ALMOST THERE: MARJA KANERVO AT AMA GALLERY

So much to disagree with, so much elbow room to disagree in: Compared to other exhibitions I've hung out in recently, Marja Kanervo's stands out for the sheer amount of fresh air.

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 It was rescinded because of the outpouring opposition from the art world that loves to keep the profound and the sacred apart.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."

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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.

THE CIRCUIT I NEED: TALVI, A CHOREOGRAPHY BY LAURA JANTUNEN

Witnessing the performance Talvi by coreographer Laura Jantunen, at Zodiak centre for contemporary dance in Helsinki, meant the (or a) world to me. Or, these are the kinds of artworks that give me that essential, life-affirming energy.

For some time in the beginning, I was not sold. I wondered if the artist had went for a monotonous movement exercise for no other reason than to get the job done. Watching the two dancers, Jantunen and Pauliina Sjöberg, doing repetitive circles as if imitating birds, or being high as kites and floating about, the always-reconstructing Westernized brain was malfunctioning: How to interpret this, what does this mean? Why do they commit to those movements? And what is this static that seems to increase in volume? And what should I make of the two monolithic objects on both sides of the Zodiak stage, not unlike the alien rectangle in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey? Why does Jantunen sport a sweatshirt with a opal side split, while Sjöberg's clothing shows the same color flashing at waistline?

In a word, I was anxious and unforgiving. I wasn't ready to take everything in. I was trying too hard to make sense. My mind was on the lookout for literal and symbolic cues. This surprised me because I've seen works by Jantunen before that traveled in similar terrain. Perhaps the formality of Zodiak got to me, or whatever fear of the day I was dealing with, like the influx of familiar faces at the lobby before the performance, causing a near panic attack.

After 15 minutes or so, as the dancers' looping movement patterns begun to fall out of sync, all these considerations faded out. Instead, I marveled the piece for its more fundamental characteristics: The relations between things. 

The monoliths reflected light beams that in turn were synced with the sound. I am assuming there was a sub-bass speaker that caused the reflective surface to vibrate and thus create light reflections around the space, but I didn't ask. After the performance was over, I had no need for additional info.

The sound increased and the light flickered. Finally, it reached its peak, and after that the space fell almost silent. The dancers continued on their looping paths, but without the hand movements. They were just walking. It's as if you're stuck on your pattern but without the content that makes you you. 

Now there was a before and after. I wouldn't blame anyone for reading this as a post-apocalyptic scenario, in which unforgiving conditions hit you with amnesia, and there's nothing left to do but to barely exist. 

The sound came back, and the dancers found their gestures anew, this time more elaborate with their heads gently swinging. What was once monotonous repetition was now re-staged and taken back with joy. The body rejoices.

But more than a forced narrative, what pulled me in was the mathematical alchemy of dynamics, equations, and energies. On this later part, the piece folded on itself, forgoing its own rules and giving birth to a singular logic. And then it all made sense to me. I took the work in and it made me understood relations between rhythm, repetition, binaries, micro and macro in a wholly new way. The work touched me on an affective level. Today, the dynamics of the world feel different due to experiencing Talvi. This is what art can do, and does best.

A friend said they were suspicious of the binary of two's: two bodies, and sound and light. I must disagree. This binary setting was simply a safe beginning from which to take off to more adventurous constellations. Also, sound and light is not a binary. They are but a one thing, which I felt was at the core of artist duo Destroyer2048's spatial design. It's all vibrations, after all. 

In the choreography of rhythms and its rules-and-non-rules, the work seemed to nod towards dance music and clubbing. There's the feeling of leaving the party at early hours of the morning while the world looks alien but extremely potent, just like your body, and that feeling can nourish your curiosity and thinking-living for days, or decades.

Art is at its most political when your understanding of what's possible in space-time mutates. The bodies that leave from an aesthetic experience with a corporeal proof of the beauty of non-binary thinking, and of worlds that defy the patriarchal one-two logic, are the kind of bodies that can bring that said logic down. This is art that gives you energy to believe in new systems of being and beings. This is science-fiction embodied.

You can reach people with words, but you can also reach them with affective dynamics. An increase in volume, a body that trips, a fabric cut to show and hide at once, a break, a descending note, the chaotic flicker of light, a multiplicity of contracts between different materials that defy causality and correlation while playing with them: Such affects are felt in the body and they reach us in the now.

For me, Talvi gave a sneak peek to art that strives to create new affective logic. What do I mean by ”affective”? I'll quote Kathleen Stewart: ”Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they're also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. They give circuits and flows the forms of a life.” (Ordinary Affects, 2007)

Could it be that art deals with inordinary kinds of affects, the ones not yet named and circulated to exhaustion? Maybe. My fellow artists, I urge to create and cherish the circuits and flows you need.

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Talvi. Concept and choreography by Laura Jantunen. Space and sound by Destroyer2048 (Ilmari Karhu & Tatu Nenonen), costume design by Hanne Jurmu, dancers: Pauliina Sjöberg, Laura Jantunen. Premiered at Zodiak, Helsinki, 22^nd of January 2019.

This black rectangle bears no relation to this text or the performance, but blog posts fare better when an image is included

ARE YOU A GOOD ARTIST?

1.

How do you know if you're a good artist? I don't mean good as in ethical or empathetic or nice, but creating good work.

How could you possibly know that? The mirror in your home presents a question mark, nothing more.

First, you want to look at what's being unsaid. Don't people tell you how they remember a work of yours from yesteryear? Haven't you received heartfelt feedback from your students? Won't your more successful colleagues ask you to collaborate? Do people talk about nice, not deep things in your presence?

Then, try not think what's being said. When you're being introduced to someone and they tell you they know you, it means you're hot shit, not that your works are good. If people write about your work without saying anything specific about the actual pieces but concentrate on your personality instead, probably you are not even doing art anymore but trading in hype. And if older artists mention you as an exciting new name, consider what they want from you, because they sure aren't interested in your craft.

If you are good-looking in a normative way, if you come from money, or if you're easy around people, you'll never truly know. A recipe for paranoia you might think. But you can't be too paranoid. Only if you're dead and there's afterlife, you might get to see if people say good things about your artistic practice in earnest. Even so, you'd be right to suspect you're being canonized only because a dead artist is a safe bet for admiration. The work might still be bad.

Kim Modig: Mapping (2017)

2.

Why do you have time to wonder if you're good or not? Don't you have work to do?

We both know this is the work. People say most of our time as artists now goes to applying for things, updating our resumé, or promoting ourselves in social media. But what about doubt? How much time does doubt take per week?

It eats your time especially if you had to fight hard to come through. You will always have more work  to do, because people see you had to break sweat to be here: No one likes visible effort outside sports so you drudge up the past labor. You put in extra hours to the the work of looking effortless.

If you're taking it easy, you probably have less work to begin with. When the day is done, you don't face the laundry pile of racism, sexism, or ableism. No one talked down at you today, misgendered you, or made you concsious of your body's unfitness to the rigid norms of this world. You never doubt if you are able to do something or not. You, as the adage of our times goes, just do it.

3.

If the axis of good or bad seems as repressing as any other dividing line, you may want to search for life outside its influence.

You become a hobbyist, performing your most convincing carnivalesque laughter at the fools who still grind away in the binary reality, begging for legitimization. When everyone else is hard at work proving their value, you do what pleases you. These things are done for the sole reason and wanting to pass the time in a pleasant way. There's no sense of getting better. Nothing goes anywhere because everywhere would be the same.

This is the small town aesthetic. Its downside is social control. Trying too hard rewards punishment. You won't be celebrated but shunned for your victories. Progression is off limits.

Music scenes often work like this, as well. One could say it's not a weakness, but a strength that makes it easier for everyone, for newcomers and veterans alike. Doing your thing is enough, as long as you're OK with unspoken rules and social norms that are reified as nonchalant clothing sense, rugged instruments, aimless songs, and, more often than not, copious amounts of alcohol.

4.

So you move to a bigger city, or look for a more competitive scene because you want the very best in the exchange of ideas. You want to take art seriously.

You meet a master who tells you they don't have any idea if what they do is good or not. The audience, or some random event like a critic defending the work to no end, will make or break the work regardless of your hopes and fears.

The master tells you about intuition and energies. Nothing else to it, they quip.

They don't need to think about good or bad because they're in a position where other people will do it for them.

In art, we like to place some people at positions where they can do exactly what they want and make other people follow their instructions to the t, because we think this is how quality gets made. When the chosen ones bore us, we give their seats to someone new, someone as audacious but who sings a different tune. The number of seats seem to never increase. It must be we like to know who is the best and who are the not good ones.

5.


Even when there are no prizes to be won or seats to fill, why do some people end up worrying if they're good artists when others don't?

If you've been encouraged all your life and told you can do everything and nice-paying opportunities have appeared from thin air, it might have never crossed your mind to question your abilities. That is the gist of privilege.

Strong self-esteem and being presented with opportunities also feed each other. You believe in yourself because people tell you so; but they say you're good because you radiate self-worth. This feedback loop gives famous people who release cookbooks, direct films, start cosmetic companies, star in everything. The doubtful recognize the good.

The people who worry about their worth will do so even at the top of the world. When doubt comes knocking, it moves in and never leaves. The only way to keep it at bay is to be around the good ones. But eventually you need to go back home.

5.

Are you a good artist? What do you think?

Books (pic by me)

WRITING ABOUT ART TODAY MEANS BEING WRITTEN ONTO

1. What to say with an exhibition?

I used to believe the following to be true: The medium of art exhibition is an ineffective way to share information to viewers.

It's true in the sense that I don't usually go into exhibition spaces in order to learn something. But these sorts of jaded rules are meaningless in reality. What is information, or learning, anyway?

Things are also curiously hard to keep apart. You deal with your breakup in doing your performance piece and the other way around. And if you're an artist who's given an exhibition space and, coincidentally, got stuff to say, why wouldn't you voice it through your exhibition?

You know it's not ideal, but nothing ever is. So many other things play out in the process. An exhibition is the outcome from the crude equation of Life divided by Conditions times Chaos. You already know from the get-go how small your influence over the end result might be.

When writing about a show, should I try to suss out the formula I mentioned above? Should I be aware of what were the conditions of production? I should, but sometimes I wonder if that isn't taking away the power of the artist to present us with the works, without needing to point toward interpretative devices lurking somewhere next to them, the institution hosting the exhibition, or the world at large?

Or is there another formula at play, one in which your need to say “I did this, not some imaginary community” derives from an equation of Privilege times Ego minus Urgency plus Charisma? OK I admit this is getting a little fuzzy.

Privilege allows you to think you're doing it all by yourself. Those least vulnerable are the ones least dependent on communities. On the other end, there are those who are too scarred by past trauma to be amongst other people again. And why would you want to rely on such a messy thing as other people if you really don't have to?

The white cube with its modernist autonomy might be problematic, but I bet many artists long to be left alone and show their work in the way they want to, independent of who they are. Another question entirely is whether or not society should support these activities of self-expression.

Being able to control your creative output and own it are crucial aspects of artistic work, especially when it's the only thing under your control, as Olivia Laing, in their book The Lonely City, makes clear when writing about the artist Henry Darger who was alone for most of adult life, creating a visual world of drawings, paintings, and text, only unearthed posthumously, in a cramped apartment with very little means.

Perhaps that's why legendary recluse artists such as David Hammons (or any of the artists presented in Martin Herbert's book “Tell Them I Said No”) refuse to open the proverbial door when fame comes knocking. It would lead into other people stepping all over your process.

2. Community and art

Rejecting all communal notions from one's practice cuts to the core of the history of Western modern and contemporary art. It is carried by the idea of autonomous works that happen in a kind of vacuum, devoid of outside world.

It's a political project, as well. Independency is Nordic welfare society at its utopian best: everyone is taken care of and given equal opportunities so no-one is dependent on their friends or families.

But then this is reality for less and less people, all the while art is becoming more and more the place where rehearsals for community-building take place. This happens partly because conservative austerity politics need a band aid (UK art institutions give a deeply unsettling example of this), but also because contemporary art practices are changing from within.

Public has become the primal form of new art, and exhibition the secondary one. The word public here acts as a placeholder for assemblies, collectives, public gatherings, non-patriarchal familial constellations and so forth.

It makes sense that the latest Helsinki-based art organization born from the ashes of Checkpoint Helsinki (which, fittingly, came into existence to oppose the building of a museum) calls itself Publics, produces mostly talks and hosts events, and seems not to be putting up exhibitions anytime soon.

Another new local enterprise, Museum of Impossible Forms, is operating on a similar vein while referring in its name to the concept of museum, which the art historian Camiel van Winkel calls the end destination for all things avant-garde.

What was once the fringe program (talks, workshops) is now the headliner. When I look around, I can see some people having not really realized this. Others are angry, even. “Why is art about the other stuff nowadays?” This is another way of saying “I''m white and feel like I can't get enough exposure.”

In addition to how petty such statements ring, it's mindless to get riled up for all the retreats and workshops & complain how art itself has been forgotten. These events are what art is today. It's not about some limp relational turn anymore, but moreso that art is now being done by people who might possess different needs from those who came before, ie. basically white privileged men. Although in most cases this change hasn't reached the highest offices of art power.

The point is obviously not to say that what all non-white artistic practices add up to is some delightful communal picnic, but that art in the West is getting a reboot. And in order to do that, you need to retreat, take stock, plan, discuss, build a strategy, gather the troops, care for others and stay warm.

The shock that well-off, liberal white people are currently channeling by accusing identity politics, which has come to mean “not white hegemonic culture”, is the direct result of feeling like outsiders in the plethora of communal activities taking over (especially the local nodes) of the art world.

It follows that no one might need the kind of formalist-modernist, theme-led exhibitions we are mostly seeing today, made by curators and artists who received a similar education in taste, class, and thinking.

3. Will anything change?

Change never comes at once. White male painters following the macho-mythical abstract expressionist credo still seem to sell just fine, and formalist exhibitions will be a thing for decades to come in some form or another, be it by artists of any identity.

And people in leading positions don't give up their power without a fight. Since old institutions are unwilling to change their practices, from hiring to bathroom policies and from curatorial thinking to their relationship with the state, new institutions will pop up, as perhaps could be said was the case with Publics and Museum of Impossible Forms.

The fruits of modernism are still edible. But if we think about the leading critical discourse, the most on-demand artists, or the most talked-about art-related books currently published, then in that realm doing exhibitions today is getting close to proclaiming you're a Cubist. The performance of professionalism today requires you organize a retreat.

In a country like Finland where considerable support for art abound, the community-building in art can result in a group of well-funded (and -meaning) artists creating images of how such an activity might look like, usually for an institution who wants to be seen as Ethical.

Art becomes a rehearsal for life, removed from any other agency than art professionals' need to seem like they're renewing themselves to suit the times. But perhaps this is needed. They are stories and we live from stories.

Many of us might feel disappointed after attending to these social art-gatherings. They are followed by another one, on a different topic, and then again another one, all the while we try to keep our own lives afloat.

We might do less modernist exhibitions, but we still have busy, precarious, and very modern lives. That's how art happens today to the people who live it: through an endless, drowning stream of deadlines and unmissable events. The difference between a retreat and a corporate team-building exercise can seem non-existent at times.

Unfortunately, art will most likely always be exploitative in some way. Artists won't be paid, producers and directors will, or vice versa. Only selected few will succeed, even if the selection criteria changes, and the many left behind should shut their traps and be happy that at least someone is finally getting that extra funding.

There's nothing so ethical and urgent that we artists couldn't turn it into blatant careerism. And you can't really be angry at that. As I said earlier, life is not ideal. Rent is rent. We do what we can, under circumstances we can't fully control. Good intentions vs. needs we can't surpass, all that.

Managing a nuanced perspective on things becomes particularly vexing when you're feeling overwhelmed by the extreme, life-destroying urgency of climate change, for example. You don't want the many shades of truth, but just the one. An artist has gone through these motions only to realize that, say, flying to biennials is bad for the environment and a grueling way to live, too. So they turn their own realization into a dictum and hold everyone up to this standard of their own making.

This is grossly self-centered, and uneven, because everyone has different reasons for doing what they do. We can't force each others as individuals to do things in a different way just because that way fits us and our abilities. Universalism and essentialism are not needed here, either.

Conducting change obviously requires listening, and a cool head. Mostly nothing about the art world caters for such qualities, which is why we have the kinds of lives we do. We are finding ourselves in a paradoxical situation: Artists are engaging in new kinds of thinking in settings that are, at their core, hostile to the idea of sustained attention. Infrastructural change in art couldn't be more urgent: the structure of doing things is in direct violation with what most of us would like to do.

What is perhaps not always understood is the magnitude of such change. Most art institutions think, in Finland at least, that they can go about their business as usual just as long as they cherry-pick a more “diverse” set of artists for their events. But you cannot include people, aggressively marginalized by the state and white patriarchy, into the inner sanctums of art and expect them to not turn around the very structures and ways of doing art. It's not only a matter of who is doing the art, but under what terms, and for what end.

This much is clear to most people working in the lower confines of the art world, where everything isn't about pleasing your donors or Ministry of Culture. But understanding something is not the same as changing it.

Kim Modig: Social Anxiety Matrix #2 (2017)

4. Whose standards?

I argue that, collectively and unconsciously, we still regard the solo exhibition, or the museum group show, or the inclusion to a big biennale, or the star guest visiting your insitution or city, to be the gold standard. The archetypes haven't changed yet. This is why we all still talk about museums and refer to them in titles and texts, although a growing number of us artists work in a way that has little connection to what happens within those walls. When will we cut the cord for good? And can you survive outside?

Everything is still in relation to the old models, or simply just made in the same way but with a different topic, which means that a way of life an exhibition tries to depict is not really meant to enter the building. Think of it like this: Exhibitions about queer art should be presented in a way that is inviting to queer life.

Consider also how European Futurism and Surrealism looked like white boys with rich parents fooling around. Art is how you live. So what would art spaces look like if their very infrastructure would reflect some other lives? What if those spaces wouldn't look like the lives of upper-class people, with designer glass at the museum café, expensive jewelry at sale in the museum shop, and the exhibitions spaces made to look immaculate? But contemporary art has never been about class revolution, but the cementing of its horizontal power structure while adding a new coat of paint on it.

Before depression hits, let us return to the question of reading a show, and to a compound issue, that of subjectivity.

5. Everything affects everything

Do I look at the artwork without any “external” explanation? And is it really a matter of either-or: Either I look at the works only, or I take into account everything else? It's not. Things bleed and stick to each other. I find it impossible to take anything apart from another thing, without at least a thread hanging between them, holding up a connection. You can try it yourself. Imagine a box with a lid and try now to remove the lid.

Is the name of the artist in the title of an exhibition the perfect example of the fact that we are still simple creatures who cannot think in fluid ways about object-subject relations and multiplicity of agencies?

Or, we can think about them, you know, pick up a Karen Barad book and quote it, but we're still seemingly far from such boundless thinking managing to change the way our world works. It's little like the situation above with exhibitions and the much-needed modes of producing and experiencing art.

Even though we know it's not the artist who, in this multi-actor sense, does a show on their own, we still insist on placing the artist's agency above anyone and anything else's. And this is why our whole thinking must change if we want to get rid of the long shadows of modernism and colonialism in art.

Is there a threshold in having an agency in something? What still counts as influencing a work of art? The line is impossible to draw. I'm thinking of Iggy Lond Malmberg and their solo performance Boner (Baltic Circle, 2014), where Malmberg said something like perhaps we perform Hamlet so often because the crown in the storage of a theater wants us to do so.

Free, individual will is getting to be a thing of the past, and perhaps this mythical freedom has been unfathomable to almost everyone except for the ones who came up with it, ie. the men in charge. So how should we begin to write about shows under this new sun of intra-agencies, where we are constantly pushing and pulling each other unknowingly, blurring the lines that used to separate me from you or from a thing?

It's not new. This stimulating yet confusing problem of multiple agencies simultaneously in play has always existed in our attempts to say something. When you try to express yourself, you end up bringing in so many other things to the forefront. Our bodies emit all kinds of data from smells to affects, and our words and actions carry infinite interpretative possibilities.

Let me return to the question of information from which this text begun. Maybe the exhibition is not at all any worse a communication platform than, for example, talking to another person. To write about an exhibition is to unearth both what I assume the show is trying to say, but also what it's saying regardless its makers' best attempts. This is the case with any human communication.

Here, we need to make a decision. It's up to you whether you want to believe the human, or the artwork, in front of you or not. If you don't, you can read them in the worst possible way. Sometimes that's healthy, sometimes violently cynical.

You could say noise is always there, surrounding the signal. The receptor can, by all means, concentrate on the noise only and deem the message meaningless, or to excavate the signal out from the static and consider its intent. Again, the noise is at times more exciting than what is being communicated, so the choice is not so clear-cut.

In informal art discourse, née bar talk, née the talk that actually molds our attitudes much more than any seminar or book can ever do, we often look for problems in something we've just experienced together. The show was horrible, the talk was sub-par, the event was pointless, the commercial galleries in our home town are all crap. This is how many of us talk (kudos to you if you ever don't!), and this is how we connect. We congregate around faults.

What is it in the structure of our art worlds that make us retort to this conscious amplification of noise and diminishing of signal? I think it's a question worth pondering. Is it the precariousness? That we're all scared for our livelihood and/or legitimization, and so we want to drag other initiatives down to level the playing field?

5. Aftermath: writing?

These, I feel, are the two main trajectories at play in art today: The fundamental change in the very forms of how art is done, experienced and presented (for whom and by who), and secondly, the revolutionary expansion of agency, which will sooner or later change our understanding of authorship and creator-mediator-spectator dynamics.

But all of this is not simply a matter of disseminating information, like I said in the beginning, but of, well, I'd like to leave that part open. I'll end with a rumination on writing.

To understand how those trajectories play out in our practices, we can think of how to write about art today. One tactic could be to think more about who is this for. If this is not for me, what am I doing here? Furthermore, if this thing here leaves me cold, why wouldn't I go somewhere warm? And yet sometimes it might prove wise to test different climates. But for one last time, all these maxims become meaningless in life, where choices are rarely binary. And sometimes there is no choice. You just are somewhere.

I could also propose we start from an understanding that being in the same space with artworks is not a one-sided affair. When entering an exhibition, you might want to ask yourself: Who is this "I" that is hanging out with the exhibition here today and what does this I do to the exhibition, and vice versa?

The chameleon once again faces the choice between a reflexive urge to fuse in with the surroundings, or a Promethean obsession to challenge your environment. You are marking the space with your energy. Is it healing, antagonizing, wobbly, or dry kind of energy?

This unbound and always changing multiplicity is who I am, and it's what an artwork with which I'm spending time, has to deal with too. And how the work conducts that dealing reverberates back to me. I am not only writing criticism about artworks: The works are writing on me.

Published subsequently in Sorbus Gallery's upcoming publication, 2019

SUOMALAISESTA KOKOUSKULTTUURISTA

This one is in Finnish, apologies to non-Finnish speakers!


Kulttuurialan yhdistyksen hallitustyöskentely Suomessa, mustavalkoisen opetusfilmin muodossa:



Kuvio menee yleensä niin että toiminnanjohtaja kertoo mitä tehdään ja hallitus hyväksyy sen sillä kukaan ei ole jaksanut perehtyä mihinkään tai ymmärrä riittävästi kokonaiskuvaa ja budjettia. Puheenjohtaja on paremmin perillä. Hallituksen muiden jäsenten tehtävä on täyttää suomalaisen yhdistyslainsäädännön muodollisuudet, kuten mielenosoittajat jotka muistuttavat kohteliaalla seisoskelullaan että meillä on täällä demokratia ja sananvapaus.



Puheenjohtaja saa palkintonsa näkyvämpänä asemana taidekentällä. Se konkretisoituu säätiöiden ja muiden rahan polttoa harrastavien tahojen ”dinner”-kutsuina. Hän voi halutessaan kirjoittaa kolumnin jossa todetaan että taide vastaa jopa kolmea prosenttia vientituontiBKT-höpömittarilukemasta ja me julkaisimmekin juuri tällaisen numeroiden ryydittämän selvityksen alastamme kuten olemme tehneet joka vuosi mutta huom! taidetta ei tietenkään saa mitata.



Aina on se yksi hallituksen jäsen joka pitää kokouksissa kärttyisiä monologeja lievästi asiaan liittyen. Hänet saadaan tyytyväiseksi muuttamalla joku sanamuoto toimintasuunnitelmaan, tiedotteeseen tai nettisivulle. Tosiasiassa hänelle voisi vain sanoa että minä näen ja kuulen sinut, se riittäisi.



Toisinaan pitää kuunnella myös yhdistyksen muita jäseniä. Jäsenpäivään käytetään 615 euroa, se menee cateringiin tai Woltille ja kolmen litran punaviinibokseihin. Jäseniä tulee paikalle neljä, yhdellä heistä on jäänyt toimistolle hanskat niin hoituu sekin samalla. Ruokaa jää yli, se annetaan tukityöllistetylle tupperware-boksissa kotiin vietäväksi. Sovitaan että pitääpä tehdä joku kiva proggis ja että palataan tähän syksymmällä, kaupungilta saisi varmaan tukea kun tämä voisi olla myös nuorille.



Jos on oikein epäkelpo hallitus, niin jäsenet ajavat kokouksissa omia projektejaan läpi ja ne toteutetaan yhdistyksen rahoilla ja toiminnanjohtajan ja muiden palkollisten työajalla. Tämä ei ole ydintoiminnan kannalta niin paheksuttavaa kun voisi luulla, onhan taideyhdistysten tehtävä joka tapauksessa puhaltaa valtiolta ja yksityisiltä tahoilta rahaa omille jäsenilleen. Mutta koska se kuulostaa pahalta, on katsottu parhaaksi kuluttaa 67% tuloista kaupungin keskustan kiinteistövuokriin ja henkilökuntaan. Ja ei saa sanoa tulo vaan varainhankinta tai avustus.



Toisinaan yhdistyksen pitkäaikaiset jäsenet eivät ole löytäneet elämälleen muuta tarkoitusta kuin yhdistyksen perustajajäsenyyden tai wanhan wiisaan roolilla ratsastamisen. Kaikki toiminnanjohtajat vihaavat sydämensä pohjasta vanhoja jäseniä jotka eivät tee mitään, mutta kertovat mitä pitäisi tehdä tai valittavat kaikesta. Heitä kuunnellaan koska toinen osapuoli saa yksipuolisesta keskustelusta rahallisen korvauksen.



Strategiatyö on sitä että keksitään mitä kivoja arvoja me edistettiinkään ja sitten niitä muotoillaan suuhun sopivaksi muutaman kokouksen ajan. Näissä kokouksissa on yleensä paremmat tarjoilut kuin tavallisesti.



Nämä arvot muuttuvat aina aikojen ja rahoittajien toiveiden mukaan. Tänäkin sunnuntaina jonkin pikkuruisen taideyhdistyksen hallitus pohtii miten sisällyttää ihmisoikeudet ja ilmastonmuutoksen vastustaminen toimintasuunnitelmaan, joka muilta osin sisältää kokeellisen sirkuksen yhden päivän festivaalin, seminaarivierailun pj:lle ja Karen Barad -lukupiirin.



Yksi asia ei ajan tuulien mukana heilu: Kaikkien yhdistysten tehtävä on lisätä oman alansa rahoitusosuutta sillä Suomi ei tulisi toimeen ilman taidemuotoa X. Siksi sovitaan tapaamisia ministeriöön ja vuosien työn jälkeen saadaan tuhat euroa lisää rahoitusta kun luvataan ministeriölle että hyppäämme mistä tahansa hulahula-vanteesta läpi kunhan vain osoitatte sormella sitä. Toisinaan joku voi miettiä että ehkä taidekentän tilanne on niin ankea koska me suostumme mihin tahansa jos joku mainitsee sanat rahoitusosuuden lisääminen mutta se on sellaista negatiivisuutta johon meillä ei yksinkertaisesti ole varaa. VOS jotain jotain.



Jos kaaokselle annetaan vähän enemmän tilaa eikä toimintasuunnitelmasta jakseta kovasti välittää, niin pitkin vuotta kehitetään kaikenlaisia hankkeita koska jollakin säätiöllä on haku auki mikroautoilua hyödyntäville hankkeille ja kyllähän me tavallaan ollaan myös mikroautoilijoiden asialla.



Sitten tulee uusi toiminnanjohtaja ja hallitus joka moralisoi aikaisempien kollegoiden töitä hovikelpoisin sanankääntein ja päättää siivota pöydän, sillä nämä mikroautohankkeet ovat tukkineet flown. Tehdään strategiatyötä. Ehkä palkataan halvin mahdollinen graafinen suunnittelija tekemään uusi ilme joka kommunikoi paremmin edistämistyötämme. Google Driveen tai Officeen tehdään kansio jossa lukee ulkopuolisen viestintäammattilaisen suosituksesta Benchmarks eikä kukaan uskalla kysyä että mitä se tarkoittikaan.



Erityisen tärkeää on että pj & tj kokoustavat ihan kaikkien mahdollisten sisaryhdistysten kanssa koska mikään ei ole niin suomalaista taidemaailmaa kuin se että samat ihmiset päättävät keskenään toistensa asioista objektiivisuutta, vertaisarviointia ja asiantuntijuutta performoiden. Kiinnostavampaa kuin taide on taiteen edistäminen ja edustaminen, siitä tulee olo että me ollaan kuulkaa ammattilaisia jotka arvonsa ansaitsevat. Silloin ei myöskään tarvitse miettiä koskettaako tämä edistämämme taide sielujamme vai ei, pakkohan sen on olla arvokasta kun sitä niin edistetään.



Jos ry-larppaus on päätetty viedä ns mestaritasolle, niin hallitus asettaa erilaisia työryhmiä. Kaikkien helpoin tapa päättää jokin asia on perustaa työryhmä tai valiokunta, joka esittelee ideansa hallitukselle joka taas haluaa kahvinousuissaan puuttua asiaan. Sitten tätä esittelyä ja selvitystä ja kommentointia voidaan jatkaa niin kauan kuin roolipeli maistuu. Useimmille se maittaa 1-2 hallituskautta sillä elämä on lopulta kovin lyhyt.



Tärkeintä on että aikuisille taiteilijoille järjestetään jokin toimistotyön ja siten normaalin elämän mieleen tuova tila johon kokoontua töiden jälkeen jotteivät he koko ajan pyörisi ylihintaisilla studioillaan miettimässä että miksi minä valitsin taidealan.



Yhdistysten keskeinen tehtävä onkin estää hallituksen jäsenten sosiaalista syrjäytymistä omasta viiteryhmästään. Aikuiset eivät voi sanoa ääneen että haluan olla ihmisten seurassa ja kaipaan hyväksyntää enkä oikein muutenkaan tiedä onko tekemisissäni mitään järkeä. Siksi on päätetty perustaa yhdistyksiä (ja työpaikkoja) jotta näistä tunteista ei koskaan tarvitsisi puhua suoraan. On aina helpompaa asettaa työryhmä kuin kysyä läheiseltään että haluaisitko viettää kanssani aikaa.

Back At The Desk, 2018, digital image

Kirjoittaja on toiminut useissa hallituksissa sekä työskennellyt toiminnanjohtajana. Hän istuu parhaillaan Teatteri- ja mediatyöntekijöiden liiton ja Suomen valo-, ääni- ja videosuunnittelijoiden hallituksissa ja pitää toisinaan kärttyisiä monologeja saadakseen huomiota.

GO DIRECT YOURSELF

Directors in theatre - why are they there?

Recently, a theatre play titled Turkka kuolee had its premiere here in Finland, surrounded by considerable hype. It's based on the writings and interviews of people who were in the orbit of one of Finland's most sadistic and notorious theatre directors. As much as I learned from listening to those stories, I found myself hoping the creators of the play would've looked into the root of the problem, which is the education offered in Theatre Academy and the ideological basis for the role of a director.

People, especially journalists, like to wonder out loud how it was possible for one person to acquire such unchecked power. It's like asking how Trump can do all those horrible things. The answer is simple: the system was designed that way. We simply trust that elected people or art school professors wouldn't take advantage of their position. Put differently, we sort of rely on luck. But to paraphrase the infamous Jenny Holzer line, abuse of power should come as no surprise. 

The laws and regulations also restrict what should and can be tolerated at any workplace. But sadly, more often than not, making theatre with a group of people is more akin to hypnosis or religious cult than a day at the office (but then, isn't all work like that?). Without dwelling too much on the theoretical or spiritual root of theatre, the need to believe takes in not only the audience of a play but its makers too. 

There's a way of talking, taking place between theatre professionals honing together an upcoming piece, that I haven't witnessed anywhere else. Every gesture, scene, object, word, is forced to carry extra meaning, which gives for an especially pompous rhetoric. 

All the stage actions and tryouts during a rehearsal can be analysed endlessly, usually to prove yourself to the director (something sound/light/set/costume/etc designers are inclined to do) who then decides whether your interpretation is correct. A great deal of belief in telepathy is needed to convey the ideas of a director into reverberant sound effects, dramatic backlight, epochal dresses, or the quivering movements of an actor. Or, if you zoom out a little, the day-to-day operations of a theatre house at large.

All of this is ideal breeding ground for sectarian autosuggestion. What follows is paranoia: am I not part of the in-group? What are the director, dramaturg, and video designer rattling on over there? What if I'm not deep enough, like my co-actor who everyone says transcends the script?

People have vastly different experiences from working in theatre, too, of course. What I'm aiming at here is some sort of generic idea that seems to always lurk in the background when people do theatre. It's the relative of the ghost that keeps appearing when paintings are hung: are these worth something? What if the painter really is talented? Am I not getting it? Is this image very deep but I'm not?

Almost all the major theatrical productions I've worked in, or rehearsals I've visited, have included shouting, belittling, and/or other behavior gone entirely unredeemed save for the "you know I'm under a lot of pressure" hail mary muttered as an afterthought during a break. This behaviour is almost solely coming from the representatives of one profession alone: directors. And usually no one wants to stand up to them. This will all be over soon, they are just having a bad day, it's nothing serious, we're all tired today, we tell ourselves.

But why do we have directors in the first place? Surely there is no god-given blueprint for how theatre must be done? Having said that, it's worthwhile to remember our theatrical tradition was founded by a society of men who favored slavery and strict hierarchies (OK I have no business lecturing anyone on Ancient Greece, so take this with a barrel of salt).

When I was studying sound design in Theatre Academy, in Helsinki, I constantly wondered why actors and designers needed someone to tell them what to do. You have the text in front of you, the stage is there, don't you wanna figure it all out on your own or with your friends?

And how is it possible that we still buy the line, often repeated by our professors in the academy, that you can't really do theatre without someone in charge? During my time (2003-2009) there were of course collectives or (a word I prefer over the former one) working groups making works without a director, but these were always dismissed in school as "experimental", "fringe", "artistic", and thus not Real Theatre.

In my decade of being an artist, I've never had the need for a director personally, as in I've never worked on a performance or whatever and thought if only there was someone here giving me stage directions and texting me in the middle of the night with notes. I haven't really seen any basis for their existence, ever. 

I used to be more nuanced about this for the sake of some sort of perceived civility, as in "of course there are many ways to do art and being led by a director is one possible way and I'm sure it's a good thing." I'm tired of saying that. I've been doing this now long enough that I can say this with at least some sort of experience: directors should for most parts be a thing of the past, or at best a marginal profession.

Everyone has ideas. Anyone can tell other people what to do. A director is validated through the labor of others. Yes, you can do beautiful things from that position: you can make other people shine and help them find their strength, you can see what's going on in the stage and where the problems in the dramaturgy might lie, you can handle all outside pressure, you can bring people together to achieve something. But we could all do that to each other. There's absolutely no need to institutionalise this role. For all its issues of abuse, ie. its dangers, the directorial model should be a marginal mode of working, not the primary one.

Here's a more black-and-white way of stating it: If you wanna help a group of actors and designers, then help, but don't take credit for it. If directors would be called assistants and paid accordingly I wouldn't have any beef -or I would, because I don't believe in that sort of hierarchical justice either, and I'm not here to punish anyone by turning competitive workplace games against them.

Don't tell me what to do

In June, I was visiting a workshop that consisted mostly of dancers. I talked about my survival strategies in art and shared my stories. We were talking about our experiences in the field when one of the participants said this thing that left a lasting impact on me. The way they said it was matter-of-fact, yet kind, and very reflective. "I don't understand why a choreographer should tell me what I must do with my body." 

There you have it. What does it say about our values, ethics, and worldview, that we have created a system in which one person (typically/historically a masculine man) tells others (typically feminine people, plus less-paid staff and technicians, latter being usually working-class men) what they should do? 

I get having someone in charge makes sense during a catastrophe or, say, surgery. There are situations where having a director for a play is appreciated, perhaps when one works with a group that benefits greatly from overall guidance, say, with children. In general, I can see it also comes useful in a factory, or a battle, too. But why have we copied this system into art, which is a fun human act that can literally be anything? 

Why settle on the most uninspiring model, even or especially so because it's the one that "drives home the results"? Why should making films or theatre be modelled after military regiment or industrial labor? 

You could say that if artists do not want to work with directors they can go and do what they want. That's cute, but the funding of stage arts here in Finland is based on established theatres getting most of the money so they can pay salaries. The financial system in arts upholds the traditional hierarchy of labor. If that's not enough, the unions will make sure this system stays intact. So really we're married with this system, and only way to bring it down is to tore it apart on all levels, from education to funding. 

Full disclosure: I am sitting on the board of Trade Union for Theatre and Media Finland, which is funny since I strongly oppose this static division of labor in arts. That being said, I'm always interested to hear other views, and one reason for my joining the board was to understand theatrical work better from inside a system that protects this division. Another reason is to be able to slide in a discussion about basic income, but that's another discussion.

Where does this anti-director hyperbole leads into? 

Of course, you can't make "Apocalypse: Now" if you don't have unchecked power and you're not on a narcissistic bent fuelled by drugs or whatnot to turn the world onto your own image. Is the world worse off without works of art that only an unhinged director can produce? 

These works are very important to a lot of other people, but take stock: do you find it impossible to think you would've loved something else if those works would have not existed? There's no need to stop loving those works, but there's also no need to repeat the formula that created these masterpieces of megalomania and resulted in abuse in so many cases. Why make art with a tool that's bound to hurt someone?

We all understand that works of art are, in a fundamental sense, of both equal and incomparable value: a short poem is not less or more meaningful than a 2-hour symphonic composition. As a society, we want to archive the big, popular, well-known works, as well as the so-called folk art that's meaningful for a given community. 

Furthermore, if we would cease to produce, for example, video art, we would do something else. Art as phenomenon wouldn't really lose or gain anything by video art's extinction. In terms of art's meaningfulness, there are no better or worse ways of making art. You can create great things by a multitude of ways that are in no way tied to any material pre-requisites.

The issues we should consider are the conditions in which artistic labor takes place. Who has access, who decides on this access, how are people or other living beings treated within a given production, just to name a few possible and very real concerns. 

These are tricky issues, because such concerns are also endemic to controlling artistic expression as a by-product of advancing much-needed workers' rights. This is precisely what unions do, even when they don't want to -by fighting for substantial pay, they end up reinforcing certain ways of working as fundamental to artistic practices. 

This leads to a situation where people are being educated in a theatre school to become actors, set designers, sound designers, directors, and so on. A production becomes something where everyone sticks to these roles and learns to speak as the representative of their profession. 

Additionally, this is why I've found it hard to defend certain core contemporary issues in art, from more funding for arts, to artists' associations' demands for more professional conditions for their members. I absolutely understand and respect these needs and have fought for them, but more and more, I see them reinforcing a hierarchical system where being an artist is a prized position instead of a fundamental right and a source of joy, and where artistic work is being kept in a petty, middle-class zone of harmless symbolic decor by placing artists in the creative class. 

But if I'd utter such things, I'd rub backs with some questionable people and political parties who are doing what they can to privatise the cultural sector and get rid of any kind of subsidies for artists. 

Directors keep on being directors

What happened with this one sadistic director in the past decades in Finland is not an exception to the rule. I've heard similar stories multiple times, and the accused of these stories are currently running city theatres, holding professorships, and acting as respected members of their artistic communities. I've heard people explain away the sexual misconducts of their actor peers as "actors simply being that way". My designer friends in theatre take constant shit in the form of slurs, shouting and now-I'm-your-friend-now-I'm-your-boss type of erratic, arbitrary behavior models when they work for directors. People who sign off are oftentimes cast either as privileged, preppy, or weak.

And it's not that you couldn't ask other people to help you in the actualisation of your artistic idea. Of course you can and quite often you should. I've worked as an assistant, stagehand, designer, co-creator, and in other such roles successfully and I've enjoyed a bunch of those experiences. 

I'm not saying, either, that a directorship is some cursed profession that turns you instantly into a monster. But how come we let this system stay afloat when it's entirely based on luck, ie. let's hope this director is nice and doesn't abuse their power? 

Afterword

Perhaps the idea of a director is tragically tied to the idea of infinite growth. We can always do bigger, greater things! More cowbell! More everything! Push it to the limit! When I think of the sickening projects I've been in where the director tried to "save" the piece by demanding we work longer days, rehearse more, do more of everything, this theory does feel right to me. 

What kind of worldview we are feeding with such a method of making art?

***

Lastly, I am sending much love to all my dear friends who are directors. I'm not against you, I just needed to say my piece. This is not a closed text, it's too full of holes for that, but a conversation starter, if anything. If you're a director and felt a sting, remember you are more than your assigned role. We all are.

Image description: the author, wearing blue pants and a shirt and sneakers, lying on the floor of an almost empty stage, with a coffee mug close to their body. From documentation shot by Christopher Hewitt. New Performance Nights, Tehdas Teatteri, Turku, 2016.