“The blacksmith was not what one preferred to see in the contemporary art gallery,” the artist, jewelery master and blacksmith Urmas Lüüs recalled from his school days. “When I was still studying, there was often the attitude that a blacksmith comes to a contemporary art gallery to make horseshoes and swords? Then everything changed. Inspiration began to draw from applied art, from ceramics, glass, iron and clay, and then somehow I got involved in this world too. At the moment, a blacksmith from Eastern Europe to be very sexy.”
A master’s degree gave freedom
Lüüs earned his master’s degree in jewelry and blacksmithing in 2014. “I’ll soon have ten years of freelance work under my belt,” he said. “When I finished my degree in 2011, that’s when I more or less figured out for myself what was happening in this field of art and where I could start to belong.”
“At the same time, three years is just a fragile glimpse of what this profession could represent,” Lüüs said. “The master’s degree gave me much more freedom to do my own thing, because firstly I already knew the people in the industry to ask my questions and, secondly, I had developed an understanding of my position in this field.”
The only philosophical question is suicide
“When Jarmo Reha came to me two years ago with the idea of the show “Eidos” and talked about it, I asked him what was the question he wanted answered. Jarmo said he would like to think about the shape I am in, not the body I am in, but I am here in the form of two arms, two legs, such genes, such joys and pains of the soul, that I am faced with such a Camusian inevitable decision, where the only philosophical question is the suicide, but because it’s not planned, but it’s still the only way out, so before that way out, I would like to know where I am, what I’m in for.”
Half of the things built on stage turned out to be rudiments
“It was very nice that all members of the production team worked in parallel, that is, if a classic big theater with a big production follows a clear sequence of how certain things happen, in the case of this production everything happened horizontally, everyone had gave impetus to the next one. My idea came from the lighting solutions of Siim Reispass, which I wanted to physically put on stage, then I had an idea for the video and came up with the idea, Kiwa reacted to the video and Siim Reispass reacted to his music again with his light, then the playwright Aare Pilv came and started adding words.”
“I started building the stage a month before the premiere and prepared it the same day as the premiere,” recalls Lüüs. “Over the course of a month, something kept changing, half of the things I built for the stage are currently in my garage and they’re not out there on the stage. You just clean these things out of production and realize that something that was absolutely necessary, suddenly becomes a rudiment. A large amount of physical matter has effectively become video.”
Art doesn’t have to provide answers
“I think that theatre, music, art and cinema should absolutely not provide answers,” Lüüs said. “However, they should create a sort of empathetic reference points, where you realize that somewhere there is something else like me, I have something to identify with, someone has thought similar thoughts. For me it is the greatest recognition when someone tells me that I also thought and felt something like that, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. The possibility of an artist is that, having these visual tools, we can, for example, recreate a situation in the theater, we can create an object on stage.”
The separation from his life partner encouraged him to act in the only way possible for an artist
Lüys tells the story of how he realized he had such an opportunity as an artist. “I broke up with my partner,” Lüüs recalled. “I was returning to the city from my last meeting with my partner and felt like I could take my heart out of my chest and use it like a Molotov cocktail to burn the whole city down. Years later I realized that I actually could. So I hacked one of the prototypes , a heart-shaped bottle, I poured some bottles of Molotov cocktail, I mixed the mixture that goes into the cocktail, I took a cameraman friend with me and we went to an old abandoned missile base, which was all concrete, and I started throwing these flaming cocktails against the walls, I was in the middle of that firestorm and the cameraman was filming. That thing that I had heard but for which I myself had no words, but for which I could create some kind of visual, became suddenly a reality.”
Over the past decade he has photographed cemeteries around the world
On December 7, Tütar Lüysi’s solo exhibition will open in the Gallery. “I have been preparing the exhibition in my head for a long time. I borrowed the title from a work by Arvo Valton: “Human! God created you from nothing, and you can feel it too often. “There will be a burial mound, but it will not just be a pile of earth, but rather a pile of semi-architectural Central European stones.”
“For the past ten years I have been photographing cemeteries all over the world. I have become interested in the collective as a kind of common consciousness both with those who are now and with those who once existed. Looking at it through funerary monuments erected over different centuries, it speaks to me” , Lüüs said.
“I asked myself what I am as an individual, how much right do I have to my uniqueness,” Lüüs explained. “I’ve been watching it for years, and every now and then I come to something where I can say that this is the real part of me. Then some time passes, and I realize that it probably wasn’t really my part. Now I’ve come to a situation where I feel that I have nothing of my own, that all I have is a collective loan. All my thoughts are because I have been surrounded by such people and such situations. If I had different parents, at home and school, country , standard of living, then I would have completely different thoughts in my head. The thoughts are not mine, they are seeds that came from somewhere, perhaps I cultivated them or amplified them in some way. I began to perceive not only the collectivity that I have in my community, but the complete community up to the stone age.”
On December 7, Lüys will open a solo exhibition at the Tütar Gallery “Human! God created you from nothing, and too often you feel it”.
In early April 2024, Lüysi’s play “Aunt Õie’s 71st Birthday” will be performed at Kanuti Gildi SAAL.
2023-12-07 13:32:00
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