historians by the Soviet regime. This paper marks an initial stage in the development of Latvian textile art history, with a particular emphasis on female textile artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is dedicated to the theoretical approaches and methodologies of artwork interpretation. By drawing from the contemporary materialist philosophy, primarily the theories of Bruno Latour and Donna J. Haraway, the paper aims to develop a version of contextual interpretation that is both terrestrial and spectulative. The paper discusses the conditions of discoursive emancipation, networked inclusivity and agency of artworks, namely: author's death, the importance of cognition, and Rancière's notion of aesthetic regime. Rancière talks about the emancipation of viewer as a result of the unpredictability of sensory cognition and the incongruity of the rules of poetics and aesthetics, which implies the activisation of artworks (images, texts, etc.). The paper argues that artworks (mediated images) have more agency than texts, which is confirmed by visual phenomenology, psychoanalysis of the gaze, the paradigm of effigies, etc. The artworks are thus the active and not-quite-dead participants of social interrelations because they keep generating unforeseen performative consequences and random meanings, as well as shaping the behaviour of the audiences that perceive them. Meanwhile authors and interpreters are not subjects but 'mere' actants - they are not-quite-alive as they rely on mediatised repositories of knowledge and forms. In terms of Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the perceiving audience (including art theorists themselves) are networked actants, and their interrelations involve many other actants, including originary imagery, (meta)stories, ideas, artists, thinkers, atmospheric phenomena, animals, and artefacts. Within Haraway's paradigm of situated knowledge, an artwork would be a sympoietic companion that joins us in thinking, makes us worry, assemble into the networks of partial, embodied, and site-specific knowledge, as well as mourn and facilitate our response-ability. If we are able to think together with various human and non-human entities, both alive and dead, this surely extends to artworks too. Haraway calls the paradigm of cohabitation of species and entities Chthulucene, and sometimes it is possible to apply it to the artworks that are not necessarily new. In the second part, I ignore the distinction between the art theoretical text and meta-text, and take up the case of Antanas Gudaitis (1904-1989). A master figure of Lithuanian modernism, Gudaitis studied in Paris (1929-1931), and his later period is marked by the plentitude of references to inter-species cohabitation. In his drawings from the 1970s, we see birds sitting at the table together with people, and his later work features 'double-portraits' that combined the heads of humans and various animals. Depicted in the distinctly expressionist style, objects and animate creatures are turned into equal actants. Gudaitis stresses the optical similarities between humans and non-humans, which gives his work the quality of the Freudian uncanny. In the conditions of an almost total cultural isolation during the soviet era, the art of Gudaitis, as well as that of the CoBrA collective, with their vision of an empathetic and slightly uncanny inter-species cohabitation (which today we would call post-anthropocentric), could have only emerged in the artistic soil already prepared by surrealism. The research of creative contexts, cultural environment and imagery is common in art history, and it is also one of the traits of the situative - terrestrial - interpretation, although the reformation of the art theoretical language through a meaningful developing of the speculative dimension is certainly not an easy task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By drawing on the principles of the 17th century portraiture, the paper discusses the functioning and meaning of the anthropomorphic imagery embedded withing the system of the architectonically structured decorum. The paper is based around the following question: is it feasible to identify the 'average' facial types as they are used in various pictorial systems with portraits of specific people? The research reconstructs the practices--prevailing in the discourses of the Lithuanian art history--of identifying specific individuals in the hermas on the doors of the Kretinga Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary; it also brings out the iconographic analogies in some of the wood carving motifs and offers their possible sources. The research has shown that, during first decades of the 17th century, the roles of visual and verbal representations of a person were taken up by various hybrid structures. For instance, a personal coat of arms with the depiction of a particular individual, itself being a hybrid structure, makes a yet another hybrid formation primarily with another media of representation-- that of a portrait. The same goes for the values and their representations professed, advocated, defended, or created by this particular individual, namely: churches, books, tombs, sarcophagi... The analysis of written sources revealed the inherent connection between the literary portrait of an individual and the dedicated heraldic figures. Jonas Chodkevičius' heraldic griffon blends in rather organically with the narrativised descriptions of the commander's appearance, including the traits of physiognomy depicted in the spirit of Aristotelian tradition - for example, Chodkevičius' noble and predatory "eagle's nose". Differently from literature and the odd illustrations from Giambattista Della Porta's treatise on physiognomics, no such hybridity is found in representational art of the 17th century: a person is represented mimetically in a portrait and symbolically (in this case, via zoomorphic motifs) in the coat of arms. These different media can be unified within a single architectural space (e.g., a church) and a single architectonic system (tombstone, gateway, furniture, etc.). The question remains whether a specific person can be represented in a hybrid structure such as herma, term, Caryatid, or Atlas. While deconstructing the art theorist Marija Matuškaitė's idea about the identification of people--the approach that prevails in Lithuanian art historical discourse--in relation to the Kretinga Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the research concludes that the principle of similarity and the links with biographical facts are not enough to interpret the hermas as depictions of specific people. The research confirms and contextualises the depictions of the church founders Jonas Karolis Chodkevičius and Sofija Chodkevičienė in the upper segments of the coats of arms that decorate the doors; the research also proposes a hypothesis that the three hermas at the lower part of the doors represent three parts of the Rosary Prayer, yet they can also represent the community of worshippers, a common prayer (Mt 18, 20) and the Church itself. Iconographically, the anthropomorphic images found in the Kretinga Church decorum can be divided into two groups: the familiar portraits of saints (Jesus, Mary, and the Cherubs) and the hybrid figures of anthropomorphised columns (Atlas and Caryatid as the figures of man and woman that support the doors as well as the trypych of hermas in the decorative system of the main entrance of the church). Their function is not merely decorative and they clearly encode a message that is either dedicational or didactic. The research was unable to determine the iconographic sources and specific meanings of Atlas and Cryatid depicted on the sacristy doors as figures cinctured with rosary and morphed into volutes and mannerist "cufflinks". It is obvious that this decorative composition, the upper part of which is decorated with the monogram of Jesus and the heads of Cherubs, and the sides of which are supported with two columns-figures that terminate at the pedestals ornamented with flower buds and lion heads (symbols of death/eternity), articulates the concept of faith and prayer. The same is also evident in the wood carvings and the iconographic programme of the church's main entrance. The research concludes that some of the motifs of the wood carvings of Kretinga church doors--burning lion heads and tasseled strings of rosary--are similar to the copper etchings in Joannis David's book Veredicum Christianum (1606) illustrated by Theoodor Galle, Joan Galle and Johan Wierix. This allows us to assume that further research on the decorative motifs can be useful for the attempts to reconstruct the iconographic programme of these unique wood carvings, find out their origins, and clarify the circumstances of their creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was prepared for the conference „How to Tell About Art? Art History, Criticism, Texts and Narratives in Lithuania" which was organized by the Institute of Art Research. The conference description stated: "The aim of art history and criticism is to open the work of art to the imagination of the perceiver." What texts on art best reveal their artistic dimensions? All texts leave traces and affects perception, depending on the influence and symbolic value of the interpreter and the emancipation of the viewer or perceiver. How many and which perceptual references, what plug-ins/crutches does the viewer really need from an art critic? For Jacques Rancière, the emancipation of the viewer begins with the principle of equality. However, the art institution often insists on the 'correct' way to view the work, as well as what to buy, collect and watch, thus enforcing a linear understanding of cultural development. American antropologist Clifford Geertz argues that culture cannot be described by imposing ideas and advocates for the percetion-based, rather than evaluation-based understanding of culture.31 According to the modern paradigm of cultural relativism, it is important to learn the language of those we research, so that we could look over their shoulder, without succumbing to the Darwinian scientific racism. The latter violates the artist's autonomous representation of free thought, as well as the viewer's freedom to choose and interpret works of art according to their own experience. The artist's own 'study' of the authentic origins of an artwork can be considered as a unveiling of the unexposed part of the artwork in textual form. Artists own narrative frees them from the necessity to evaluate and provides material for studies of the peculiar systems of artistic thinking and creative genesis. Speaking about - or rather, with - art and artistic approach presuppose a respectful relationship with the art viewer and perceiver: instead of explaining what the particular experience should/could feel like, it provides more material for perception and further artistic interpretation. Could this help us "open the work of art to the imagination of the perceiver"? It is possible that, when written by a non-canonical artist, such a text with its ambiguous ties to the artwork would not only hamper the viewer's imagination, but also deconstruct any pre-existing fragmentary perception. The art history inventory finds complicated systems inconvenient. Therefore, by asking "Who Wants to Know where Artists live?", I not only emphasise the Who, which refers to the interested party, but also ask weather (who needs it) or why it could be interesting to know all that, and what to do with it. The article presents excerpts from a piece of author's artistic writing which was read as a conference paper. The reader is therefore invited to sample the experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual art in Vilnius of 1919-1939, as a whole, has not been studied until now. To a lesser extent, its level of study was determined by the difficult geopolitical situation in Vilnius. In the interwar years, Vilnius and its region were annexed by Poland. Subsequently, the peculiar artistic life of the city during this period and its results for a long time have been of little interest to Lithuanian researchers. This has led to a fragmented perception of Lithuania's art history, in which the interwar artistic life of Vilnius has still been marginalized. The aim of the article is to analyze the art formation processes of the interwar Vilnius, highlighting the direction and nature of the activities of its most important institutions (Faculty of Arts at Stephen Báthory University, Vilnius School of Crafts, Vilnius Association of Plastic Artists), and to discuss and evaluate their significance in the process of modernizing the city's culture. The paper raises a question of Poland's cultural policy in the interwar period: in which ways and by which means did it work in the field of art in Vilnius? It highlights that the art of the interwar period in Vilnius was dominated by the portrayal of historical architecture, while other spaces and themes were hardly touched - for example, there is a lack of images of suburban and modern lifestyle and daily life. The paper makes an assumption that it was the political and cultural situation in Vilnius that influenced the establishment of such a retrospective view. Only in the 1930s, with the transformation of Vilnius into a modern city of the Second Rzeczpospolita, its modern visual culture began to manifest itself more actively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, the Uruguayan-Slovene artist Francisco Tomsich launched the artistic research project Give my regards to those you connect, an exploration on connections and dialogues between artists from the former Yugoslavia and the River Plate region corresponding through the Mail Art network from the late 1960s onward. The research's point of departure was a list of postal addresses from artists in Serbia prepared prior to the dissolution of Yugoslavia by the Uruguayan artist Clemente Padín and expanded in 2019 by Tomsich through the study of the "Yugoeslavia" folder at the General Archive of the University of the Republic of Uruguay. This paper traces the project's development in Uruguay and Serbia in 2019 and summarises some of its achievements while describing the author's approach to artistic research and the key issues of method, archive, comparative art histories, institutional context and failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no consensus in art history about the reasons for the association of Archangel Michael with the Weighing of Souls or Psychostasis in Christian art, and the paper examines Karl Künstle's theory that the figure of the angel replaced the Manus Domini, the Hand of God. Tracing the process of transformation through examples that were not provided by Künstle, it argues for a coexistence of the angel and the Manus Dei in the same role, with the angel eventually taking precedence perhaps due to the increased diffusion of Saint Michael's cult. Through the analysis of Vincenzo Cicogna's Angelorum et daemonum nomina et attributa... the paper demonstrates that the understanding of the angel as the Manus Dei in medieval and Early Modern art was supported by contemporaneous theories in angelology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]