Citations Ed. 6: Violeta Bubelytė

Socialist realism was not only an aesthetic program, but a cultural philosophy that defined the rules of all forms of cultural production in the Soviet Union. Its style is remarkable for its simplicity. Its only purpose was to present an idealized representation of the proletarian revolution. Its simplistic scenes and narratives were literal and didactic in order to strengthen, motivate, and maintain the population’s correct understanding of Soviet society. Industrial production and technological progress were celebrated, its main characters the working and laboring classes now at the vanguard of a wave of social reforms.

The “New Woman” emerged as a trope in the early years after the Bolshevik Revolution, a motif that followed Lenin’s decriminalization of homosexuality and legalization of abortion and divorce. No longer was she a mere domestic servant or wife: She was a factory worker, an engineer, or a politician, an agent of revolution as capable as her male counterparts. Though the Lenin-era reforms were eventually dialed back by Stalin in the 1930s, by then, the workforce was almost completely equally divided between men and women in 1950. But despite this parity, patriarchal tropes persisted in social realist art. Men were cast in the fatherly rhetoric of both Lenin and Stalin, while the women were set in the background, depicted as assistants to the male heroes.

Thus, the apparent representational equality was short-lived, as women quickly returned to the familiar territories of the fields and kitchens. This was a more accurate description of their social and economic roles. Not only were they expected to work as much as men, they were also caring for children and the household.

By the 1970s, the Soviet Union was a diminutive form of its earlier years. The economy, while the second largest in the world, began to stagnate in the middle of the decade. Such weaknesses reverberated through other domains of society, including visual art production. But in Lithuania, the Lithuanian photographers’ union created an opening for new modes of art making. They defied propaganda censors by staging exhibitions that showed the fruits of the socialist dream – crumbling infrastructure, widespread poverty, and rigid social hierarchies. The so-called Lithuania School was celebrated for its rebellious defiance of the Soviet regime.

Yet amid this subversive surge of creativity, women, as both practitioner and subject, did not enjoy the celebrations in kind. Critic Monika Krikstopaityte notes that the leadership of the union was comprised of entirely men. Censorship waned as their exhibitions became more frequent. Nudes could once again be displayed openly, but female subjects were determined and framed by common tropes of male-gaze sexualization, whose photographers were celebrated as reclaiming a semblance of reality and ownership.

Patriarchy did not wane in parallel with the Soviet Union’s demise. When women photographers presented nudes, they were lambasted in the press, criticized for promoting immorality. It is against this background we should see the remarkable contributions of Violeta Bubelytė (b. 1956), one of Lithuania’s most productive yet undersung art photographers of the late twentieth century.

For the better part of forty years, her subject has been herself, releasing only self-portraits since she began her artistic practice in 1981. Her work challenged both the extant status quo of official Soviet culture as well as the emerging aesthetic of the Lithuanian School. Where young women were posed in natural settings as allegories of blooming nature, Bubelytė staged herself against blank backgrounds that eschewed romantic narratives. “[M]ost of the time we see a sharp gaze that keeps staring us, a cool light that draws her body out as it is,” writes Krikstopaityte, “and echoes of visual history in the composition.”

That Bubelytė has almost exclusively photographed herself in the nude suggests the extent of her meditations on, investigations of, and confrontations with the historical regime of female representation. Bubelytė uses her nude form not to represent an other, but the material spirituality of the represented nude for itself and on its own terms. Its iconography, history, and vulnerability are reshaped and recontextualized in each of Bubelytė’s works. Prints from the early ‘80s depict her bracing a mirror against her body, her profile reflected askew. In another, she lays across a wooden floor with the mirror covered from her stomach to her knees, the soft folds of a floor-length curtain reflected in the surface. These images invite and reject the gaze and its immediate command of tropes cemented in accepted narratives of visual history.

In other photographs, Bubelytė plays with presence itself, her doubled image wispy and transparent in the frame. Such images suggest movement and time, yet narrative still eludes. These challenges are taken up in other conventional references to classical portraiture – she poses in profile, draped in a white sheet. The stark contrast of the black background against the white sheet seems medieval, but it is neither mocking nor dismissive. In another, Bubelytė sits on a chair with her back toward the camera. She turns and looks straight back into the lens, the right half of her body disappearing into the shadow. Bubelytė looks back at neither an ideal viewer nor a hostile one, but simply to look elsewhere, probing a horizon beyond our own recognition.

Bubelytė is still less well known than her peers, both men and women, in Lithuania. In 2018, a retrospective of her work was held in Lithuania. To commemorate the occasion, a limited set of Bubelytė’s best-known prints from her entire career was produced in an edition of 100. LW – C is privileged to offer one of these copies for sale.