ARTS AND LITERATURE

Karolina Jakaitė, Antanas Kazakauskas: everything is programmed (Antanas Kazakauskas: viskas užprogramuota), Vilnius: Vilnius Graphic Art Centre, 2022, 271 pp.

The first comprehensive study of the biography and work of Antanas Kazakauskas (1937–2019), Lithuania’s first advertising graphic artist who also specialised in industrial graphical design, opening another page in the history of Lithuanian design. Reconstructing Kazakauskas’s creative trajectory, design historian Karolina Jakaitė embarked on detective research, looking for associations, visual quotations and appropriation, thus highlighting the artist’s creative method: composing, combining and (re)using what others have already created, rather than creating something anew. The research into Kazakauskas’s work covers all areas of his oeuvre which are evaluated here in the broader field of visual culture at the time and include advertising posters, book design and unique book series, collages and graphic abstractions, and his long-term work as an art editor at the magazine “Mūsų gamta” (Our Nature). This book is richly illustrated and includes a block of memoirs about Kazakauskas and a photographic documentation of his retrospective exhibition organised in autumn 2021.

Karolina Jakaitė is a design history researcher, and a lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Her research focuses on Soviet Lithuanian design. She is interested in artefacts and the stories of their makers; the processes of contemporary design; everyday culture; and the activities of design institutions. As a curator, she has organised exhibitions and conferences, carried out design history projects, and given public lectures in Lithuania and abroad. She is a co-founder of ‘The Design Foundation’ – a research initiative dedicated to Lithuanian design history.