Heikkilä's
previous exhibition at AMA in 2013 struck me as powerful. I can't remember any details from the show, only its
considerable impact that stayed with me. Looking at the documentation
now, I noticed how similar these two shows are to a fault. There's
the zooming in on white skin (this time between the eyes), and what
looks like the ground seen from space, but also the echoes from the
lineages of abstract painting, such as line drawings and color field,
and playful hanging of canvases that barely fit to the wall
height-wise. All of this made (and makes) you consider the nature of seeing and
measuring both within and outside the gallery.
It might be worthwhile to mention that I am not really writing about the works
themselves for the simple fact that I don't know so much about
painting. So my attention steers towards the effects the exhibition
as a whole has on me, and the connections I am making from what I've been seeing, reading, and sensing lately, and in the show.
The most
striking thing I saw, in the 2017 show, was witnessing an artist sticking with their
inquiry. It comforts you as a viewer when an artist is signalling a
commitment to what they're doing. This might seem self-evident or
something best dismissed as a shtick to some, but it made me realise how the
artists I know usually try out a different approach each time (unless a
particular thing sells well). I do that too. So in my world, staying
is much more rare than shifting, and it's something that pulls me in
immediately.
I was reading a
review of the 2013 show, written by Veikko Halmetoja, a
Helsinki-based curator, art dealer, and critic. Halmetoja notes how
refreshing it is to see "these themes" (ie. ecological
issues in general) being turned into paintings, instead of the usual
strategy of depicting them via photographs. In general, either
strategy isn't preferable over the other for me. Both tend to result
in visualising a theme or a theory, while the making of a show
itself-where it is, who pays for it, who works there, how is it made
and experienced-might bear no relationship to the ideas it is said to
explore. For example, if I would make a show criticising the the role
of work as the new religion in our society, wouldn't it be weird if
I'd do 18-hour days and drove people helping me into burnout in order
to finish the show on time? Maybe it wouldn't to you, but I think it
should feel weird. I prefer the exhibition space not be cut away from
the reality that produces it, although I see no value in reproducing
images of that reality in that space, either. So what is the
solution?
I want to say
something along the lines of "more holistic approaches in which one considers everything that goes into the production and experience of
knowledge in exhibition spaces", but what that means is beyond me. I am
standing in AMA, confused by my own art-related preconceptions and anxieties which I then project onto the works of another artist,
half-heartedly wishing for them to solve these issues, while I full
well know the only way I'm able to be in a meaningful relation to
these works and ideas I'm temporarily sharing the space with is by
both abandoning my presumptions and cherishing them, thus accepting
the mess I am bringing with me to meet another mess.
A few quotes
from the 2017 Heikkilä exhibition handout: "I (and many other
humans, and why not some of their pet dogs as well) MUST CONSUME
LESS", "This is Me (the biophilist / multi-species
ecological unit) working in a state of complete merging of the Self
with all Life
using materials like acrylic glue that is harmful to both Self and
Others.", "To reject the privileging of human existence
over nonhuman existence. Is this “fashionable”? If it is – it’s
kinda cool. Essential fashion on Most Important Matters. Please gimme
more ᕙ(`▿ ´)ᕗ ♥". "Trillions become one and this
one is acting towards it"
If this is the
case, then I think it's worthwhile to ask this: If a merging with
everything arounds us, and the un-privileging of the human existence, is paramount, why adhere to the modernist role of the individual
artist who creates discreet art works? Isn't that prone to shut out all
other possible agents and connections? Or am I doing the shutting
out? Am I taking the press release text too literally, instead of
seeing it as just another squishy piece of material contributing to
the tapestry of things, ideas, realness, and references? "Every
relation immediately generates a new object."1
Or is the press
release, as it so often seems to be, a way to make sure the
"aboutness" of a show comes through? Is it up to me to
start creating those new connections, to lose myself in the allusions
to glue, the trillions, and other ecological units? But if we take these
ideas seriously, wouldn't it lead us to question the very foundations
of the platforms we inhabit as artists? The rejecting of the
privileged position of the (Western, white) human existence compels us to ask what is human and who defines it, and how that
definition and category is being protected, and who ends up feeling
the violence from such categorising. Can artists (and curators, directors, producers, technicians, etc) change these things, if
they don't question the very nature of how knowledge is being produced
and safeguarded?
Surely these
are questions that most artists struggle with: representation vs
action, beliefs vs practice, ethics vs forms, defences vs curiosity.
One could say that Heikkilä's text is a strategy to show the limits
of what art works can do, and investigate those limits within a
chosen medium. Perhaps the answer to "what to do with art"
is in the small things and gestures that spark your imagination and
subtly nudges your preconceptions. If I tend to feel sad about what I perceive as the limits of an art work or an exhibition, what can I do? Demand the artist works
more to my liking? Or accept what's there in this room, and start
over?
(To quote
Ta-Nehisi Coates, one makes art not to change the world "but in
the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie"2. But
it is also true that art is the one thing that has affected my
structures of thinking the most. It has never been about learning new
things or receiving information per se: art changes the way I
experience the world, if it does anything at all. This is why formal
qualities, questions of presenting, curatorial concepts, and
aesthetics have far more political potential than the raw information
one might inject into an art work, or an exhibition, although it is
hard to say where on ends and the other begins.)
Speaking of
small things, Maureen O'Malley's book "Philosophy of
Macrobiology" was hidden under a pile of seemingly art-making
-related objects, such as a plastic box where one mixes colors. I was
crouching like a cat trying to see what the book is. It felt oddly
rewarding to figure it out but this is not a value judgement.
In their
writings (of which I have, as with most things, only a cursory
understanding -I looked up a review of the book while writing this, and
then hastily read an article from John Dupre's Philosophy of Biology),
O'Malley has made a a compelling case for considering fundamental
philosophical questions through the lens of microbes, "the
smallest things". The book could easily be implemented, by
artists, as a contribution to the current increase in all things
system theory, diagrams, and classifications (in art discourses).
O'Malley encourages the reader to re-think the foundations of the
categories that, for example, separate living and non-living things
in philosophical thought. The unfortunate thing is, as much as artists are
being encouraged by a host of thinkers, and no matter how many art
works are asking the viewer to question certain given notions of
meaning, subject-object -relation, and other binaries, the museum
machine, the biennial complex, or the educational paradigm will
eventually render everything violently into neat categories to uphold
the tenets of their reality.
Whereas
O'Malley's writings makes the case, as far as I understood, for
taking microbes seriously, Heikkilä's exhibition proposes something
akin to refurbishing. That is only if you're willing to look at the works
as paintings in a gallery that tries to sell art, and if you compare
them to what is being shown in other spaces where similar gambits are
at play.
Most of
Heikkilä's paintings that were sold had sprinkles of miniature stuff
on the surface that gave them more three-dimensionality. These bits connected the works, by the choice of materials
the sprinkly stuff was made of, to the themes addressed in the
handout text. It looked as if someone had updated the abstract
landscape painting genre that, I imagine, comprises 70% of all the
art works sold in Finland. This is a harsh thing to say, but it's not
about the effect of the work: it's about the reference points I have
at my disposal, collected from time spent touring Finnish galleries.
After I am done
sharpening my nails with such routine dismissal I've learned to
exercise around art, a practice I am slowly unlearning as I
begin my long goodbye to orderly art while considering the
potential value of those nails and that order, I sit down, get back
up, walk around the gallery a few times, re-read the text, pace arund a
little, and eavesdrop a visitor talking with a staff member (they
were quibbling about Finnish art scene). I hang out with the works
again, feeling unsure if being direct is more needed today than being
there.
I try to be
there. The more time passes, the more I feel like being somewhere.
This isn't landscape painting: this is a landscape, one that Heikkilä
has created from a petro-lifestyle that runs counter to the ideals
one holds dear, a paradox so fundamental that many of us have given
up on resolving it.
As so often,
I'm thinking of how crucial curating is to the experience of art. My
mind starts to place Heikkilä's works in wholly different contexts,
away from AMA gallery. To see these works at AMA is to look at a
machine turned off, stored away from the consuming effect of daily
usage. I imagine the inevitable "Anthropocene" group
exhibition, probably already in the works in some Finnish museum, that
will feature all the 30-something artists currently engaged with
issues of intra-agency, non-human subjectivity, petro-narratives, and
epistemic disturbances, or, if you instead consider how the rooms in
such a show will be put together, pastel-colored mushy objects,
fungi, theory-heavy books, diagonal neon sticks, 3D landscapes, the
lot. Such categorising and forcing into museum discipline discredits the artists greatly. I secretly hope the artists will turn down those future offers if they can afford to do so.
Such a show
would, once more, make clear how thematic curating is a way of ostracising
ideas for the entertainment of the enlightened members of society, by conserving the works stationary, instead of implementing and vitalising them. It will remind you how "all
human orders [...] have mapped their "descriptive statements"
or governing master codes on the heavens [...] in doing so, they had
thereby mapped their specific criterion of being human, of what it
was "to be a good man and woman of one's kind" [...] their
respective truths had necessarily come to function as an "objective
set of facts" for the people of that society"3.
If I/you
wouldn't force art works to mean what I/you think they should mean
out of being scared that people will think I/you are not in the know,
would I/you have extra room in my/your heart for the total mess?
1 = Graham
Harman: The Quadruple Object
2 = Ta-Nehisi
Coates: We Were Eight Years In Power
3 = Sylvia
Wynter: Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth&Freedom -
Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation-An Argument
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