FEMINIST FORUM (FEMF) GROUP EXHIBITION CURATED BY RAMINA HABIBOLLAH AND NAYAB IKRAM, 20-21 OCT, CABLE FACTORY, HELSINKI

Feminist Forum exhibition, installation view. Courtesy the artists. Image: Kimmo Modig

LOCAL?

"not only is contemporaneity about the engagement with the urgent issues of the moment we are living out, but more importantly it is the moment in which we make those issues our own. That is the process by which we enter the contemporary."
-Irit Rogoff: The Expanded Field

"I don’t believe there are enough good people in the art world who speak on a level and think about legacy/about policy/who go to council meetings and have a worthwhile presence and do something without prioritising their own gains of being a Gap Yah-type, look I work with Real People in my art-type dickhead”, wrote the White Pube recently. Later on in the essay(1), they recommend art institutions to have obligatory local advisory boards: "With such boards, art spaces of all scales might be responsible and accountable then; social, local, good. their activity would be considered, wanted, attended, and shared. yep ok thats the art world i wanna see. can I have that for christmas please."

If I wish for art to make sense locally, it’s worth to ask for whom art is usually made, then? Most shows I see are targeted for other artists & art pros, like the ones I’ve done myself because I have no idea how to talk to anyone else. Attempts to cater for larger audiences usually fail, as essentially no one (=”laymen”) cares enough to see something new, or perhaps, and most likely, the work was not really made with any understanding of any other audience than your peers.

But I know so very little of audiences and communities to begin with. In this case, my point of view is that of a  professional-seeming(?) art worker(?) who goes to see shows and then talks about them privately with their peers.

And I wonder why most of my friends say they don't feel anything when they see art. The art we witness in Helsinki and elsewhere is almost always about showing that you can make “an art thing”. It is proof, as I’ve claimed elsewhere(456). There’s rarely any entrance into the work because the work is made to be acknowledged, not experienced.

All this I say so I can lay the foundation for discussing the exhibition mentioned in the title of this post so hold tight.


MUSEUMS? (AGAIN...)

Also, and by way of reminding you I don’t hate museums, although I doubt you would care if your snap judgement on my snap judgements is balanced, and not that I was talking about museums this time, but anyways let’s set the record straight: no, it's not that museums should solve all the problems of art+audiences. Quite the opposite imho, I would love them to have the ability to focus on fighting forgetting, that is, doing archiving work (which then would allow you to dissect the ideologies guiding such enterprises, something that is way more urgent than to talk about being depressed by what’s on).

For some reason, museums have been burdened with the task of being the main place you go for all things contemporary art here in Helsinki -maybe because this is such a small place and there is no discourse that would enable more analytical takes on the roles of different institutions, so it is very hard to avoid talking about museums when you talk about contemporary art.

Or actually it is very easy to avoid talking about museums, just look at something else, like the FemF show I am slowly getting to here.

---Which is so weird, that bit about having to talk about museums, because museum shows here very rarely have anything to do with the issues and ideas me and my colleagues deem pressing. No, we don't decide what is worthwhile in general, of course, but I am depicting my reality, so that you would understand where I'm coming from with this and how it potentially visualizes a larger contemporary art discourse. I don't see most museums and their personnel working with the same questions with me, whereas with my precarious colleagues who are critics, technicians, writers, whatnot, I feel a connection because it is based on a situation, a position, instead of a genre.

THIS IS WHERE WE DIFFER

And also why do Helsinki-based art institutions collaborate with each other when it's pretty obvious that the actual_people_working_in_these_institutions have vastly different, even if unpronounced aims?

Why do independent, fiercely critical festivals, galleries etc. want to work with bigger institutions when they are looking for very different things?

I mean, go to a bar with people who work for any highly visible and/or cool independent art org, and listen to them bleed their hearts out on how disappointed they are with these seemingly required collabs, and you will bloody well learn what the differences are.

I must admit one reason I was positively surprised by the Femf group exhibition was there was no mention of the usual suspects Frame, Kiasma, University of Arts, Taike, Kone Foundation, etc. I mean of course I am not saying this was from the organisers’ part an act of opposing or turning down offers, how could I know, but merely am pointing this out as a visitor who reads the handouts and looks at the Facebook event texts and regards this sort of info as part of the experience.
This fact made me feel hopeful, although I could just as well imagine the people doing this show wouldn't mind the collab/access because it means money and other resources, so obv this is not a clear-cut issue that somehow got "solved" here, or that there wouldn't be structural racism and the like in Finnish art institutions and everyone can just "choose" whether to collaborate/take the money or not.

And lastly, this was an exhibition to go along the Feminist Forum that had a lot of other programme from talks to workshops within it, and from what I understood the Forum is produced with voluntary work. But what I saw was not just something on the side, a fringe event, but one of the most compelling exhibitions in a very long time.

I've recently been reading a book edited by INCITE!, titled “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded - Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex” and I guess that has influenced me quite a bit in terms of understanding how support structures co-opt ideas and movements and energies and what sustainable alternatives are out there.

What this collabo-reflex means in practice is that representatives from the same institutions are present in almost all of the boards, from festivals to artists' associations, to residency and grant juries. Because, you know, it’s “good” for networking to have someone from that museum or this money-laundering business amongst us. Everyone has to be ready to play ball with each other, leading to uninspired, numbingly polite-yet-eerie-cold atmosphere, where any issue gets quickly taken over by the formal, hegemonic production methods (and thus knowledge and value systems).

INCLUSION?

As Grace Kyungwon Hong has explained(9), inclusion is leverage for the capitalist, or any hegemonic system to protect the power balance, not to change it. By inviting a "suitable", acclaimed individual in, we can stop to think about literally everyone else who is still left out because now we have a visual representation from a given repressed minority. (This is way more clumsier put than how Hong phrased this but maybe you know what I mean.)

On the other hand, "we" have this myth of supposedly needing to pull together, as some afterthought from art-as-nationalist interest that no one sincerely believes in, save for evangelists of entrepreneurial credo such as designer, artist Paola Suhonen(4, in Finnish), but it's still lurking very heavily everywhere in the Finnish intellectual scenery, nevertheless.

But no one needs to pull together on everything imo. Save that for large-scale issues, like fair pay, human rights, and fighting fascism. I think it is crucial to know the difference between when and where to join forces, and for what causes, and when not to, because empty, habitual collaboration simply muddies the waters and makes it impossible to understand what we or you or I or whoever was trying to do in the first place.

I want to find ways to cross over the limits of the cultural-economic boxes the neoliberal reality wants us to stay in, and find out larger societal connections. That would be brilliant, yes, instead of the aforementioned people-with-degrees-and-invites playing the game of performative inclusion. This I want, instead of watering down one’s agencies into a soggy compromise based on contrived locality forced in place to suit the needs of some puny grant the Arts Promotion Centre is wrangling in front of you.

The mere fact that two things exist in Helsinki does not mean they need to collaborate, as much as we like to "meet to have meetings."(5) This kind of thinking comes from the same tainted well as measuring everything by audience numbers, treating institutional collaboration as an ends to itself, and the fantasy of knowing what’s going on because "Finland is so small you quickly get to know everybody"? Really, you know everyone? Who cleans your office and what was it that you said about actor-networks? When was the last time you saw art made by someone who doesn’t have 50+ FB friends in common with you? I am asking this from myself, as well, and I need to keep asking it ffs.

But yeah so, more standing apart when it comes to doing your own thing and more coming together when it really matters we show the power in numbers.

It is why sometimes the cost of making compromises is the losing of the impossible, the radically different way of that which does not figure in the current neoliberal logic or in your organisation's strategy. Hong brings up affect as on opposing force, quoting Kara Keeling in how it “points toward the ways that whatever escapes recognition, whatever escapes meaning and valuation, exists as an impossible possibility within our shared reality.”

OK SO THE SHOW ITSELF FINALLY

What does impossible look like? Does it look like the exhibition curated by artists Ramina Habibollah and Nayab Ikram, which seemed at first glance a familiar affair with its removable white walls, photographs, few installations, a book on display, paintings, and videos? Finding the time and energy to open up to anything is hard, I feel, so you look at the simplest visual cues and make a quick categorisation and move on to think about eating something soon. I think I spend maybe 2 hours in the show, and around the second hour I started to overcome and leave behind my learned taxonomies and other preconceptions, as much as that is even possible, or desireable.

Nora Sayyad: Finding Forgiveness, 2017 (photobook). Courtesy the artist. Image: Kimmo Modig

For only two days, mere hours really, with the first day filled with performances I sadly missed, and the second day hosting talks by some of the artists, the exhibition was open at one of the spaces at Cable Factory in Ruoholahti, an eerie area of south-central Helsink, populated by successful IT companies, with apartment blocks scattered around the channel built there in the 90s, when the area started to be transformed from a warehouse area into a residential zone. I never enjoyed visiting Cable Factory: it feels like someone is cementing an idea what artistic labor should look like.

When I went to visit the show on Saturday morning, it was still quiet (it got busier later on), and then a colleague showed up. We chatted a little. They were very impressed by the choice of videos and were hoping the curators would put together a screening later on (which they did because, well, isn’t it the right thing to do. Go see it, it's at Third Space in Punavuori, until Saturday 23rd of Dec 2017). The entire runtime of the videos was hours: I am not sure if it would've been possible to see them all during the weekend.

That the show cannot be experienced at whole drives home an important point about knowledge and objectivity: You cannot have the full view. First sign of the impossible? This was similar in spirit with having Nora Sayyad's thesis or graduation work (opinnäyte), with photos of Sayyad's father and his family in Palestine and research on multicultural families at large, on display amongst the other pieces. One wouldn't read the thesis there and then, and I merely glanced it while running around trying to see "everything", but it felt like a useful thing to have there, like this someone could surely use this for something, this is real, lived knowledge. It managed to do that thing people seem to try to do with placing books in exhibitions: the suggesting of another piece of knowledge, to be experienced elsewhere, but accessed partly from this space, like a wormhole, or the echo of a refrain from another song.

Man Yau: Planet HER-BB, 2017. In the background: Kuralay Kin: Woman Dancing, 2017. Courtesy the artists. Image by Kimmo Modig.

Aside from the videos, shown on two spots in the show, there were lot of drawings, photographs, and paintings. As much as I enjoyed looking at them, I couldn't stop hanging out with Man Yau's porcelain sculpture "Planet HER-BB" (see pic above), which was like an oasis of mutating visual references I couldn’t quite place, or, say, study materials of a biology class from the year 2158. Having in the middle of the exhibition turned into a command center from which you navigate.

Carmen Baltzar's video piece "GYPSY", from 2016, depicted white Finnish people talking about their preconceptions of Romani people. Sadly I didn’t have the time to see it in full, only for few minutes, but what I saw stayed with me: the casual ways you, if you belong to the/a norm, let yourself judge other people outside of this norm while seeing yourself as merely observing the world, the inherent violence of this rhetoric coming through on full force in Baltzar’s video piece.

Even something as fleeting and easily unnoticeable as paintings from a workshop Globaalinuoret & FemF had organised together felt compelling, because the piece was swimming amongst the other, more "refined" works (as in, I imagine the workshop was a short one, perhaps not made to produce art only, whereas the other works I guess were made by practicing artists, but rly I don't know anything about the workshop this is just how I read it), exchanging some of the resonance of their immediacy for the gravitas of the more pronounced pieces.

Those made-up juxtapositions between workshopping and working made (and makes) little sense as an interpretative device, something that become apparent with Shieko Reto's drawings, one of them detailing what seemed like a demonstration against Finnish government's necro-policy of forced sterilisation of transgender people. Reto’s drawings felt at the same time as just a thing one does on the side, and like a work that has been coming up, and lived through, for years. Earlier this year there was an eye-popping window painting by Reto in Kaisaniemi(1000).

Shieko Reto: HelzPride, 2017. Courtesy the artist. Image: Kimmo Modig

I rarely experience shows through singular art works, but instead as an immersive encounter with multiple modalities, so I won’t usually write so much about specific pieces. And it would be exhausting to go through even half of the pieces in the FemF show.

Additionally, very rarely an aesthetic enters my body with such decisiveness that I cannot do anything but fall in love. And I don’t even think that phenomenon as some applaudable feat, more than simply a sign that me and the artist have similar class/race/gender experiences or taste or something something. We all need to hear the chorus sometimes, of course, so like anyone else I enjoy those moments of deep (or shallow) resonance. I like that feeling but there’s very little I could say about that, or?

This time, I wasn’t even thinking about this whole did-I-felt-it-in-my-stomach -trope so much, because the FemF exhibit was one of those shows that make all the works in it shine brighter (meaning the works didn't have to compete for your attention if that makes sense), instead of dimming their power in order to hammer home some savvy curatorial concept.

Not that there wasn't a concept. It was clearly spelled out that the exhibition displays works made by racialised artists (or artists of color). I understood the curating had been done by combining different approaches: there was an open call, and additionally they handpicked some of the artists, especially friends whose works they wanted to show, plus there was some collaboration with Koltuor, an "Instagram based gallery where we want to highlight and celebrate non-white artists, writers, poets, performing artists and filmmakers mainly in Scandinavia", who did the graphic design.

It was possible to think to whom this show was for and what it set out to do, but this info was put forth in a way that allowed the exhibition to do other things, too, and people experiencing and visiting the show could then set their coordinates accordingly in relation to where the show was located on an intersectional map.

This exhibition, for me, was also an example of how the method in itself doesn't dictate the potential of the results (I could complain about open calls in general for weeks on end) but how you implement it, and what you are trying to do with the method you’ve chosen or found yourself working with.

What a joy it is to stroll around in an exhibition that trusted its artists while having a very clear, and stated, agenda governing it. Maybe the most important thing to get right really is your reasons for doing something.

---OK so yes I am using somebody else's labor to further my own claims. That's what I tend to do with art, which in all honesty has no intrinsic value for me (I think?), only use value. Art works almost always mean something to me only after I have figured out how I can use them (or vice versa), or understand how they are being used by someone. So for example this exhibition became a companion piece to some stuff I’ve been thinking about and going through lately.

Obviously I wasn't getting something out from all of the works, but why would that matter? What is that even, like sitting comfortably on each sofa at a furniture store? In my mind, the show would have not been better or worse had you change one work for another.

I think the curator is always the only person who loves everything in the show they have put together, while the rest of us like what we like.

Why do I say some other work wouldn’t make the show different? Because the curators and everyone involved in the FemF show managed to create a temporary situation, a system*, really, in which everything placed in it became enforced with vitality.

The thinking, energy, and lived experiences that goes into making a show is what protects it and gives it its aura. And if this protective ritual fails, then there’s nothing an art work, press release, installation pics or online hype could change.

EMOTIONS

This is what happens when I live through an exhibition: My emotions measure the distance between what I want and what the show seems to be. Then, I need to either accept the show or deny it. I can then either carry it with me to future situations (accept it), or try to leave it behind (deny it). But the latter is sort of ruled out at this point, because the show, like any experience, refuses to be left behind without strings, or slime, or threads, or cords attaching it to me.

Whatever happens next in my life, the show hangs on, usually through negation, or as a shadow, or a ghost, because I was there already, I can not not be there anymore. But if I accept it, then I endorse it, protect it, or maybe wear it out so as to make you think it’s been with me for a while, like a denim jacket.

Sometimes, the distance between myself and the show is too big, and I don’t even try working at it. I walk out, I forget it, only a very feeble thread hanging loose from my mind.

In the FemF case, the distance I needed to travel to accept the show varied, but finally the way in was provided by artists whose work I already knew, as is often the case. The first thing I did was I sat down to look at an engaging documentary video about the activist-artist group Mahoyo and their travels & projects, which was kind of advertisement-y as in selling something to me, but that was precisely what I found curious and nicely conflicting and kind of real. Then a video by artist Sepideh Rahaa followed but I thought well I like Rahaa's work already so let's see what else is there and moved on to look at paintings and such, deciding to carry this show with me where ever I'd go next.

Mahoyo: The Mahoyo Project, 2015 (video). Courtesy the artists. Image: Kimmo Modig

“We will follow any hint of energy, at least for a little while. When something happens, we swarm toward it, gaze at it, sniff it, absorb its force, pour over its details, make fun of it, hide from it, spit it out, or develop a taste for it. We complain about the compulsion to participate. We deny its pull. We blame it on the suburbs and TV and ourselves. But we desire it too, and the cure is usually another kind of swarming, this time under the sign of redemption: a mobilization for justice, a neighborhood watch committee, some way of keeping our collective eyes open. Something to do.” 
-Kathleen Stewart, “Ordinary Affects”

HAVING THE ENERGY

One particularly enjoyable thing about this exhibition was its size. Even though it was a group show with a set concept, it didn’t require tons of intellectual-emotional-physical labor to go through it -not to say the works would have not been complex or worth diving deep into, or that I "got" it all, but that everything was not overly complicated merely for its own sake.

I mean it is the dark season in Finland, 24/7 cognitive capitalism reigns over everything, and everyone I know is tired. When you create a show, the amount of info/triggers/cues you put into it for viewers to digest tells us what kind of life (diet, schedule, abilities) you expect the audience to lead, you know, in order to have the surplus energy and cultural capital necessary to take in your vision. Maybe that should be spelled out at exhibition entrances?

--But like this is coming from a person who just wrote a long winding freewheeling text so---

In general, not having chairs while showing long videos is a way of saying you must be healthy enough to stand here for 30-60 minutes to watch my art without losing your concentration. But since the videos in this show were shown as collections (and there were a few chairs there), I didn’t feel them imposing a certain kind of spectatorship onto me. It was more like a YouTube a playlist, like here are the names, take the handout home and look them up, or alternatively see what you have time to see now, and then do what you want. And the fact there is now a screening of those work is great news.

Jon Ely: People who deserved to be on the Swedish hundred-crown bank note instead of Carl von Linné, 2017. Installation shot. Courtesy the artist. Image: Kimmo Modig 

Jon Ely: People who deserved to be on the Swedish hundred-crown bank note instead of Carl von Linné, 2017. Installation shot. Courtesy the artist. Image: Kimmo Modig

Artists in the FemF show: Aka Niviâna, Ana Gutieszca, Carmen Baltzar, Caroline Suinner, Crystal Z Campbell, Diana Soria Hernandez, Ding Yi, Dzamil Kamanger, Elise Mattisson Chue, Jay Mar Albaos, Jon Ely, Karoline Montero Araya, Kemal Koçak, Kuralay Kin, Lolo Arziki, Mahoyo, Man Yau, Mona Eid, Müge Yildiz, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Nora Sayyad, Razan Abou Askar, Saadia Hussain, Sabah Ejaz, Sepideh Rahaa, Shieko Reto, Vishnu Vardhani.

1 = http://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/local-advisory-boards
4 = https://areena.yle.fi/1-4158535
456 = http://kimmomodig.com/themes/
9 = Grace Kyungwon Hong - Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (introduction + chapter 2)
5 = https://youtu.be/Z0ndtYaCRO0?t=4m58s
1000 = http://shiekoreto1.blogspot.fi/2017/01/genderhuman-jan-25-march-2017.html
* = for more on how exhibitions could be understood as systems, see and interpret Reza Negarestani’s essay Frontiers of Manipulation as a piece on that topic, if you want, albeit it talks about material organisation and conceptual modelling but I think it could apply for what I am saying here, but maybe it's worth to elaborate on a wholly other review.

111X & JOHANNES EKHOLM & MAN YAU at SINNE, HELSINKI, Oct 14 - 29, 2017

THE SETUP

Last month, I sat down amidst vintage Artek chairs, Genelec speakers, and a selection of house plants, all enclosed in a room-inside-a-room at Sinne gallery. Fluorescent lights above me were occasionally flickering in sync with the audio, trying their best to animate the makeshift, deadened space. A 90-minute dystopic-utopian radio play, taking place "fifteen minutes from now", in the vein of the British TV show Black Mirror, was playing.

Afterwards, a staff member at the gallery was happy to see I stayed for the full length of the piece. I imagine 90 minutes is a lot to ask for most, but then I was there to write this. Work work work. To be honest, I wasn't there all the time, but went online to vent my frustration. Aargh. I don't have a smartphone but I had my computer with me and it had Sinne's Wi-Fi stored in it from the time our band played there a few months ago.

Whereas Black Mirror -and no I won't drag this comparison throughout- looks at how technology influences (mostly white, middle-class) social relations, "There Is A Light..." imagines the desires and potentialities of Helsinki-based precariat after the current order has gone up in flames in an activist uprising.

The exhibition itself is two-fold: there's the sound piece, and then there's everything else, which is credited to artist and sculptor Man Yau. The broken-beats, post-club bass-heavy music in the radio play is produced by 111X. In a puff-cum-interview(1), the artists said the visual setup should remind audiences that the fictional world of the radio play, in which an actress is receiving a state award while the parliament is being taken over by protestors, is not unlike ours. Choosing audio as the primary medium is an apt choice, as it frees you from having to come up with a visual stand-in for all the ideas. The way out from the muddy waters of representation is through the immersive, physio-hallucinogenic medium of sound, perhaps.

OK so I have no idea how to say this other than like: it seems as if the exhibition wanted us tell ourselves that we, both the audience and the creators of the exhibition, know what is wrong in the world, and that this exhibition exists in that same world. The nod, the wink.

What is it about artists or our working conditions that make us put things into space and will them into meaning what we think they should mean? And if I, as a spectator, subscribe to this meaning, for example by reading the handout text and deducing that the beat-up BMW must symbolise crony capitalism, what does this process do to me exactly, apart from granting me cultural access to a set of symbols & concepts, and before that, making me desire for that make-believe access in the first place? What would happen if I wouldn't agree to accept the presentation of design furniture as a sign of anything else but, I dunno, a successful partnership with the companies mentioned in the thank you notes? As proof of labor? Artists & co always say you're free to interpret the work to your liking but no one ever tells you how you actually can do that, and what doing so would mean to the discourse we're in.

POLITICAL ART

Should we categorise "There is a light...", jarringly, as political art, then how is it different from the works of Jani Leinonen and Riiko Sakkinen, for example, whose works have gathered vast amount of criticism (if you're not aware of these events unfolding in Finnish art, perhaps cut a few paragraphs)? This might seem like a calculated rebuttal, but risking that I still think the comparison is one that must be made in order to clarify these terms so we understand what we are talking about here. What is the difference between this and that kind of art, if they both borrow their momentum and raison d'être from the political (for lack of a better term)?

As a tactic, it reminds me of highbrow music journalism. Pop music thinkpieces seem to be based on the notion that since they tackle globally worshipped, mega-successful artists, the writing must be important, too.(0) Of course, most of the time it absolutely is not meaningful to anyone outside pop criticism believers, as is the case with art and its priesthood, as well.

Obviously, this is not about the merits of pop journalism: it's just that the topic you choose does not elevate or justify your writing per se. People might care about object A, but it does not follow they care about somebody talking about A. The talk in itself is simply another object with which one needs to create a relationship, or not.

Referencing political events or struggles won't add to the weight an art work has in the cultural sphere, then (something the Sinne show doesn't exactly do, though the script contains a lot of quotes from activist-friendly literature etc). Although it kinda adds. What can happen is that the theme itself creates a certain type of aura around your practice: you might have better chances at getting grants, be featured on serious panels, people perhaps deem you as a person worth considering seriously, all that.

Also, no one ever criticises such works unless they're blatantly ignorant, as has been the case with the countless numbers of "refugee-inspired" art made by white Finnish artists touring the topic in their careers. But when, for example, an artist makes an informed work about, say, fascism during a specific period in Finnish history, the cultural sphere ceases to address its aesthetic or artistic merit. It becomes a monument for being right, and for a shared leftist/liberal/critical values (which I share, too). And since this monument is categorised as art, not science, for example, no one will check if the sources hold, there is no peer review system, and so on. We are prone to think the artist is right and so we simply salute the effort, instead of analysing it critically. (But I can't help but to add we need these monuments sometimes, you know, just to have something?)

Still, nothing stymies discussion as combining poetic license with morally proofread topics. Again, no, I am not saying one shouldn't do such works, or that they couldn't work just fine in some cases. What I am trying to argue for here is how so-called political art is being received, and what the choice of content might mean to their reception and cultural mileage. This goes back to the earlier remark about putting a thing in an art space and forcing meaning onto it. We must be able to look beyond that gesture, to see what really happens when the work goes out into the world, and gets mixed up with worldliness.

USING ART

Though why wouldn't the act of providing information be enough? (ok so this is a tangent way removed from the Sinne piece already just fyi)

Can't I just accept that a move like that is a smart, cold-blooded hijacking of the medium of art for saying something more pressing? And why would I even care if someone does use art to simply disperse some intel?

I mean, I have no desire to "defend" art from anything. I also want to see our current world order up in flames, and art is, as Man Yau and Johannes Ekholm pointed out, complicit. But then I've almost never learned anything from art that that informs me. If I've been made to do so, I've forgotten all the facts on my way home, just like how my tears inflicted by the narco-optics of a Hollywood flick dry before I've managed to exit the cinema.

So I guess if you do appropriate art for something else, then you have to go all the way in, and change not just the content but the conditions of its production, and not simply commit to the tried exhibition practices, artist careers, accepting of group shows, keynotes, and awards, maybe?

In order to set the stage for a meaningful analysis, artists need to recognise similarities between their activities, so we can understand what these concepts mean, as I stated earlier. As much as more in-the-know artists like to set themselves apart from the ones they hate, I can't see any real difference between, say, Alfredo Jaar's empty slogan-heavy posturing and that of the celebrated, intellectually more "mature" artists with up-to-date vocabulary, themes, and subjects. I'm talking to myself here, as well. I want to learn to understand similarities so I can defend the making of a difference.

Just as I feel that criticising the instrumentalisation of art, most recently by Anna Tuori and Aleksis Salusjärvi(2), rings a little hollow, because using art to get things done is not the problem, at all. If you need to stop an environmental exploitation venture by a predatory company and the museum can be of help, of course you do it. Art spaces and workers are real things living in a real world, so of course it's ok to act accordingly. Instead of defending autonomy, I'd like to talk about how you can instrumentalise your practice in a meaningful way. Wouldn't it be healthier to start from the fact we are always complicit, subjective, subjected, and operating in a web of connections, dependencies, and agencies, than to try to defend some 20th century avant-garde dream of autonomy which really ever made sense if you were the heir of a rich family in Italy, driving fast cars and being high all the time?

The problem is never the media and forms in themselves. I think we should look at the institutional execution of the work, ie. how it is embedded in and entangled with its own context, from the salaries of everyone working towards making the work happen, to the affective-intellectual connections it draws, and what are the values it either consciously or unwillingly furthers. Who do you work with, who are you talking to.

I'M LOVIN' IT

Narrowing my interpretation of the work at Sinne as politically mindful but ultimately ineffective miming routine is a disservice to the work. The audio piece comes off as engaging, fun, and refreshing, when you forget this political art label bs I've gone on about here.

First of all, the play is not trying to be well made. It's overarchingly exuberant, and as asuch breaking from the tradition of "good work", something I salute. Sure, the artists are connected enough to get well-known actors &co to read the lines, and they are showing it in Sinne. More so, it's hard to imagine any Helsinki-based art institution saying no to this trio (this was, I understood, a commissioned piece by Pro Artibus, the association/foundation funding Sinne), but I'm sure that has happened and will happen too, sobecause nothing in this faux-meritocratic nightmare neoliberal art world makes sense and everyone is always going way down or up without a second's notice and everyone is paranoid of everyone else, while some of us have decided to judge anyone who dares to complain about these velocities, ultimately denying the intersectionalist power of tears.

But anyways so the work is dirty, the sound design is sometimes very tongue-in-cheek (there's a lot of eerie industrial wind-ish ambience), the acting is all over the place, the text too goes to places without worrying too much about narrative credibility or anything, really. I just needed to relax a little first and take off my usual pair of POLITICAL ART IS SO PROBLEMATIC AAAARGH glasses. It just that everything is politics already, everything is capitalised so I might as well enjoy myself experiencing this work.

MORE POLITICAL ART

OK I'll rage about political art some more now. For most parts, it feels like campaign rhetoric familiar from elections. And just like in politics, in art it is the actions that (should) count. But then, what are real actions in art? I feel my take on this is patchy, and I haven't really grasped this in any particularly deep way, but my gut feeling says art's political potential is in dealing with the politics of art itself, stealing art as a platform in its entirety for completely different means, or working along other non-art-related actors in the long-term, but isn't that pretty standard? I will leave it here to show where I am at. ++I'll try to follow up with this real actions gambit next time when I will hopefully write about a group exhibition that was on for two days as part of Feminist Forum.

So were the actions "real" in this show at Sinne? For me, the answer lies in the space: did the work gain any vitality from the context of a gallery? That's a boring question. Let's try something more suited for the times: did I feel something? If I didn't, is there something wrong with me, should I learn to feel more, or differently?

Is there any way under late capitalism to write a blog like this as a gesture of friendship, or are these things always about envy, belittling another artist, competition, or accelerating knowledge production to keep this machine called art world in motion? What does anticapitalist criticism look like? Is it an act of solidarity to take something seriously and go out your way to write about it, or is it always just careerism? What happens when I meet Man Yau or Johannes Ekholm again in Helsinki? Do they think I'm any less scared or tired than they are? Do I? Am I?

Do you? What makes you want to stand on the side of the ring reading this? What should an anticapitalist spectator do? Should we all just go back to the evasive, invisible, yet deeply political artistic practice of David Hammons, who for all their life has done the most etheral-but-super-concrete, unsellable-yet-totally-sold-out, mysterious-but-pedestrian, hobbyish-yet-professional, silly-tho-political art that I am (made) aware of (what made me know these things, what are the conditions guiding my references)? Negri & Hardt, two philosophers who have written books that you shouldn't feel like you should read them ---screw it live your life, have argued for the abandonment of institutions such as museums, so should we? Why isn't this audio work being played to audiences from car stereos at a parking lot? What do the artists want from the gallery? Or from us, the gallery goers? To wake up? To see you and your knowledge?

How is this show any different from my own show at Helsinki Art Museum's gallery, which was an exercise on entry-level conceptual art? Should we raise or lower the standards? I think, don't I, that we should all be hobbyists and stop doing any kind of art that requires support, gallery spaces, or any other compromises towards the white anti-queer hetero matrix called the normative society, in which art plays the role of the moderate joker so "everyone" can feel they're all right and nothing is too subversive, personal, or weird. I wish it would be that easy. I wish "no" was less expensive.

This I think is true: either you believe that the site of contemporary art (museums, galleries, etc) is worth fighting over, as Irene Campolmi argues, following Chantal Mouffe and sort of counter to Hardt&Negri(4), or you don't. If you don't, then working in art begins to feel overtly pointless. Then the solution is not to insert so-called political content into the art works as a means to signal that these are the real issues that are more important than aesthetics and whatever. For if you do that, it's such a nihilistic, un-beautiful act that I will leave the room, because while it's easy to point out the other, more urgent things we should work on than the politics of the exhibition space, then I as a viewer can't help but to think "then why are you here? And why did you invite us?"

In the end, this had little to do with the exhibition in the title, as often is the case. But the radio play is now in Soundcloud(5), go listen to it, I think it really is wonderful, but it took me three listens to get into it, ie. I am not busy.

0 = https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/16/16666306/taylor-swift-poptimism-2017
1 = editmedia.fi/pitkat/lainauksia-ilman-lainausmerkkeja/
2 = https://nuorivoima.fi/lue/essee/aikamme-estetiikka-kapitalistinen-realismi
4 = http://www.irenecampolmi.com/uploads/7/0/5/4/70545307/campolmi_icom.pdf
5 = https://soundcloud.com/johannes-ekholm/there-is-a-light-that-never-goes-out