Jonas Mekas - Let me dream utopias

Jonas Mekas Let me dream utopias
June 20–July 21, 2019

Last year, Jonas Mekas revisited over 60 years of his poetic work. He filled three notebooks with poems, from his adolescence in Lithuania to the years of forced labour and "Displaced Persons" camps in Germany and finally his life in New York. This Book Project: Gallery Version—as he titled it—explored the place of poetry and the poetic in his life and work. It was meant to unfold in space through a collaboration with Rupert.

We have continued this project, left unfinished at Mekas’ death earlier this year and with it, we have explored Mekas’ approach to the poetic in poetry and moving image. For Mekas, the poetic was both an act of making and a sensibility, shaped by and shaping everyday existence and in this sense better characterised the artist's work than terms like "experimental" or "avant-garde," which historically also sought to bring together art and life. This alignment of lived experience with the poetic is thread throughout Mekas' utopias. They are not the abstract and idealised "nowheres" of the word’s etymology. Rather, Mekas describes them as "somewheres" that are contoured by the local and its memories, histories and senses.

Mekas’ work is rooted in his early life in Lithuania and its language. Time and again, he recalls its landscape as textured by details like rabbit shit and forest moss. Real utopias, Mekas claimed, may only be found "within one’s small closed village" evoked with the specific mouth muscles of one’s mother’s tongue. He first attempted to articulate this localised sensitivity as a very young man, still embedded in his Lithuanian environment and its Romantic literary tradition. Later, he developed it into a unique voice in both word and moving image.

This immediacy of contact with the details of life is simultaneously displaced and shaped by memories, exile and trauma. In his poems and films, specificity of experience is underscored by the indeterminate distance of Mekas’ "somewheres." In the artist’s poetics, distance is the twin of proximity and loss is immanent to presence. The immersion in the present that Mekas often proclaims as an ecstatic dispersal of the self ("I live ecstatically! Vertically!") is simultaneously acknowledged as an experience that is always already irredeemably lost. The dominant mood of nostalgia and longing in the poems shown in this exhibition is underscored by this particular sense of loss. For Mekas, utopias and dreams are as much places of longing as domains of ecstatic experience.

The exhibition and its accompanying programmes focus on Mekas’ poetics as a universe and a microcosm, at once ethereal and earthly, conventional and direct, joyful and melancholic. Jonas Mekas: Let me dream utopias celebrates the memory of Jonas Mekas through this personal project and offers a close reading of his poetic oeuvre as an always-ongoing exploration of the intensities of lived experience, shaped by the particular quality of the artist’s poetic worlds.