uozas Laivys. Salantų tankas, 2011. Foto Jurgita Laivė

The artistic practice of Juozas Laivys (born 1976) includes sculpture, objects, installations, performance art, text, video, and photography. His work stands out because of his authentic approach to themes that are widely discussed in contemporary art, such as authorship, institutional power, the economic value of art, and the boundary (or lack thereof) between life and art. In raising these issues, he often uses the strategy of appropriation, deliberately straightforward rhetoric – characteristic of mass (as well as bureaucratic) culture – and combines conceptual gestures with real physical gestures. In 2007, Laivys moved from Vilnius to the village of Narvaišiai in Plungė district, where he has since taken on the role of an independent farmer, an urban painter, and an active contemporary artist. He collaborated on much of his recent work with Tomas Danilevičius, especially in organising art events for ‘Plungė – Lithuania’s Capital of Culture 2009.’  

Collaboration remained the basis of his later work, which Laivys produced with local communities and his artist colleagues. Having authored 256 artworks, Laivys decided to pause his individual creative work for fourteen years, starting from 2015, with the aim of turning his own life into a work of art. At present, he engages in an array of post-creative possibilities and explores the realm of pure ideas, dictated by a specific place, time, current events, and subject artistic vision. 

After suspending his creative work, the non-practising artist occasionally signs contracts with individual artists and transfers to them, for a fixed period, the identity of the still creating Juozas Laivys, while he himself tends the Artworks Cemetery. This Cemetery functions as a service for artists and is the only medium of its kind in the whole world. During 2016-2020, over thirty artworks of different genres have been buried there. According to the cemetery caretaker himself, the interest in burying individual artworks has increased with each year because it provides a unique opportunity for living artists to express themselves by giving meaning the existence of their artworks in an alternative way. By the nature of its activities, the Cemetery of Artworks is classified neither as a museum, nor as a gallery or private collection.  

Laivys graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a degree in sculpture in 2001 and completed a post-doc at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon in France in 2004. He has had solo shows at COCO (Contemporary Concerns) Kunstverein in Vienna, the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, and Tulips & Roses in Vilnius; and participated at the Kaunas Biennial (2017) and group shows at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, the Frutta Gallery in Rome, Gasworks in London, the Biennale of Young Artists in Tallinn, and gb agency in Paris. Since 2017, Laivys has been studying for a PhD in Art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts on the topic of ‘Kleopas Society. Spectral Analysis and the Dissemination of the Post-Production Phenomenon’.