This lithograph was created to mark the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, a sporting event that showcased both the promise of Olympic ideals and simultaneously the ways in which Cold War ideology eclipsed these ideals. Fourteen Eastern bloc countries, led by the USSR, boycotted the Games of 1984, in symbolic retaliation for the United States-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. For Viesulas, an artist whose experience of exile from Soviet-occupied Lithuania framed his artistic career, this political game of tit-for-tat was a singular event. In the abstracted elements of the Olympic torch represented here, the beacon becomes instead a conflagration of youthful ambition and ancient calendar rites held aloft on a crutch. An upended roller skate and pre-Columbian sundials evoke the symbol of the Olympic rings, while the whole ensemble is suggestive of Lady Liberty’s torch. Here, however, it is ablaze with the frustrated ambitions of athletes from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and redolent of our long history of repression of the human spirit by politics and ideology.
_{—Excerpted from https://www.viesulas.org/new-products/olympics, accessed 6-25-2021}