1.
I'll begin with a second-person narrative of my experience visiting the exhibition. You can think of it as a 3D rendition. I visited the exhibition on a Sunday afternoon in mid-August, 2018.
*
You open the door and close it behind you so as to not make any unnecessary noise. You studied sound design; these careful movements feel like second nature. Upon arrival you get anxious, not so much you'd leave but enough to make you put on a role. You don't know what your role is exactly. Your body feels tense. Maybe you're an athlete, or a guard. Compete or protect. Make art or curate.
There are handouts on your right. You don't grab them just yet, but notice the prices. You remember reading in a book called Front Desk / Back Office how, in the 90's, the city of New York tried to enforce this practice of displaying prices, hoping it'd make the acquiring of artworks more fair. It was rescinded because of the outpouring opposition from the art world that loves to keep the profound and the sacred apart.
You are convinced you remember it wrong but try to forget the whole thing and concentrate on being here. This is not New York.
On your left, there are various objects on wall-mounted, white pedestals. Each object looks pristine. You were already aware the show features objects from the artist's studio that they had no need for anymore, and anyone visiting the show can photograph or draw any of the objects before taking it with them, as long as they leave an object here in return.
It's like a Facebook swap group, you think, and wonder if it will eventually be filled with baby clothes and USB chargers.
You turn around and look at a work called Lopullinen (“Final”), made of photographic basecoat and beeswax. It looks like every other white-surface-with-scarce-marks type of painting you've seen. Such works always make you think of Malevich and how ignorant you are for not seeing the legacy, the variation, and the potential in the tradition of emptied surfaces.
You are not a visual artist. To feel more at home here, you think of a bold campaign proposition for a yogurt brand where this kind of empty field style of paintings could be utilized: Two images, one of yogurt with bits of jam scattered and another of a Rauschenberg or a Kanervo painting.
You sometimes work at marketing but now you are here because you also sometimes work at the art world. Right now, you're not working in either. Is it weird to hang out at the office if you're not being paid to be there?
Facing the gallery office you turn around, take a few steps back towards exit and the window surface with handouts, and turn left to enter the main room. You notice the floor features white objects that resemble bags of clay. They are made of clay. You understand this is conceptual humor, or you think you do, and just as you notice a couple visiting the gallery, you imagine yourself laughing out loud and cursing a lot because you've suddenly become a brash man of letters in your search for a role to help you get through another art-related social situation. That audacious, masculine laughter is your sonic idea of both New York and historicized conceptual art.
You like the carelessness of the objects. Perhaps neat, clear-cut concepts have begun to suffocate the artist. But the objects also remind you of the artist's work in Ateneum a few decades ago, where they had cardboard boxes on the floor.
In the 90's, art looked more like a holy mess. You have only seen pictures of said work in Ateneum. You were born in 1981. Your parents didn't take you to museums so you didn't see any shows in the 90’s.
In the main room, next to the clay bags, there's a table placed diagonally. It looks like a minimalist designer's desk. It reminds you of the pictures in Front Desk / Back Office, of the back rooms of commercial galleries with the same modernist design chairs by Eames, Jacobsen, and Rams. The table and chair here are not high design, but most likely from Ikea. This is more social democratic than liberal in ethos.
 |
| Marja Kanervo, main room at AMA gallery, installation view. Pic by Jussi Koitela. |
At the table, you can draw an image of an object you took from the show. In the walls, there are photographs and drawings of the objects. They are below your natural line of sight. You think of how men always seem much taller than you, although you're tall yourself. You still seem to think in terms of men and women although you are not either one. You would like to look at this show and not think of anyone's sex.
No matter how white the walls, the categories appear if you scratch the surface, like Kanervo has often done. You remember reading from a Pori Art Museum publication how Marja Kanervo shows you the marks and signs of labor, such as residue plaster on the floor from having cut a piece of the wall off, while casting their self out from the view.
You cross the main room to reach the doorway to a kind of hallway. On the right, you witness the work Oksidipunainen (Oxide Red). On a miniature shelf, there is red pigment lying partly in a bag and the bag has leaked the pigment down to the ground.
It is what it is. It is not for you, not today. Looking at the work makes you show your back to the whole show, like you're saying no to all the playfulness of exchanging objects and the artist revisiting their oeuvre, and instead devoting yourself to this altar of modernist sculpture-rupture. And even though this is not for you, you recognize the kind of person who finds this work to be the only proper one in the show. This work is here so all the artists in Finland having a knack for Orthodox mysticism can feel OK about this show. The sacred is secured. You feel bad for being so petty.
You turn around and peep into a very small room that's on your right. There are paper planes made of old art magazines and catalogs, presumably from Kanervo's collection. The work is called Henk. Koht. (“Personal”), materials used are paper and bronze cast. You forget to look for the latter material.
If this is not a work that smiles wholeheartedly at all the serious words written about an artist then I don't know what would be, you say to yourself, half-audible. The title of the piece, Personal, nudges you to ask: personal to whom? Can an artist create intimacy without being intimate? Can you reach from a distance?
Having walked full circle, you have returned to the entrance room. You look at the objects again, and wonder why the artist would have such stuff in their life in the first place. What were they planning to do with what looks like a roll of paper made of copper? Why hasn't anyone picked that up yet? It must be valuable. This is a solution to the problem of having stuff. But it's not, because there's the exchange which means the artist will get new stuff in return. It's not KonMari. What will Kanervo do with the materials people give in return?
And what about the photographs and drawings of the items, altogether tied into a single work titled Jatkuva (“Perpetual”), filed under “mixed media” and costing 18 000€. Is the price a conceptual joke, too, and will I get a slice of the money if I bring an object here? A price for a new artwork is strange because you're essentially paying for what took a lifetime to make. And that's why criticism is weird as well. You are at the gallery only for some minutes more, while the land underneath will not even notice the building ever existing unless our understanding of energies and connections is fundamentally flawed which is a real possibility.
You retreat to a corner in the main room and read the text curator Jussi Koitela has written for the show. You realize Jussi has seen what you are seeing, that this is a life's work and a kind of culmination for an artistic practice that has been too often interpreted through the dictum of minimalism and conceptualism.
Jussi writes “Life, economy, and work constitute the dialogue of the body with the material world”, referring I assume to Kanervo's life, economy, and work, but also to ours. You consider if you want to be in dialogue with all of this, and whether you'd like to donate an object. You only have some gum with you -is that offensive to give? You decide you will not fulfill the exchange, although that copper paper and also that sturdy rope up there look really appealing and something you could sell for cash.
You consider once more the painting-looking object made of beeswax, and the altar-looking assemblage, and the clay casts. These works bother you the most in their traditional art objecthood-ness.
You try think about those three not as things having been made from something, but as non-manipulated as the objects offered for exchange. They are not a result from a kind of experimentation with other materials, but rather a thing onto themselves.
Every object is an independent object? Is this material realism?
You don't want to go deeper into this, but you are happy having founded a way of looking at those three works not as art finely crafted, but as happenstance, as tapestry of material collisions that took place when you weren't there. Now this new collision between you and one of the objects emerges without the earlier collisions. Or is that even possible, isn't these relationships you're having with the three works made possible by all your (respective) past relationships?
Your brain dissolves like fried banana. You are beginning to like the show.
You realize the three works that “look like basic art” are catalysts forcing you to think harder and feel more.
The exchange of objects seemed easy to grasp at first, but now it feels ridden with complications. The exhibition creates problems for itself. The dynamic creating these problems is made of the following parameters: modernist traditions, relational-material practices, questions of authorship, the city and the gallery as interfaces, and your expectations of art.
For a second you grasp what's happening here but someone enters the room and you panic, and you stop thinking and go back to performing a guard, or an athlete.
You are ready to leave. You're trying to crystallize your experience into words. Something like “How to live with materials, when they are ripe with expectations? Kanervo's solo exhibition On Materials illuminates how the legacies of material investigations in contemporary art can run parallel to and cross paths with more personal ruminations, which for Kanervo seem to be one and the same thing. The artificiality of the exchange lends the show a deadpan look, like the existential slapstick character who already knows she'll slip on the banana.”
You close the door gently behind you.
2.
Ama is located close to the city's most fabulous public library, the one on Richardinkatu, a stone's throw from the more busier parts of central Helsinki, with cobbled roads all around, making a stroll in the area physically distinct.
A geological publication from 1975 by Maija Haavisto and Esa Kukkonen depicts the history of the soil under my feet. Over 4000 years ago I would've been awash in the Littorina Sea, a less salty precursor to Baltic Sea, like phone calls are to Internet. I imagine glaciers, the ultimate in bleak and monumental sculpture, sailing around me in the world that was here even before Littorina, some 12 000 years ago. Some of us might get to see Helsinki being taken over by water once more.
Today the area is known as Kaartinkaupunki district. It is characterized by slopes and dips, perhaps shaped by postglacial land uplift. That's a term I picked up from that publication above.
These geological concepts feel as distant to me as the Minimalist and Post-Minimalist rhetoric, utilized by Finnish art historians to box in Kanervo's practice: The artist traveled to New York in 1981, saw Eva Hesse's work and some exhibitions in derelict industrial sites, and thus the origin story was born and repeated in catalogs texts up to this day.
Is the New York postwar art scene with its dematerialization and other such strategies the Littorina Sea to Kanervo's style? The simmering batch from which the gutsy 80's and 90's Finnish art was set off by the gradual “Westernization” following the fall of Soviet Union, rise of EU, explosion of cheap flights, and the advent of internet?
With the Ama exhibition, Kanervo chose not to follow the worn path set out for them by art history. It's no wonder the show was greeted with confusion, for example in the Finnish-language Taide magazine.
Is Kanervo trolling? Where are the ultra-reduced, sleek spatial interventions? How do you fit this mix of works to Kanervo's oeuvre? Truth is, their work has often strayed from a deterministic lineage. Kanervo has made clothes, montages, and of course those slick wall texts.
The roads going up and down make walking in Kaartinkaupunki a more exhausting enterprise than in the flatter parts of the center. The area of Kallio, taken over by creatives, is another home to many ascends and descends. I wonder how that affects one's life or creative energies.
The galleries from which contemporary art museum Kiasma, I’ve understood, seems to buy most of its works are all located around a pleasantly flat square in Punavuori. If you go there from the museum via Mannerheimintie and then turn to Bulevardi, you're in no time at Anhava and Helsinki Contemporary. Shopping made easy, like one expects it to be in the city center.
The aforementioned publication from 1975, titled “Quaternary deposits in the Helsinki map-sheet area including sea bottom”, explains how the land in Helsinki is originally comprised of clay, but in the central area it is mostly been removed or covered with more sturdier landfill, in what is only a temporary compromise in planetary time between urban and geological agencies.
In Kanervo's trademark works, comprised of etching off plaster from walls akin to Gordon Matta-Clark, or of materials degrading throughout the span of an exhibition, the viewer is made to think of other temporalities besides the present one. It is really time that Kanervo paints with, after all.
Maybe this exhibition is not that different from the other ones, then? Time shared, time away, time left (as in the artist’s more ecologically minded oil pieces), and the effects of time made visible are some of the main concerns of Kanervo's work in my eyes.
When I studied documentation from Kanervo's earlier works, those past pieces usually gave out their concept immediately: ascending steps filled with oil, mirroring surfaces in nature, cardboard boxes filling the space, or checkered squares, in the style of Carl André, taking over the floor. But there's so much more, too: Works that absolutely deviate from the lineage of conceptual art: trials, experiments, perhaps mishaps, but most of all the joy making objects and creating spaces.
This is not the story of an obsessively rigid designer-y artist repeating the same form endlessly, but of one’s who is dedicated to boundless experimentation.
Whereas in the 90's, Kanervo's artworks were usually interpreted either through the canon of postwar conceptualism or overwrought explanatory symbolism, today we can look at Kanervo's artistic output for what it is: materials and conditions in dialogue. You can still take the works to reflect anything from humble spirituality to the grief of the Nordic soul, as critics (and the artist) have done in the past, but there's no reason to redeem the works by overwriting them with symbolic tapestry. We have no need for the landfill anymore: the bare earth at last.
3.
In the mid-1800's, a shoemaker had its shop opposite where Ama resides in today. Today, the stores focus more on luxury than necessities, helping their customers reach peak Maslow. The buildings here in the southern bit of Kaartinkaupunki carries the august patina of being one of the oldest urban areas in Helsinki. It's a highly typical setting for a commercial gallery, although in Finland the difference between artist spaces, for-profit galleries, and museums is hard to locate.
It's usually pretty quiet in Kaartinkaupunki, since only a thousand people live here. A tenfold number of mostly white-collar workers come in everyday, but their hours and mine do not overlap.
The relative quiet of Kaartinkaupunki is the muteness of old wealth, of having no need to gather attention towards your power. It is the opposite of the young, user-cum-influencer's hunger who is trying to make a(nother) career in social media.
I wish to not compare Kanervo to old wealth or dismiss Ama for its location, but am instead depicting the environment in which the exhibition takes place. Concerning the young influencers, I imagine Kanervo doesn’t have to be online to find work and attention, but how could I know. I am fighting for the same opportunities with colleagues 10-40 years younger and older than me. Roads rarely lead anywhere nowadays.
While getting closer to Ama, I stop to stare at the grand buildings stocked with copywriters and financial consultants. The buildings reek of opportunity, potential, and power. I can feel the desire for all such things take over me.
4.
Art has always taken a liking to soundless money. Having a silent partner is the ultimate dream in running a gallery. Someone who pays the bills, doesn't mind the content, and disappears to the background.
The money that is being made in the online epoch prefers to make noise. Microsoft has a start-up incubator named Flux nearby Ama in an expensive-looking, old-guard residential building turned into office spaces. It comprises of one whole floor. I go there sometimes to write or play Magic:The Gathering, because it's free to enter and there's complimentary coffee & soft drinks, provided you can bear the aspiring slogans and general can-do, start-uppity attitude abound. The bathroom mirror doubles as digital screen superimposed with latest tech news. Last time, it informed me about an upcoming Apple product launch while I was gathering myself to face the entrepreneurial world behind the bathroom door.
 |
| Selfie at a high-tech bathroom. |
In November during my morning wandering, months after the Kanervo exhibition had closed, I am walking towards Ama from west, as I would do normally after visiting the galleries in Punavuori first, although I should really be hunting for work instead than doing these rounds.
It's 9 am so the gallery is closed. I try to peep in from the windows but mainly see the reflection of the opposing side of the street, where the shoemaker once toiled away. Squinting my eyes, I can make out there are paintings, of standard sizes, on the walls. I imagine a film crew preparing to shoot a scene there. I think of a set designer who has made the gallery space look like a gallery space. My fictional actors are looking at their social media feeds on their mobile screens, sitting in for the gallery personnel who will take over the inattentive staring exercise after the crew has disappeared.
Richardinkatu descends towards the eerily empty square of Kasarmitori that is now home to one of the most aesthetically insulting works in recent history, a national memorial for Winter War. It is painfully literal. It is comprised of a 5-meter or so human figure full of holes. A collection of war-era photographs depicting stock Finnish history have been placed in a windowed room that doubles as the statue's plinth.
To compare it with the cool subtlety of Kanervo's memorial for the victims of Finnish civil war 1918-1919, found on a quiet off-site in Suomenlinna island goes to show how history can be recounted in dramatically different registers. I discovered Kanervo's memorial piece from an eloquently written book by Marja-Terttu Kivirinta (see list of sources below).
Whenever I visit Ama, from the inside, that is, I tend to stroll around the space once or twice. There's a narrow, shy hallway in the back with a small room on the side opposite to the wall of the main room. The hallway connects the office area, entrance room, and the main room together. After making a full circle, I usually find myself settling on the farthest corner of the bigger room, next to the row of windows, so I can take in a kind of general view of the exhibition.
During Kanervo's, three months ago, I visited only once, spending around 30 minutes in the space, which is diminutive to the lifetime it has taken for the artist to come up with the works in question. Paradoxically, Kanervo's more well-known works feel almost hurried, experientially, in comparison to the spirit of the Ama show, because this exhibition demands more time from you. There's very little to take in at a glance, and there is none of the effect of Kanervo's interventionist works, where just being there inside the site-specific installation counts as experiencing the work on full.
The Ama show is not only an intellectual exercise, either, but one that makes sense only if you care to consider its many aspects. There's no snappy effect here. This show would look tiring in Instagram.
 |
| Marja Kanervo at Such Gallery, Helsinki, 2015. |
5.
Jussi Koitela, who has written the handout text, used to run a vitrine gallery called Such with me, in another wealthy but even more quiet area of Helsinki called Töölö, a few kilometers from Ama. I had contacted Kanervo already in 2013 to propose a one-day exhibition in Sorbus, but that didn't pan out due to timing.
Then in 2016, we managed to get Kanervo to create a new work for our vitrine. A small, rustic painting frame was placed inside our human-size, vitrine-as-gallery. A covering tape was attached to the glass, with letters carved out that spelled KYVYTTÖMYYS. Translating to “inability” but also “impotency”, it was a striking message in an old-fashioned, bourgeois residential area. A former President of Finland lives next door.
I try to read Jussi's text. It's challenging to read standing. I picture myself sitting on a mush passenger seat in a train traveling from Cologne to Brussels, taking in my dear friend's thinking, while in the corner of my eye the train crosses river Meuse and the world outside looks just as colorless as Helsinki, or modernist design chairs at a gallery's back room. The European visual information from the window of the train is reminiscent of failed clickbait, or of bot-like online ads, as if I'm back at Microsoft Flux staring at the hi-tech bathroom mirror. The travels of a creative rarely seem to take them anywhere.
I wonder if Kanervo's aesthetic is born from such travels, and from the heady-but-tongue-in-cheek tradition of central European conceptual art (no clear idea what I'm referring to, but I'm sure someone knows what I mean -think of design but also excrement), and the precise but plain serial installation style that is prevalent on the rows of images circling the walls at Ama.
Kanervo's strategy of writing words on institutional (and sometimes other) walls is an act of handing out information one doesn't necessarily need, so that the experience leaves you confused, unsure if the word was meant for you, or if it was just a byte from an endless feed made by the artist over their lifetime instead of an algorithm? Can you be site-specific when everywhere feels the same for the middle-class art consumer? Is an installation at Venice any different from one at Helsinki?
Looking at images from catalogs and other publications, there's a loneliness in Kanervo's practice, in going around doing things that are directed to no one in particular, created by a bodiless non-presence. This lonely feeling is hidden so deep behind the walls of elegance and craft that when I reach it, I feel fraudulent.
I remember what Kanervo said about the ambience surrounding the forming of the legendary performance art group Jack Helen Brut, and how they all felt so beautiful and omnipotent and young, like such groups always do in the beginning, and how, subsequently, Kanervo dropped out because acting or being seen that way was not a good fit, and how Kanervo's career has, after that, kept the image of the artist away from the works themselves.
Can we say things without being there to say them? It's such a basic yet fundamental question. It has haunted me whenever I've done exhibitions myself. Why do we invite people to look at what we've done without being there in person?
At the Ama show, I feel Marja Kanervo is almost there. The instructions on how to interact with the exchangeable objects read like a note left at the kitchen table by your Airbnb host dreading of human interaction. It’s as if the world, and especially the people in it, are so unreliable that Kanervo wants to be in charge of how, and if, an exchange should take place.
The exhibition keeps my mind busy. There are so many connections, modernist baggage, heaps of materials asking different questions, and piles and piles of histories, practices, and trajectories waiting to be excavated. I haven't wrestled with a show this much perhaps ever before. I've worked on this text for six months, and it's still nowhere, but I need to go somewhere else now.
I'll end with a quote from Antti Saarela, writing for a publication about Kanervo's exhibition at Pori Art Museum in 2003.
"It is possible the artist discusses the power that signs hold, the issue how an anonymous subject may have a voice but not the power nor the capabilities to name the public or even his or her public domain."
*
Marja Kanervo: Materiaaleista ("On Materials") was on display at gallery Ama, Helsinki, between Aug 10 and Sep 2, 2018. Coincidentally, my first blog post was about a solo by Alma Heikkilä at the same gallery.
Sources:
Marja Kanervo catalogs and exhibition publications:
- (Dis)appearing. A Museum of contemporary art Kiasma publication 138/2013
- Oulu City Art Museum 9.10.-19.12.2004
- No Name. Pori Art Museum publications 68, 2003
- Artist of the Year. Helsinki Art Hall 1992
- Joensuun taidemuseon julkaisuja 1/1990
Marja-Terttu Kivirinta: Yhdeksän taiteilijaa, WSOY 2007
Maija Haavisto, Esa Kukkonen. Geological map of Finland, Quaternary deposits, Helsinki. Geologian tutkimuskeskus, 1986
Front Desk / Back Office. The secret world of galleries in 39 pictures and two texts. Fucking Good Art, 2010
Taide-lehti, 4/2018
With warm thanks to Miina Hujala for insightful comments.
