Reading Recommendation:

http://deslivresetdesphotos.blog.lemonde.fr/files/2009/11/candida5.1258016887.jpg

Candida Höfer “On Kawara. Date Paintings in Private Collections”
by Aliina Astrova

Asked to review (propose, suggest?) a book or an essay of some kind for your consideration, I am faced with a few boxes worth of academic writing that occupy the space on the floor of a flat I am about to move from. It all seems a mess; and I have no desire to pick from this pile, let alone impose any of these books in a form of a recommendation. Due to my occupation I read a lot, and there are many texts that have influenced me, but “I don’t believe everything I read anymore,” as a friend of mine put it.

The same guy once showed me a book by Candida Höfer. It was a chunky title, of a coffee table kind. Expensive production, glossy photographs, no writing besides captions. Inside, the artist famous for her photographs of public spaces—banks, offices—reprinted her extensive series of pictures taken of Japanese conceptualist On Kawara’s infamous Date Paintings (1) hung on the walls of their collectors. For a long time—at least 3 years that have passed since that day—my friend’s passionate recommendation of the book overshadowed its contents in my memory, until recently I stumbled upon the same publication in an unlikely location during my travels. The discovery caught me off guard; I have completely forgotten about the book and now it was there in front of me (“It had found me”) and I had no choice but to get it, even though I was only later to find out the importance of this object in my ever decreasing collection.

In my mind, neither of the countless essays, talks and lectures on the nature, essence, or future of painting have succeeded to express the reality of what this medium—or maybe even art in general—have come to be today as well as Höfer’s simple project. Page after page, across over 250 of them in total, lay perfect reproductions of her photographs, each one an immaculately simple shot of expensive laconic modern interior designs wrapping one of the Date Paintings; often choosing her signature classical straight-on angle with the painting taking center stage, but sometimes preferring more subtle ways, where the viewer has to look for “the object” of the photograph, if tat object actually were the Date Paintings. In fact, the object of Höfer’s pictures, or even her project, is not any one of On Kawara’s paintings in particular. Her book is simultaneously one of the most exclusive selections of interior design as well as one of the most critical presentations of painting to date—not to assume that such coincidence would be surprising. It hits you straight-on, just as Höfer’s signature shooting angle: This is what painting is. Neatly stuck onto a wall of an expensive flat, doing nothing. It is dead in a way no verbal criticism could possibly express. It is nothing, and it counts nothing but the days since its own death. AUG.12.1975; 18 JUN, 1995; JULY 6,2000; ... It is not the loud death art and its critics hoped for—the kind that exits with a bang, with a statement, ruining everything; to die for a cause, changing everything in the process; a revolution. Instead, it is a death that goes unnoticed, leaving sufficient space to pretend it never happened.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Kawara#Today_series

Voldi lahti / Unfold

Lükka kokku / Fold back

AB cubed presents: Elnara Taidre x Tanel Rander

Beyond grand and small (landscape) narratives — the mythogeography of Tanel Rander
Translated by Hendrik Koger

A work from Tanel Rander’s exhibition Decolonize This. 2012 (Courtesy of the artist)

Tanel Rander is probably best known for his constantly multiplying pseudonyms which he uses to mark the different spheres and directions of his practices and build an integrated system from these at times conflicting fragments. One can find his record in the art chronicles under the following pseudonyms and collective author names: chaneldior, chaned:or, chaneldyor, Chanel Rantie, C:, Anon Porx and many others. Nevertheless, it would be better to present him here under his citizen name, which sort of draws together different projects and related identities, even more so, because at his most recent personal exhibition (Decolonize This, 2012, Y-Gallery) he went under that name.

The current text examines Tanel Rander’s projects related to the field of visual arts, leaving aside his work in music and literature, through the concept of landscape narrative and mythology. He treats mythogeography as both a personal art method and an ideological practice, which connects the individual and collective mythopoeia as well as their criticism. Instead of deep-examining and -analysing Rander’s projects I would rather try to bring out their general substantial characteristics — all the more so because the artist himself defines his art practices through extreme existentialism among other things.

The aspiration to capture the existential was also apparent in Rander’s Master’s thesis Geneesia (2010; see http://www.artun.ee/vk/kunstMA/Tanel_Rander.pdf and http://chnldr.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post.html) which gave the main points of landscape-related base narratives and — using text and visual arts — to put into words and stage the quintessential aspect of landscape. By offering a fictitious model connecting geo-, cosmo- and anthropography and treating the individual as an island and the island as a scene, Geneesia was an attempt at creating a narrative for both the micro- and macrocosm at the same time.

The exhibition Geneesia (Genesia, 2010, EAST Gallery)

However, Rander consistently focuses rather on real landscapes, not fictitious ones — although his approach to real landscapes may often resemble fiction. Rander’s projects bring into effect the mythology of place, the legends and mythopoetic potential directly related to a place, as well as the personal myth-making “activated” by it. His personal “landscape obsessions” include Tartu and Southern Estonia, but more widely also the territory south from Estonia along the imaginary meridian. Of course, one could read into it the mythological opposition of North and South: for example, in the works of Nikolai Gogol the cold and formal Saint Petersburg is contrasted with the warm and folksy Ukraine — a similar logic is apparent in the sometimes downright mythological opposing of Tallinn and Tartu in present-day Estonia. Still, it seems that these associations are more complex in Rander’s case — he chooses to search for alternative (and equal) partners in dialogue in the East-European post-communistic space to counterbalance the quite understandable Nordic orientation of Estonia.

The conceptual excursions, expeditions (see http://emajoeksp.blogspot.com/) and other events — including the event series Tammeöö (Oak Night) — related to the topic of Tartu have been taking place for several years by now. What is important here is the effect of participation, search for the genius loci, transcending the ordinary and creating a certain dreamlike atmosphere in familiar (urban) areas, which creates a shift in the limited perception of everyday reality. Tammeöö is a project in collaboration with Erkki Luuk, with whom Rander has developed a peculiar creative synergy similar to collective authorship. While Luuk is often the author of texts and non-existent words, then Rander is a vessel for visualising and physically realising these images, bringing them to the level of the environment and performances.

Performance-installation Tammeöö (Oak Night, 2009, Tartu Culture Factory)

While creating new words helps to overcome the limitations of language, then creating new characters and worlds is a way to expand reality: noteworthy examples of this are the exhibitions Kesktalvine hnott (Midwinter Hlog) and Uriaadi lõpp (The End of Uriaat), which stage bleak artistic worlds at times with very minimalistic methods.

The exhibition Kesktalvine hnott (Midwinter Hlog, 2010, Tallinn City Gallery)

The exhibition Uriaadi lõpp (The End of Uriaat, 2010, Y-Gallery)

Artistic mythology for Rander is the means for entering a special reality and activating it as something possible in everyday reality, not remaining obscure. For this purpose he becomes a part of his own artistic mythology (or on the contrary, he makes the artistic mythology an organic part of his own life?). The dwarf costume that Rander often is wearing is in its own way an idiosyncratic narrative. In many myths dwarves are placed between the mythic time and time of historic epochs. Dwarves are strongly related to the elements they are exposed to (mountains, forest) — they are the masters of the elements. Dwarves often have the characteristics of the so-called chtonic functions — they are mostly associated with the earth and the subterranean, or underworld — caves and mines. While German folk tradition presents the dwarves as evil and dangerous, then in English folklore they are kind, can give good advice and teach humans the secrets of metalworking.

The Dwarf — Tanel Rander’s idiosyncratic narrative

Rander’s dwarf is in a way the medium between the historic (everyday) and mythic (magic) reality. By becoming the embodiment of the “master of the landscape” he is also a guide who shares the landscape experience with the viewers and offers the means to enter it as if by a secret door — the framework of the artistic mythology, which sets the context at the frontier between the usual and the unusual worlds. Storytelling has the potential of a magical act — in the traditional context the listeners of a mythological story also witness it as a true event. This expresses the power of a mythological story to bring the listeners into the mythological time-space. Rander tells his “stories” in a maximalistic way. By adding the elements of photography, video, painting, performance, music, installation art, “found” objects and landscapes to the text in the mix, he not only creates a special environment but a separate time-space.

In his works Rander touches upon grand, existential topics — among others the collective unconscious, dream symbols and other phenomena often related to mystical processes, the existence or non-existence of which is impossible to prove. One could say that his approach is the search for a third way between the modernist objective declaring of the truth and the subjective playfulness of postmodernism. Rander’s small narratives often maintain a dialogue with grand metanarratives, but the author avoids aggressively imposing them as absolute truth and rather shares them with the viewers as a possibility or a half-personal fantasy that they can still accept in earnest. The total and suggestive nature of his constructions will surely leave no-one feeling indifferent and can make people see the world in a different way, at least for a moment. This method might be described via the so-called principle of the defamiliarization, which makes it possible to break out of the pragmatic routine of everyday life by roping in a strange or irrational aspect. It is not incidental that Rander’s works have references to Joseph Beuys, who criticised the absolute rationality of the West by seeking to balance it with the irrationality of the East. In doing so, Rander is critical of Beuys’s exploitation of the East at that, preferring to bring out the immanent irrationality of a situation and/or place instead of exoticising it — which does not exclude the transcendent aspect.

Seeking the borderline state of the irrational, which may include hypnotic storytelling, musical background or a lengthy ritual procedure — performance — it is as if Rander is staging an illusion that precedes reality and which at the same time has the potential to become true reality. Although not the reality of the everyday, but the Other reality that is based on metaphysical logic and is rejected by our neo-positivistic way of thinking. At the same time we do not notice the metaphysical convictions — such as national myths and myth of the state — that seem logical and infallible in our everyday conception of the world. In turn, Rander deconstructs these convictions by drawing on the symbolic potential of landscapes and demonstrating the ideological construction of these symbols.

The exhibition Decolonize This (2012, Y-Gallery)

Rander’s newer works focus on the deconstruction of theories and practices in terms of postcolonialism. He sees the postcolonial theories as means to articulate and contextualise the mythology of geographic phenomenons. His previous gestures like the expedition into the landscape that has became marginal in the context of Estonia, and its phenomenological analysis (The expedition Käkimäe Kägu (Cuckoo of Käkimäe) in Alatskivi, 2009 dedicated to Juhan Liiv; see http://juhanliiv.blogspot.com/) have evolved into projects of explicit political study (see http://minusilmad.blogspot.com/). Decolonize This (2012), Rander’s most recent exhibition, is the author’s attempt at analysing landscape myths and offer alternative solutions by making them work for his advantage. Thus the works of Tanel Rander place themselves interestingly between de- and remythologising, somewhere beyond grand and small (landscape) narratives.


See also:
http://chnldr.blogspot.com
http://tartutrash.blogspot.com/



Elnara Taidre is an art historian and critic who works in the Art Museum of Estonia and makes a research on artistic mythologies in the Doctoral Programme of the Estonian Academy of Arts.





AB cubed is a preparatory essay series for the III Artishok Biennale where X young Baltic and Scandinavian writers have chosen for their gesture of courtesy X young Estonian artists who have caught their eye with a witty personal exhibition or an absorbing work of art in a group show in recent years. Artishok tests experimetal editorial practice and self-inititative readiness in the art field with the series, giving writers the opportunity to take the initiative - but also the responsibility - and do one chosen artist a favour. The writers do not receive honorary for their work whereas the suggested artists automatically get an invitation for participation in Artishok Biennale in the autumn. Read more...

Voldi lahti / Unfold

Lükka kokku / Fold back

AB cubed presents: Indrek Grigor x Madis Katz

An art historical file titled Madis Katz in Indrek Grigor’s archive
Translated by Kristiina Raud



Without burdening the readers with the answer to why I chose to nominate Madis Katz for the biennale in order to save space and time as well as taking into consideration the content – that would be a bit too interpretive, which I am currently trying to avoid -, I would rather like to emphasise the way the material is presented. Namely, the following is a contingent file, located in the computer and on the shelf and also partly in the memory of the author as an art historian. The file is labelled Madis Katz and it includes the material which has accumulated in different contexts during the last five years in which I have acknowledged Katz as an artist.

As the function of this submission is above all nominating the artist and in this sense also contributing to his wider acknowledgment, as I have reason to believe that many of my colleagues have perhaps followed Katz with a lesser attention than I, then I will not present an interpretive piece on the contents of my filing box; instead, I will try to give an overview as neutral as possible of what it actually contains, more so as the said content itself already includes a considerable amount of interpretations.


The first entry is Madis Katz’s master’s thesis Virtuality of Day-To-Day Existence. A detail from this photo installation was displayed at the Tartu Art Museum at The Crocodile Ate the Honey of the Bear (2007), a graduate exhibition of Tartu Art College and the department of painting at Tartu University curated by Liisa Kaljula. The exhibition was accompanied by an audio guide.


Virtuality of Day-To-Day Existence
Installation in environment
Tartu Art College, Department of Photography




2nd entry: Madis Katz’s solo exhibition The Fold – Saaremaa Beach 26 July 2008 at Y Gallery. The whole exhibition is, however, stored in my biological memory, containing the conversations before the opening as well as the technical and financial issues and also the memories of the exhibition itself. I remember the contradiction between the contents and the execution of the different levels of the exhibition. Well-executed photographs in the classical modern sense versus the concept jar as the secondary layer, critical of the over-verbalisation of the art field, which was formally simply a 3-litre jar on the window-sill, which did not have a very elegant effect, while at the same time the labels with clichés about constrainedly complicated exhibition concepts, which were the contents of the jar, left a remarkably professional impression.


The third entry, which is also stuck in my head, dates back to the summer of 2010 when the first act of the sonic event Topofon, curated by Sven Vabar, took place in Gen club. A relatively young girl was walking around in the room, wearing a long red shirt which had along its left shoulder, the back, and the front written in an even column the words ‘TÜRA TÜRA TÜRA TÜRA…’ (‘FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK...’).

A few weeks later when I accidentally met Katz in front of a shopping centre I learned that what I had seen was one of Katz’s alter ego’s, Safe-Sex Guru’s hobbies – obscene clothes. Among the Guru’s hobbies are also trophies: plaster casts of women’s breasts, which have never been exhibited. However, under the same name the artist has displayed a pair of panties at the Tartu Art House exhibition The Golden Calf (2010). Perhaps a bit better known to the wider audience are the Guru’s pornographic analogue slide sessions, which he presented at the closing party of the old building of the Estonian Academy of Arts.



4th entry:

Artist talk with Katz, organized by Tartu Community College. I only managed to record an hour of the almost two-hour event because I had forgotten to empty the memory card of my dictaphone and there was simply no more room. Missing from the end is mainly the topic concerning Safe-Sex Guru and the audience’s questions.

My questions focused on the relationship between the abstract and the figural. Katz’s answers focus on the series Sacrals, Laymen, and The Fold, probably partly initiated by me, while at the same time emphasizing that he does not usually discuss his work. It is difficult to judge if and how much the last statement is true. I have always managed to have very interesting and substantial conversations with Katz, and when looking for performers for the community college, Katz was even recommended to me as an articulate speaker. Nevertheless, I must admit, as the next entries will illustrate, that Katz often prefers to discuss the general issues of the art field.
Conceptual documentalism and institutional conceptualism are critical terms which were mentioned at the community college recording and also in the following presentation at the semiotics seminar Semiosalong and which mark Katz’s fight against the excessive verbalisation of the visual.




5th entry: Katz’s appearance at Semiosalong, titled On Science and Art as A Prussakov, is in essence a very critical view on the wall texts of exhibitions as unnecessary ballast. The opposition of the discrete verbal language to the continual visual language is repeated.









6th entry: A Self-contained Monologue or the critic in psychoanalysis vol. 2.
After his presentation at Semiosalong I invited Katz to the Tartu Art House to discuss the function of the wall text in the context of the panels descriptively documenting the past parts of Jevgeni Zolotko’s six-part work Things. First and foremost, I was defending the position that art criticism should be independent from the work of art.

Katz reaches a conclusion which describes the work as a sphere that has a continual visual side as well as a discrete verbalised side and this way the work is movable in three-dimensional space when required, actualising more or less one side or the other according to need. In regards to independent criticism we jointly reach the term ‘self-contained monologue’ which should therefore constitute one of the methods of the so-called new art criticism.





Indrek Grigor is an institutional gallerist, freelance art critic and editor in chief of the podcast Tartu möliseb.











AB cubed is a preparatory essay series for the III Artishok Biennale where X young Baltic and Scandinavian writers have chosen for their gesture of courtesy X young Estonian artists who have caught their eye with a witty personal exhibition or an absorbing work of art in a group show in recent years. Artishok tests experimetal editorial practice and self-inititative readiness in the art field with the series, giving writers the opportunity to take the initiative - but also the responsibility - and do one chosen artist a favour. The writers do not receive honorary for their work whereas the suggested artists automatically get an invitation for participation in Artishok Biennale in the autumn. Read more...

Voldi lahti / Unfold

Lükka kokku / Fold back

AB cubed presents: Margit Säde Lehni x Triin Tamm

TRIIN TAMM AND HER UNCERTAINTIES
Translated by Merli Kirsimäe, proofread by Philip Matesic

Triin Tamm Last Step First 2009 (photo Triin Tamm)

INTRODUCTION OR THE DEATH OF EFFORT

One of Triin Tamm’s first works was a clumsy lump of Blu-Tack with the words The Death of Effort (2008) stamped on it. Blu-Tack is material often used for fixing things onto walls. Its reincarnation as a work of art indicates that the artist is interested in space, where besides clumsiness (a lump of Blu-Tack moulded in hand) there is also room to play around with perfection (the stamped words), associations (the achievement to put up your works and also the failure of that effort) and incoherency (well, but really, how is it all connected after all?).

Triin Tamm (b. 1982) entered the food chain of the art world backwards, starting her career with a retrospective at OUI - Centre for Contemporary Arts, Grenoble in 2009. For the retrospective the artist brought out all the works specially made for the exhibition as well as proposals for future works, which in a way were realised in the publication that accompanied the exhibition, or rather, in its deconstructed catalogue. This, at the same time, gave the artist 192 pages in addition to the gallery space, and a chance to gather together even the most curious of her works – abracadabra performances, very-difficult-to-understand objects and sculptures, typographic exercises and unexpected pieces of advice on subjects such as “How to Mix Grey”, etc. Margus Tamm (!) writes here on the Artishok blog about Triin Tamm’s work: “the hectic photo material about “the artist’s life and work” that lacks clear connections, does not give the usual smart overlook, but does it in a different way, offering fragments of the author’s psychogeography”.1

Also while preparing the Retrospective, Tamm did not try to hide any steps or activities that she needed to take to set up the exhibition in the space, on the contrary – she wrote them on the walls as reminders to the viewers. The list included practical guidelines, some rather obvious in setting up an exhibition, such as “repaint the walls, wash the floor, bring works Tuesday afternoon”, but also a bit more playful reminders like “don’t wake up too late, fold table stabilizers, don’t wake up too early, don’t forget anything, if necessary make more works” and “send more clichés from Estonia”.2

COLLECTED WORKS OR CONTAINERS AND GENERATORS

The Retrospective catalogue represents the very important line of generators, containers in Tamm’s work. Leafing through the book, one gets tempted to take it as a nonstandard ordering catalogue, where the artist supplies the audience with all sorts of peculiar art and widespread truths about how it could be categorized. Still, the work remains immaterial enough, as do its torn covers, which in turn were converted into a conceptual donation Collected Work (2011), made especially for the EKKM (Museum of Contemporary Art of Estonia) and the exhibition Museum files I: Collected Principles. This retrospective of Retrospective covers, arranged festively in a glass case, was made out of the torn covers of 400 published books in a shrink wrapping. Marcel Broodthaers’s first work Pense-Bête (1964) comes to mind - a glass case exhibiting 44 unsold copies of his same-titled poetry book, which had all been partly cast in plaster.

In the exhibition Next to Nothing (2010) in the CAME, Tamm has taken an interest in interpreting conceptual art without knowing its exact context. Seth Siegelaub’s group exhibition in the form of a conceptual photocopy book The Xerox Book (1968) offered 7 artists a fixed number of standard A4 pages and a photocopier to work with. By standardising the conditions of work process, the curator wished to bring out the differences in each artist’s project and also as a way to better understand their work. Tamm’s idea of reenacting The Xerox Book as an audio book already seems like an absurd undertaking, but what will be left of the original work if it is “read” from scratch, like the radio newsreader Tõnu Karjatse does it? Martin Rünk finds that “by describing these visually minimal projects, he adjusts his interpretation by every page and thus nicely communicates the analysis process of a person, who has an empathic rather than a professional approach to art.”3

In the case of A Stack of Books as well as A Book of Stacks (2011) this is exactly what the artist claims it to be – stacks of books compiled of the copies of a book that gathers together different books about unusual, invented and secret languages. Robert Morris’ The Box with A Sound of its Own Making (1961) comes to mind.

Retrospective was not the last time for Tamm to do things in the wrong order. The admirable object Last Step First (2009) is much more multilayered than it might at first seem. That tiny functional model of a sauna that does not only baffle you with its beautiful interior but also its miniature working stove, made after the Grenoble artists had built a life-size working copy of the Estonian Academy of Arts’ Tamse sauna, in Muhu Island, for the OUI Art Centre.

The Carousel Collection (2011- ongoing) is a travelling exhibition, which, by drawing attention to artists’ permanent cooperation, assembles and exhibits 35mm slides donated by different cultural workers. It reminds me of Robert Filliou and George Brecht’s idea Eternal Network (1968) - a model of cooperation where there are no boundaries between the artist and the audience, because both operate in the name of a common creation. Arranging together incompatible places, things, relationships and ideas, the Carousel Collection becomes a chameleon that is a at one time a travel guide from the past, at other - illustrations of a lecture - created by multitude, but presented as a whole.4

Triin Tamm’s Archeology of Things to Come (2009 - ongoing)5 is a database of collected sayings, titles, or out-of-context thoughts that have been given the chance to materialize as titles of exhibitions or works of art. The idea promotes reusing and creating new contexts around the titles of exhibitions or artworks that are already in use, but also the opportunity to start anew. Tamm’s database of titles can be viewed both as a collection of inspiring chaotic notes as well as a never-ending story. Oblique Strategies (1975)6 by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt comes to mind. Similarly to Eno, Tamm also adds titles according to need, as if playing a kind of intellectual Solitaire in which there is no single or successful solution. It also reminds me of Raymond Queneau’s 100 000 000 000 000 poems and a line from there: “Dear reader, smile, before your lips go numb”. All of Triin Tamm’s own works and exhibitions have gotten their titles from her database – sometimes selecting more randomly and other times more carefully. For example, her recently opened solo exhibition in the never before used Antwerp Objectif Exhibitions’ basement floor was given a title that figured both in the curator’s and the artist’s preferences.

COULDN’T, WASN’T, DIDN’T OR A BIRD IN THE HAND IS WORTH TWO IN THE BUSH

Objectif Exhibitions’ curator Chris Fitzpatrick writes in the exhibition’s press release that “Wasn’t There Yesterday (2012) is a fitting title, since she wasn’t there yesterday either”. He claims that “because of scheduling conflicts Tamm couldn’t go to Antwerp herself, but regretting her absence and having a common Estonian name, Tamm arranged for another Triin Tamm (living near Antwerp) to attend the opening in her place”. Fitzpatrick also mentions that “the title is not only a practicality, but also an issue of mediation and the impossibility of professional demands”.7

Tamm tries to do just as much as is needed, sometimes even less. For example, how to draw attention to an exhibition that never took place? The workbook Incomplet Material (Rollo Press, 2010) has been published for the exhibition German, French, Spanish & Many Others… that did not happen from 27/03 - 10/04/2010 at Corner College, Zürich. The workbook contains calligraphic exercises by the students of Kopli Art School in Tallinn, on the question “What would we like to study at school?” The youngsters mostly want to study art, design and architecture. However, more often than not, the question “why?” crops up and their dreams come across rather as a collection of philosophical haikus than a possible reality. Among many others, one sincere wish stands out: “At school we should learn frying dumplings and eating them, when the stomach sufficiently empty is, like at this moment.”

Unofficially and serendipitously, the artist also expresses her views on art education at the Estonian Academy of Arts’ (the EAA) 2010 graduate exhibition at the Telliskivi complex in Tallinn. The fact is that Tamm never studied at the EAA. Nevertheless she managed to hijack a small corner among the many architects’ booths where she exhibited her graduation work Models & Constructs, aka. 2 Cool 4 School, which consisted of a T-shirt with the words “Never Again” printed on it and instructional slides on composition found in the former building of the EAA. I am reminded of the book “Models & Constructs: margin notes to a design culture” (Hyphen Press, 1990) by designer, poet and teacher Norman Potter, which, in addition to the author’s comments on thinking and making, contains also his poems. Here it would be fitting to quote in the footnotes a few lines from his performance script In:quest of Icarus.8

There is nothing fixed for Triin Tamm, her unfixed schedule gives the opportunity for potential work but also for doing nothing. For Tamm, creating art has nothing to do with deadlines, nervousness, psychological tensions or collapsing from exhaustion. Therefore, her work Naked Life ( 2009) is a series of calendar pages left blank. Tamm is intrigued by distinguishing work from non-work, the substitute and side activities. Mladen Stilinović and his work Artist at Work (1978) comes to mind. But for Tamm, such idleness does not necessarily mean not creating art, but a hypothesis that nothing needs to be produced, if the conditions are not agreeable. Which in turn reminds me of Lawrence Wiener’s Declaration of Intent (1968).9 But be aware, Tamm’s often reproducible art works do exist, often in abundance.

THE LANDSCAPES OF THE INDETERMINABLE SURROGATE ARTIST

Margus Tamm writes, “with Retrospective it is very important that Triin Tamm is the album’s artist, designer and also the publisher and by undertaking the whole production process herself, she can avoid the disruption between Retrospective’s content and format”.10 It is indeed true that Tamm (Triin that is, although, who knows, maybe Margus as well) has adapted most of the roles available in the art world. Besides her involvement in different art projects, manoeuvres and minimal interventions, her practice also includes project management, publishing and with the recent Carousel Collection she has also taken on the roles of curator and collector. As Tamm can’t be everywhere at once, she is rarely alone in her work. Mirroring norms and standards, she borrows something from everyone, including herself.

So what exactly is the case with the uncertainty that Triin Tamm generates? In logics or mathematics, uncertainty is an answer to a question for which the exact answer cannot be found. Curator Stéphane Sauzedde points out, in the introduction to Retrospective, that “although Triin Tamm was born in the end of 20th century and is from Eastern Europe, she does not seem to have any primary residence, neither to belong to any scene.”11 The uncertainty associated with Tamm is what makes her practice, in the context of creative industries, so appealing. This ambiguity has a presence and at times is self-reflective, contemplative, reticent, gestural, collaborative, multi-layered – or something in between – she chooses not to say. This reminds me of an interview with the American writer David Foster Wallace where he responds to the idea of whether his work is rather “Realism” or “Metafiction”, by claiming it’s not really one or other, or both, but rather “if anything, it’s meta-the-difference-between-the-two.”12


Margit Säde Lehni is a freelance curator.











AB cubed is a preparatory essay series for the III Artishok Biennale where X young Baltic and Scandinavian writers have chosen for their gesture of courtesy X young Estonian artists who have caught their eye with a witty personal exhibition or an absorbing work of art in a group show in recent years. Artishok tests experimetal editorial practice and self-inititative readiness in the art field with the series, giving writers the opportunity to take the initiative - but also the responsibility - and do one chosen artist a favour. The writers do not receive honorary for their work whereas the suggested artists automatically get an invitation for participation in Artishok Biennale in the autumn. Read more...


1 http://artishok.blogspot.com/2010/02/25-kauneimat-eesti-raamatut-2009.html
2 cliché – a plate of relief printing
3 http://www.sirp.ee/index.php option=com_content&view=article&id=11035:koik-on-nii-nagu-enne-aga-miski-pole-enam-endine-&catid=6:kunst&Itemid=10&issue=3307
4 Chris Fitzpatrick, in conversation with, 2012
5 http://archeologyofthingstocome.blogspot.com/
6 http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
7 http://www.objectif-exhibitions.org/
8 ....
My boy, I think it’s time you learnt to fly.
Another lesson: how to survive, to live, and
be like me, a wise old bird. My secret? - work;
to learn the labyrinthine code; then play, my
son, to break it. And no short cuts in learning.
You see those feathers by your feet? - yes them

that you-know-who has dined on. Come on -
So what, you say. A mixed up kid? - too bad.
- developed late, and that.

And did I learn?
...
9 1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece need not be built.
10 http://artishok.blogspot.com/2010/02/25-kauneimat-eesti-raamatut-2009.html
11 http://www.e-artnow.org/announcement-archive/archive/2009/9/article/ACTION/2420/
12 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all

Voldi lahti / Unfold

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AB cubed presents: Saara Hacklin x Anu Vahtra

On photography and the city: Anu Vahtra's invasive, transient images 
Proofread by Merli Kirsimäe and Barbara Sheard

Anu Vahtra Dimensions Variable, 2009 (source: website of Anu Vahtra)

French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes in his essay Trafic/Déclic (2004) how the city and photography belong to each other. For Nancy, there is the concrete reference to early photographic experiments made in the city – think of the studio window view of the cityscape – , but besides this, their common ground has to do with time. Nancy underlines the transient nature of photography that is able to catch only glimpses, presenting a suspension, immobilizing the absence, retrieving the presence. The city, on the other hand is connected to the voyage. It offers a moment of rest for the voyager, for the one that does not stay. Indeed, what photography and cities have in common is, according to Nancy, that they both are systems for capturing the passage.

Anu Vahtra (b. 1982) is a young Estonian artist who has studied photography in the Estonian Academy of Arts, spent a term in Konsthøgskolen in Bergen, and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her work deals with photography without being restricted by it. In fact, it might seem that Vahtra's works are as much about the destroying of the images (see Dimensions Variable, 2009), or they may approach questions of performance (such as in Stage 1, 2011), sculpt the space itself (like in Homage to Gordon Matta-Clark, 2009) and thus push the photography aside.

There is one pervading feature in Vahtra's working methods that catches the attention. Her work – often using photography – has a strong site-specific nature, as the artist takes as her point of departure the existing space. This does not mean, however, that she would follow a certain pattern. For instance, Untitled (A line has two sides aka any of the twenty-four triangles), 2011 pervades the city: in a video projection on a wall of a white building Vahtra projects series of black and white images of the place, which at the same time blurs the difference between the image and the city, but also highlights aspects from the surroundings that are unnoticed in the everyday perception, suggesting another kind of experience of the space.

Vahtra's installations – of which we can get a glimpse in the photograph Dimensions variable, 2009 (25 x 20 cm) – consist of black and white images underlining the transient nature of photography. She makes use of low-tech techniques such as xeroxing to create wallpaper size, 1:1 scale installations that reflect the surrounding space. As a result, the spectator's everyday perception of space is mixed with another interpretation, where reality is filtered through or blended in with a black and white image. Paradoxically, by choosing a low-tech method and black and white image Vahtra both plays with a certain feeling of authenticity – think of the tradition of documentary photography – as well as underlines the alienation from the reality. All in all, the experience of the space is in many ways transient: the work is site-specific and will be destroyed afterwards, the image that is the origin of that altered experience of space will vanish.

There are also occasions when the artist has planned to work with a specific space, but has been denied access to that place. In Access by permission only, 2010 the spectator encounters a stack of off-set posters. Vahtra's plan to work with the rooftop of Tallinn Art Hall (Kunstihoone) was blocked by the bureaucracy and she never gained the required permission to access the roof. In the poster you can see a bird’s-eye view of the Art Hall, pictured from the rooftop on the other side of the Freedom Square. The space that Vahtra had in mind has been, however, removed from the spectator's reach: instead of a rooftop, the poster has a hole. Paradoxically, one could think the hole is at the same time omitted from view, as well as an opening to another world...

The themes of Vahtra's work are familiar from the history of visual arts. The questions of mimesis and trompe l'œil are both present in her works, although it seems that the intent to deceive is here replaced by an invitation for the spectator to heighten momentarily his or her sense of experiencing the environment. In many ways I cannot help but think about Nancy's rather bold suggestion of city and photography belonging together. Vahtra's way of using photography underlines the transient nature of both the medium and the city: what was once there cannot be reached anymore. What is at stake in her work is the setting up of suspension.

Saara Hacklin has recently defended her PhD thesis Divergencies of Perception. The Possibilities of Merleau-Pontian Phenomenology in Analyses of Contemporary Art at the University of Helsinki. Besides research, she has also worked as a curator and has written about art for different publications, such as Mustekala.info web journal.





AB cubed is a preparatory essay series for the III Artishok Biennale where X young Baltic and Scandinavian writers have chosen for their gesture of courtesy X young Estonian artists who have caught their eye with a witty personal exhibition or an absorbing work of art in a group show in recent years. Artishok tests experimetal editorial practice and self-inititative readiness in the art field with the series, giving writers the opportunity to take the initiative - but also the responsibility - and do one chosen artist a favour. The writers do not receive honorary for their work whereas the suggested artists automatically get an invitation for participation in Artishok Biennale in the autumn. Read more...

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AB cubed presents: Tõnis Saadoja x Paco Ulman

Games between buildings, words, and clouds — a short review of Paco Ulman`s photography
Translated by Hendrik Koger

Paco Ulman Untitled (Photo from Paco Ulman)

In the spring of 2009, one could visit the concurrent exhibitions of artists Jaanus Samma and Paco Ulman — In the Park and In Tallinn respectively — in the Draakoni gallery and in the Hobusepea gallery. "Pleasantly autistic exhibitions both of them", somebody said, "Samma's not so much." Jaanus Samma's self-portraits displaying a boy wandering in the Palais-Royal gardens with a toy cannon serve as a young man's sullen commentary on a beautiful but dogmatic tradition: "I would like to blow it to pieces, because I could never be as dignified or as true." On the other hand, the portraits acted as an attempt by the artist to melt one's feeling of human powerlessness into the fixed historical park environment.

When Jaanus Samma was more or less visibly hesitant to relate to the authoritarian cultural contexts — evident in the use of symbols like the french park, cannon, and order —, then Paco Ulman's dialogue with the local urban space did not draw on any conventional symbols.

However, Ulman's exhibition did include the first1 attempt by curator Andreas Trossek to develop a clearly literary angle alongside the artist's earlier works — filling the otherwise empty cityscapes with people by means of simple contrasting in order to see "how would certain districts in Tallinn react if struck by a localised anomaly of a sudden "human flood", an abnormally dense concentration of human bodies?"2 The already mentioned attempt at conceptual development remained merely illustrative, because the absence of people in earlier pictures was not the main reason why the meaning behind Ulman's photos was difficult to put into words. The attempt to use simple contrasting in order to find a polar explanation for the previous works (thereby preserving the artist's own reception of his work) did not turn out to be visually cogent.

The exhibition, divided into sides A and B, was at its most convincing in the B side downstairs that displayed Ulman's earlier, more difficult, but visually concentrated work, which had surely found its way to the gallery by a path more rough and subjective than the clarity of the series upstairs. The fragmentation of the photographs and the integration of single photos into the whole on the basis of gentler qualities like composition, use of colour and light all spoke in favour of the gallery downstairs. Add to that a subjective choice of object and a distinct mood contributed to by different types of weather in the photographs. Ulman admits that suitable atmosphere is decisive at the moment of taking the shoot.3

As opposed to the preferences of the journalistic viewpoint in the case of similar shots, Ulman is not ideological or critical when analysing the surrounding environment. Nor are his photographs illustrative, because it would be very difficult to say what is it exactly that they illustrate. Topical social commentaries appear in Ulman's photographs only as secondary allusions. The 2009 North Tallinn photo series could not be used in a conference where the development of the city district, detailed plan, or environmental designing according to the needs of the people would be discussed. The trucks in the Tallinn Passenger Port car park do not speak volumes of transit business, nor does the interior of the passenger ferries (as depicted in Tallinn-Helsinki-Stockholm, 2011) speak volumes of the movement of workforce between Estonia and Finland.

Ulman states his inability to articulate his own photographs by saying that in order to apprehend the creative impulse, one has to forget about everything external, and think about nothing. He feels that later definitions, however, are too generalising. Ulman has also said that the context of the photograph ends with the edges of the picture.4 Ulman's practice can be considered successful as being an intuitive dialogue, because his carefully composed photographs of the garden cities, wastelands and dark corners of Tallinn have no definite framework even in the minds of locals. What is striking is not the recognition of specific locations5, but the way Ulman depicts a certain environment. Ulman is without a doubt one of those photographers who is envied because of their ability to simply notice and push the trigger button to extract the most important from the current space-time.

He describes the way one photograph (in this case The Tiigiveski Park, 2008) came to be:

"I always feel like a Martian when I find something like this". I have discovered the order and logical sequence of things here. In the case of this scene I knew it from afar that I could make something out of it. It was a good day, because the light was very peculiar. The weather was humid and warm — the one that usually precedes a thunderstorm. The sky was layered with clouds with sunlight gleaming through them, and the shadows were soft and barely visible. It was warm and bright out in the open, but comfy, dark, and cool in the Tiigiveski Park. The car park was large enough that the light could fall only on the cars, leaving everything else in the shade. I was faced with an interesting dilemma while framing — how to interpret this line of cars; is it a bunch of objects, a single whole object, or a single object and its copies? Is the original somewhere among them? It was important not to make a choice between them, but to find a frame that makes all interpretations possible. I took about ten pictures from different distances and sides. It took a while to get the "right" framing and angle."6

For example, Ulman's photographs of urban scenes make one wonder what the number of overlook views is that architects have planned on while designing buildings in real environment between greenery and other buildings. Ulman, who has a degree in architecture, can find the angles he needs, but have they really been consciously constructed by someone beforehand? It is more likely that the formation of sizes and proportions in an urban area is such a changing and an uncontrollable process that one could never see the constant development and quiet transformation of the environment, as well as the stir of everyday life around it, when designing a building. The bulk of Ulman's photographs are taken in spontaneous extreme situations multifaceted in relation to time and meaning, where the emphasis in the picture has no connection to the origin of what it depicts. What is captured in the frame attains features that differentiate it from its original meaning. There are causal explanations behind sofas that have been put somewhere high and close to the ceiling in commission shops, cardboard boxes lying around on a stadium, white vans lined up near the edge of a park, or a building covered in film, but the way Ulman explains the situation deliberately avoids logical allusions. Noticing randomness as well as the details that are usually missed, and getting the whole into frame figuratively is what best describes Ulman's approach.

Ulman is interested in individual moments, not the wider context. For example, the deserted leisure areas on board of a passenger ship strike as being all the more odd in Ulman's works because the artist has depicted them in fragments rather than in a panorama. Ulman’s approach makes the interior acquire the status of a material beyond its original function and meaning. Ulman's works have repeatedly shown that the artist's paragon is indeed fantasy, a touch of the unreal within the real world.7 That is the reason why even an ordinary passenger ship seems to be like a space station from a historical science fiction film in his photographs. A U-shaped snowy form in shallow coastal water is even more cryptic in its meaning. All the more so that Ulman has not since seen the described object in that same spot any more.

Whether Ulman's oeuvre is more humorous, unreal, or vice versa probably depends on the beholder. If forklifts behind a plank fence that has excavators painted on it, have a comical effect, then the huge piles of logs around a moving loaded timber truck — the size of which, compared with the former, is like that of a toy — is rather cosmic. The unattainable mystery of the world of toys is amplified in Ulman's work, because, despite the fact that everything depicted really happened, the frames manipulating with the size of things primarily denote parallelism, not congruity, staging rather than documentation.

The trademark fog in Ulman's photographs of urban spaces acquires a milieu of staging in his Untitled photo series of 2010. The comic book of the same title (2009) depicts a block of flats dissolving into clouds hanging over a patch of land where there used to be a city. In addition to digital illustration, Ulman stages a situation in reality as well, but on an opposite scale — he adds white puffs of steam to an interior space under construction in his photographs. The staging, which in the case of the photographs depicting overcrowded cityscapes came on as being somewhat clumsy, is delicately refined in the form of steam clouds enclosed in an interior space. Why it succeeded may be because Ulman chose a more controllable situation over random movements. Taking pictures of individual human figures as separate photographs within the same frame and and fusing them into a single photo during retouching had to proceed from the trajectory of people in the streets. However, the artificially generated cloud of steam was probably a lot more static and flexible of a partner to help Ulman find the right frame. The artist managed to use tangible means to create a situation that does not differ from his ability to randomly notice things in an uncontrollable outside space in any way. The result is a vacuum or autonomy of meaning which synchronizes the categories of documentation and staging, as well as illusion and reality. This is a play that helps to cleanse the overloaded areas of the mind, or, on the contrary, to load the underutilized areas; a play as means to find freedom in the rationality of everyday awareness.

The idea of seeing Ulman's works as a play finds a historic precedent in the happenings of young architects in wastelands near the city in early 1970s.8 One is familiar with gestural abstraction which was used back then to clear out the semantic fields that were in visual synchronization with the location were the play took place mainly through the photographs of Jüri Okas. Out of the contemporary urban photographers, the work of Paco Ulman is on the same level with Okas in the field of subject matter, the way he depicts environments (wastelands, seashores, industrial buildings), and the the way he frames his photographs. The social aspects behind buildings and environments today are different than they were forty years ago, yet the works of Okas and Ulman follow a similar logic. The topographic view, which treats the (three-dimensional) frame as a plane of ordered dimensions, is characteristic of both of them. While Okas approaches the object almost exclusively in frontal view, Ulman is more multifaceted and his frames are more clearly defined. Nevertheless, Ulman's work could be seen as a continuation of the The Concise Dictionary of Modern Architecture by Okas, because the same logic runs through both Ulman's frames and Okas's survey of the anomalies in architecture. The similarity between the two authors rests on the angle they use to depict combinations of architectural aspects. Taking a step to the left or right would already change the meaning of the picture.

If aesthetics is described via adjectives, then the articulation of the text, as well as the comparisons and connections within, are achieved by means of conjunctions. Pictures of a beach during winter, foggy car parks, wastelands, and clouds, forgotten or obscure combinations in Ulman's photographs are the conjunctions of a bigger text the artist extracts from everyday reality and delivers to us in chapters. After a while, every text becomes monotonous and incoherent when there are no conjunctions. However, when only conjunctions are stressed then the inferences before and after become important. In one of Ulman's photographs of a pivoting joint of a trolleybus (from the debut exhibition The Links of the City, 2008) where the front and the rear of the bus exceed both sides of the frame, it is unclear which is the front or back side of the vehicle. Ulman only reveals the connecting link; the meanings attached to it are for us to figure out. Ulman does not give us the whole picture, but stresses conjunctions here and there while photographing, thereby advising us to look over the important things and understandings in our own big pictures. Out of the conjunctions and, nor, or, but, however, (in order) to, if, when, because, until, although, like, as if, Ulman most often points out the last two.


Tõnis Saadoja is a freelance artist living and working in Tallinn.










AB cubed is a preparatory essay series for the III Artishok Biennale where X young Baltic and Scandinavian writers have chosen for their gesture of courtesy X young Estonian artists who have caught their eye with a witty personal exhibition or an absorbing work of art in a group show in recent years. Artishok tests experimetal editorial practice and self-inititative readiness in the art field with the series, giving writers the opportunity to take the initiative - but also the responsibility - and do one chosen artist a favour. The writers do not receive honorary for their work whereas the suggested artists automatically get an invitation for participation in Artishok Biennale in the autumn. Read more...


1 Andreas Trossek has acted as a curator of Ulman's first two exhibitions The Links of the City (In the former House of Designers in Tallinn, 2008) and The Links of The City (In the gallery of the Estonian Academy of Arts, 2008), taking part in selection of the works to be displayed, and not in their creation.
2 Andreas Trossek, quote from the press release of the exhibition In Tallinn.
3 From a conversation with the artist.
4 Ibid.
5 Ulman does not consider it necessary to find specific titles for his urban photographs, instead he adds the name of the district or the place where the picture was taken to photographs with a poetic flavour. Kitseküla, Mustjõe, Pirita, Suur-Sõjamäe.
5 From a conversation with the artist.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Mari Laanemets „Pilk sotsialistliku linna tühermaadele ja tagahoovidesse: happening’ id, mängud ja jalutuskäigud Tallinnas 1970. aastatel“ - Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi 2005/4 (14).

Voldi lahti / Unfold

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AB cubed presents: Gregor Taul x Art Allmägi

Some paragraphs on Art Allmägi and young Estonian sculpture
Translated by Merli Kirsimäe

Art Allmägi I Had a Dream Last Night (photo by Gregor Taul)

1

The artist I have chosen for reviewing is Art Allmägi (b. 1983), because he, along with Edith Karlson, Jass Kaselaan and Jevgeni Zolotko, is one of the few young Estonian sculptors who seems to have the objective to create his art for galleries – a more delicate and milder direction compared to creating permanent works of art meant for the public space. Art Allmägi comes from the parish of Lohusuu (reputedly the area that has the greatest density of sculptors in Estonia), at first he studied to become a blacksmith-stonemason at the Vana-Vigala Technical and Service School, then went on to study sculpture at Tartu Art College (TAC) after which he obtained a Master’s degree from the Department of Installation and Sculpture at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EAA). In January 2012 his first solo exhibition I Had a Dream Last Night… opened in Hobusepea Gallery in Tallinn.

2

There is an awkward 6-year gap yawning in the young Estonian sculpture, on one side of which stand the artists born in the first half of the seventies: Indrek Köster and Taavi Talve (known as Johnson and Johnson) (both b. 1970), Neeme Külm (b. 1974) and Kirke Kangro (b. 1975), and on the other side there are Jass Kaselaan (b. 1981), Edith Karlson (b. 1983) and Jevgeni Zolotko (b. 1983) (1). While the first group started their careers as artists at the beginning and middle of the 2000s, then when we get to the beginning of the 2010s, it’s the new generation’s turn to shine. It is worth mentioning that while in photography, painting, art criticism and also in poetry and dance, the centre stage has been taken by the new twenty-somethings, then the newcomers trying to make their way in sculpture have recently turned or will soon be thirty. Of course sculptors do have exhibitions also when they are younger, but the typically time-, energy- and material-consuming art of sculpture only gets those with a strong will staying true to it. The author of this review sure hopes that Estonian sculpture manages to get rid of this stereotype of the ‘scary challenge’.

3

Zolotko, Kaselaan and Karlson all had their exhibition debuts in 2009. Jevgeni Zolotko, a TAC sculpture graduate, had his first exhibitions in the Central Estonian Art Gallery pArt and in Vaal Gallery. In 2010 he successfully took part in the Artishok Biennale and in 2011 he managed to beat off strong competition and won the Köler Prize presented by the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia. Jass Kaselaan, who has a Bachelor’s degree from TAC and a Master’s from the EAA, is known for his large-scale spatial installations in Tallinn City Gallery and Tartu Art House. In 2011 he was awarded the Anton Starkopf Prize for sculpture. Edith Karlson, graduate of the EAA was presented with the EAA Young Artist’s Prize in 2006. In January 2012 her solo exhibition opened in Sur la Montagne Gallery in Berlin.

4

In addition to that trio there are other artists also worth mentioning: Eike Eplik (b. 1982), who also first studied at TAC and then did her MA in the EAA in 2010. Eplik’s first solo exhibition opened in the summer of 2011 in Y Gallery, Tartu (2). In this year’s spring, Maigi Magnus (3), whose portfolio so far promises exciting art to come, will defend her Master’s thesis in the EAA Department of Installation and Sculpture.

During the last three years a grouping called SUHE (4) which is formed of sculpture students of the EAA (Sigrid Uibopuu, Ulla Juske, Hanna Piksarv, Eva Järv), has also been very active. Its members have held wonderful feasts of sculpture in Raja Gallery and at the Tallinn Art Student Expo (TASE) festival and these exhibitions have been almost textbook examples of relational aesthetics. The members of this group are also working as individual artists, Ulla Juske (b. 1986) (5) lives and works in Dublin where she will open her first solo exhibition this spring, Hanna Piksarv (b. 1989) (6) has taken part in many group exhibitions and in June 2011 took part in the festival of construction foam sculptures in Tallinn Old Town.

5

At this point let us compare a little the sculpture studies in Tartu and Tallinn. In TAC the students, instructed by Jaan Luik (before Jaan Luik, Mati Karmin was the instructor), are mostly taught to become skilled craftsmen. Great attention is paid to completing practical assignments, i.e. they work on objects made of marble, granite, dolomite, wood, plastic or some other materials. Although work is carried out on different materials at the EAA as well, the main emphasis there is on the artist’s own work and its critical conceptualisation.

TAC is almost like a separate little microcosm into which students disappear in the mornings and are let out again in the evenings. This kind of persistent emphasis on manual study results in young craftsmen rather than artists. This tendency towards craftsmanship is also contributed to by the fact that courses on art history at TAC serve to reinforce what has already been learnt at secondary school – during the four years of studying, students are dragged through Egyptian, Ancient Greek, mediaeval, etc. art, and then, if you are lucky, you just might get as far as pop art. (However, specialised art history covers also contemporary art practices of the chosen subject). Then the school is over and the world has to welcome young graduates who have grown to see contemporary art with certain preconceptions, if not hostility. (This dreadful situation has hopefully started to change thanks to the founding of Gallery Noorus and to the addition of young instructors.)

In the Department of Installation and Sculpture as in other departments of fine arts at the EAA on the other hand, people have been moving on the course of contemporary art for quite some time already. The recent renaming of the department (Department of Sculpture became Department of Installation and Sculpture) was also rather long overdue and essential if only to justify the existence of a department that has not given us a sculptor-monumentalist in a long while.

Indeed, it seems that the best solution for young sculptors is to first acquire the necessary manual skills from TAC and then move on to obtain a critical approach from the EAA.

6

Young sculptors do not usually create monumental art under their own names. If they create it at all, then by helping older colleagues in order to earn a little. In a way the explanation is obvious – there is no demand for sculptures, (memorial) monuments, fountains, etc. in the public space, therefore also no competitions. Fortunately, none of our young sculptors has decided to follow Tauno Kangro’s lead to almost forcibly thrust their works upon others. On the other hand, it is a pity that young sculptors do not make use of the full potential of their specialty’s core, which is the sculptural structuring and interpreting of a space. The author of this review finds that young sculptors in particular could be the vanguard of installations and actions, interventions in city spaces. Instead they remain toothless onlookers in the safe distance, they are ‘ten-toothed agents of decadence’ as the surrealist Ilmar Laaban described Rroosi Selaviste (or Rrose Sélavy).

As significant exceptions, we must first mention the 2010 sculpture symposium “Lühiajaline. Suuremõõtmeline” (Short-term. Large-scale), curated by Jevgeni Zolotko in Raadi, Tartu – the art created demonstrated how large-scale sculptures, or ‘poor monuments’ can also decay over a period of time. Also in 2010, Edith Karlson, as part of her exhibition “Tsirkus” (Circus), smuggled a figure of a rhinoceros on the back of Tauno Kangro’s sculpture “Korstnapühkija” (Chimney-Sweep). In relation to monumental art, Karlson, along with professors Jaak Soans and Jüri Ojaver, took part in the exhibition “Etteütleja” (Sufleur), where representatives of three generations dissected the topic of popular demand for public sculptures and monuments. Jass Kaselaan, Edith Karlson, Hanna Piksarv and Maigi Magnus took part in the exhibition of construction foam sculptures as part of Tallinn Treff Festival in 2011 (7).

7

If we want to say something about some general tendencies then Karlson, Kaselaan and Eplik all tend to create their sculptures out of some kind of plastic. The sculptors’ distinctive style is usually determined by the extent to which, if at all, the author decides to process, smooth, dye, etc. the work’s surface.

8

Art Allmägi. Similarly to other holders of a TAC BA degree, he also decided to do his MA at the EAA. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions (8) and recently had his first solo exhibition in Hobusepea Gallery. During the last five years, Allmägi has made his living helping professional sculptors. Thus, the artists who have benefited from his help include Simson from Seaküla with his Tallinn pigeons, Kristina Norman with her Golden Soldier and Mati Karmin with his marble statue of the poet Marie Under.

The author of this review first noticed Art Allmägi during the exhibition “Raske samm” (Scary Challenge), curated by Jüri Ojaver, which took place on the second floor of Postimaja in the autumn of 2009. It was a very big exhibition with 24 participants, therefore it was easy to get left unnoticed, which indeed happened to many. However, very good works, such as Allmägi’s group of sculptures, which had its references to Oleg Kulik, Simson from Seaküla and Hannes Starkopf, got well-deserved attention and were real treats for the eye. Indeed, his works were absolutely wonderful, but as they will soon be exhibited again in Tartu Art House, I will not spoil it for you. I promise to write about these works once the exhibition has opened!

9

Art Allmägi’s exhibition, which was also a further development of his Master’s project, in Hobusepea Gallery has been written about by Signe-Fideelia Roots (8) - written about well, in a summarising, supporting way. Since all in all I agree with what has been said in that article, I have decided not to write a separate article about his exhibition and will instead reproduce our conversation which might be of help when wanting to understand Allmägi’s exhibition and keep an eye on his future works.

Gregor Taul: First of all, can you please tell me a little bit about the materials that you primarily use in your work?
Art Allmägi: Simply put, they’re just plastics – polyester resin and polystyrene foam. They can both, of course, be worked on quickly and are also cheap. And lasting as well, as long as you don’t leave the sculptures in direct sunlight for too long. I make the sculptures out of polystyrene foam and then cover with polyester resin which is better to process. Jass Kaselaan, on the other hand, leaves the surfaces of his sculptures uneven, he is after a more rustic outcome. Time-wise, plastic of course makes my work significantly easier, but it took me 40 hours to create the necessary rough texture of the blue bear…

G. T.: Tell me about your schools, please.

A. A.: First I studied at TAC. Studying is a lot more rigid there than at the EAA. It’s very much like having a nine-to-five job. But you will get a good technical skills’ foundation. For which you must of course also find time to study. I spent most of my time in the school.

G. T.: How do you work, are you in the studio day in, day out, constantly working on something?

A. A.: No, that’s not me. I am more of a project-based worker. I try to find times that would suit me and the galleries, and then I write the projects and if I get the times, start working towards these deadlines.

G. T.: Do you write exhibition applications to galleries abroad as well or only Estonia?

A. A.: Ha-ha… I’m a ‘small-scale’ person, so at least for now, it is Estonia only. But you never know, maybe sometime in the future.

G. T.: What is your relationship with monumental art?

A. A.: Monumental art… Absolutely no relation. I think and work focused on galleries. I don’t wish to say anything about the public space. I choose to say nothing about the Tauno Kangro matter as well. Since I do not work in or for the public space, then I don’t feel I have a say in the matter. If I wanted to say something, I’d have to do so with my art as well.

G. T.: That reminds me, when I asked this from your course mate Jevgeni Zolotko, he said that Tartu is so full of sculptures that if he ever wanted to do something for the public space in Tartu, then maybe for Annelinn where there is almost no public art at all… But coming back to the schools, why did you decide to do your MA at the EAA?

A. A.: Actually I didn’t see that there were any other options. Several friends had already done the same – Jass Kaselaan, Eike Eplik, Berit Talpsepp – it seemed and seems that it’s worth it. I came to the EAA to search for what was missing at TAC. The EAA is a lot more bohemian compared to TAC. Yes, there are general lectures in the main building, but outside – wander about and see for yourself how you manage to get your things done. Because, let’s be honest, they have problems getting the students to attend at the Raja street sculpture building…

G. T.: Let’s talk about your exhibitions now. The essence?

A. A.: Oh… difficult, very difficult to answer. There are lots of little bits, I should explain them piece by piece. For me, this exhibition is primarily a text. A sculptural storybook.

G. T.: The works that featured in the Postimaja exhibition were rather vulgar. And I suppose an ‘average’ person would probably also have used the word ‘rude’ for your exhibition in Hobusepea Gallery.

A. A.: Hmm… I would like to approach the answer by saying that one has to fight and compete for the viewer’s attention. Especially in a group exhibition. If we look at things from a broader perspective then it can be said we are living in a world loaded with advertisement, where you need to fight for attention at every step. I, as an artist, also have to work hard for attention. If I get the visitor to come to my exhibition, to see my work, then that is already a major achievement. To make sure the attention will not wander while at the exhibition, I am, in a way, forced to take advantage of people’s most vulgar instincts, both in a good and bad sense. For example, if I use real people in my art, then I tend not to make use of these people in particular, rather the social instincts and institutions that determine which public figures you can exploit and which you cannot. People have turned into roles, and that is what I want to show in my work.

G. T.: And the main themes you analyse?

A. A.: The themes also often come to me when thinking about the viewers. I often come across exhibitions where the artist hasn’t unfortunately given the viewers any thought, hasn’t even tried to relate to the viewer through the art. By the way, after my exhibition at Hobusepea Gallery, many people came to me to say how good the exhibition had been… but why did I have to use Tõnis Mägi like that? For me, choosing Mägi was exactly that aspect which was supposed to trigger irritation and questions in the viewer. Had I used some sort of “typical gay” instead, everything would have been OK, but would that have been a propelling thought? I have been interested in the subject of sexuality for about ten years now and this interest has gone hand in hand with my interest in native peoples and different forms and norms of social behaviour in general. While working on my Master’s, I wanted to explore why we process some things in our heads as we do. Thanks to writing my thesis, looking into the matter, reading, creating the work, I became a lot more tolerant. Not that I wasn’t already tolerant before, I just began to understand some processes much better.

G. T.: Let’s talk about your contemporaries – Edith Karlson, Jass Kaselaan, Jevgeni Zolotko. How would you evaluate their work?

A. A.: Complicated… Jass – a great friend. Jevgeni – also a friend and a very talented one. It is hard to evaluate your friends’ work. Jass’ and Jevgeni’s methods of work are similar from their starting points – both of them create large-scale spatial installations. For Jevgeni, the conceptual side is also very important. Because both of them work a lot with space and object, then I guess you could make a generalisation and say – Tartu schooling. Edith, although through and through a student of the EAA seems to have become one of the ‘Tartu school’ group because of all the influence from the ones who came from TAC. I think, on the whole, ‘Tartu school’ means having complete control over the object.

G. T.: Have you got your own Teacher?

A. A.: …no, no, I haven’t.

G. T.: But from art history?

A. A.: No. I don’t know actually, whether that makes me lucky or unlucky. Perhaps Damien Hirst, but only because of what he once said. A journalist asked him once how he would like to be remembered. And he answered: as a great lover…

Gregor Taul is an MA student of art history at Estonian Academy of Arts. He also works as a curator in this very school and gives lectures on contemporary art to graphic design students.









AB cubed is a preparatory essay series for the III Artishok Biennale where X young Baltic and Scandinavian writers have chosen for their gesture of courtesy X young Estonian artists who have caught their eye with a witty personal exhibition or an absorbing work of art in a group show in recent years. Artishok tests experimetal editorial practice and self-inititative readiness in the art field with the series, giving writers the opportunity to take the initiative - but also the responsibility - and do one chosen artist a favour. The writers do not receive honorary for their work whereas the suggested artists automatically get an invitation for participation in Artishok Biennale in the autumn. Read more...


(1) In broad terms, these five-year-intervals could also be applied to the previous decades:

50s: Jüri Ojaver (b. 1955), Terje Ojaver (b. 1955), Tiiu Kirsipuu (b. 1957), Mati Karmin (b. 1959), Simson from Seaküla (b. 1959).

60s: Villu Jaanisoo (b. 1963), Hannes Starkopf (b. 1965), Vergo Vernik (b. 1967).

70s: Indrek Köster (b. 1970), Taavi Talve (b. 1970), Elo Liiv (b. 1971), Neeme Külm (b. 1974), Kirke Kangro (b. 1975).

80s: Jass Kaselaan (b. 1981), Edith Karlson (b. 1983), Jevgeni Zolotko (b. 1983), Maigi Magnus (b. 1983).

What we might conclude from this is that if the young sculptors’ wave comes, then the next five years will be theirs. Sculpture is just slow?

(2) http://ygalerii.blogspot.com/2011/08/eike-eplik-ja-vaike-oks-27-augustist-10.html

(3) http://staarskulptor.weebly.com/ and http://maigimagnus.blogspot.com/ and Sandra Jõgeva’s review on her first solo exhibition:
http://www.sirp.ee/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10504:seks-valed-kineetiline-skulptuur-ja-videolint&catid=6:kunst&Itemid=10&issue=3294

(4) http://meilonkasiinhuvitav.blogspot.com/

(5) http://ullajuske.com/

(6) http://hpiksarv.blogspot.com/ and http://hanna-piksarv.prfl.org/

(7) http://www.nuku.ee/festival/toimunud-festivalid/tallinn-treff-festival-2011/penosili-skulptuuride-naitus/

(8) Group exhibitions that Allmägi has taken part in: 2011: “5 kevadist hetke” (5 Moments of Spring) in Merikarvia, Finland; Group exhibition of the EAA MA students in the Rotermann Quarter, Tallinn; 2010: The Estonian Artists' Association’s X annual exhibition “Vastandumised” (Confrontations) in Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn; “Skulptuur ja palimpsest” (Sculpture and palimpsest), exhibition of the MA students of the EAA Department of Fine Arts, Riga, Latvia; 2009: Scary Challenge, exhibition of the EAA Department of Sculpture in Postimaja, Tallinn; “Diskussioon” (Discussion), exhibition of TAC Department of Sculpture, Gallery Noorus, Tartu; 2008: “Isiklik ja avalik” (Personal and Public), Raja Gallery, Tallinn; joint exhibition of TAC and University of Tartu Department of Painting, Tartu Art Museum Leaning Building, Tartu; “Class of 2008”, exhibition of TAC graduate’s works, fair hall of Tartu Fairs, Tartu; 2007: The Keniuses’ exhibition, Y Gallery, Tartu; 2006: TAC exhibition as part of Tartu Art Month in Vana Kaubamaja, Tartu.

(9)http://www.sirp.ee/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13998:absurdipilk-seksuaalvaehemuste-probleemidele&catid=6:kunst&Itemid=10&issue=3379

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Thoughts about landscape and Siram`s exhibition „Organic production in creative industry/Culture Feat. Nature“

Exhibition view, 04.02. – 04.03.2012 Tallinn City Gallery

TANEL RANDER


The title of the exhibition, partly in English („Culture feat. Nature“), is ironic, and the exhibition texts are precarious and fumbling. The author moves on her conceptual framework in an uncertain way and touches briefly a wide range of problems that could be criticised in a more explicit and constructive way. But she does another way, giving a lot of space for her works to be perceived and interprated. To some extent, the exhibitions looks like a riddle. But doesn`t such important and urgent questions require direct and explicit way of speaking, instead of creating general and ironical metaphors? Still, i won`t deal with those matters now. The problems of nature and landscape in the context of contemporary art are so serious, that any artefacts that point at those, should lead to constructive reactions and shared liability with ciritcists. Therefore im going to use the wide interpretation space in order to point out some topics that need to be critically reviewed.



Siram speaks about the marginal position of nature in contemporary art field, and admits turning against her own position by focusing on that topic. In the exhibition text she writes that nature is mainly the field of some crazy Finns (referring to environmental art scene in Finland), and those local artists, who have moved to countryside and started to praise the beauty of nature, have been left behind in the contemporary art scene. So, it appears that contemporary art has a certain location, content and borders, which are outside the nature –myths like that are created by political power of contemporary art and they keep up the matrix of the system, which mainly should not be seen. There are noble ideas of endless freedom of creativity, where everyone is free to do anything, etc. Such freedom is guided by certain principles of global capitalist ideology, acting through the agency of art market. These principles and matrixes are reproduced in art education, art theory and critics, they are performed by artists, curators, criticists and theoreticians, often even by those, who wouldn`t associate themselves with the shameless and explicit mechanisms creative industry. But after all, there is democracy-based state power with programme to carry out global capitalist ideology, which invades the free space to turn it into human resources and put them under heavy layers of creative industry and world economy.

Contemporary art is part of contemporary world, where nature has a constantly marginal position in any field. The desires of mankind are related with technology and mass production, for a long time already. According to Walter Benjamin, the extatic encounter of masses and technology is like copulation, an index of sexual delight and birth of something new. After Benjamin`s death a huge outbreak of global culture of desires and enjoyment has taken place. It is based on the constant desire for new and illusion of a free market, based on supply and demand. Part of the demand is pointed at art, which constitutes the symbolic order of contemporary art, that is directly or indirectly based on the principles of global culture – technology, mass production/consumption, (sexual) enjoyment, singularity/originality. Nature is an instrument and a resource for this system. Already Benjamin announced that landscape has exploded. The Western landscape, penetrated by technology. The borders of the exploded landscape are uncertain and disputable, especially in the context of global culture, but still, it`s obvious that there are differences between Western and Eastern Europe – the landscape of the Baltics is not the same as in Netherlands, Germany, UK, etc. It is doubtable that Eastern Europe shares the landscape (ideas and responsibility) with the West. Therefore the discourses on landscape in East-European context should depart from a critical, postcolonial position, that first of all concentrates on the Socialist past – an experience that the West never had. Nature as a whole should be involved to the discussions of exploitation and marginalism in terms of gender, sexuality, race and other social matters.

In the mainstream of contemporary art, nature has to correspond to the basic principles of global culture that keeps nature as a biopolitical object. Biotechnology and organic production/consumption are new sources of enjoyment – this is what Siram also points out as following: „Sustainable development, organic production, recycling and other green arguments have turned into a random marketing nonsense, that the successful part of society uses as exclusive chanses of consumption“. In fact, these sources of ejoyment are symptoms of massive ecological catastrophe, that show out in a wrong way, through aesthetical mimesis. The pleasure principle works as bait in mass communication and arts. In the period of Cold War, the ecocritical positions of Agnes Denes were expressed by enormous manipulations with nature – wheat field in New York, etc. The visual rhetorics of new Apple laptops speak more about pure nature and less about mass production, exploitation and contamination, applying on the green consumption enjoyment. Nature inspires designers, artists and (landscape) architects to create utopian concepts, that are often used in advertising, marketing and product development. In this regard, i would point to a recent exhibition „(re)designing nature“ (25.05.2010 – 23.01.2011, Künstlerhaus, Vienna). It contained characteristic utopian illustrations of ideas about hi-tech and pure nature together, side by side („Hydrogenase Algae Farm“, Vincent Callebaut Architectures), also all kind of experiments with green plants and earth, installations with organic elements, etc. The installation „Tischgesellschaft/Dinner party“ (by Christian Philipp Müller and Jochen Koppensteiner) was probably meant to be ironical, but it worked out as cynicism – seems like they understood the point, but still reproduced the ironic embodiment of an evil idea. This installation was set up as a white, nicely designed table with white`n trendy tableware. In the middle, there were well designed pieces of green plants served as food. Such way work the biopower mechanisms – a dinner table with firm and elitist aesthetical code refers to biopolitical power structures, that make decisions on the color, content and function of nature. Green color is a metaphor of life, including human life. Might be possible, that this is also, what Siram meant, when writing her concept as follows: „Maybe i just try to see forest behind trees, as much as i can, and behind this forest the people, who have planted it…“. Siram is not certain about the owners of those thousands of eyes watching her, while she is looking at nature. Are those human eyes, after all? Probably not! Siram has decided to skip the biopolitical decisions on the origins of nature and landscape.

From recent times, there can be found another significant exhibition, this time with a bit critical position. „Return of Landcape“ (13.03. – 30.05.2010) in Berlin Art Academy and it`s text-based catalogue, edited by Donata Valentien, viewed the relations between civilization and landscape through two radical phenomenas – Venice and Las Vegas. Rather concerned than critical articles are illustrated with works of this exhibition – aerial photos of Alex S. Maclean that reflect the human traces on landscape in a way, which i find too much oriented to aesthetics and pleasure. In some cases, the pleasure of the text and irony might turn out as misguiding agencies. The landscape paintings of Siram refer to the marginality of the format itself, besides the content, and therefore they can be viewed as acts of protest. Mapping human traces on landscape through landscape paintings is closer to ecocritical aims than the manifestos of professionalism and technology by Alex S. Maclean. Siram`s landscape paintings are conceptually also bound with hi-tech matters – paintings were named after the GPS locations of the painting sites. Together with paintings, two documentary videos of forest are exposed. By the influence of photo series (plus a video) that reflect a former event, where Siram opened the exhibition of the landscape paintings in forest, and quests were dressed in animal costumes, the format and content of the landscape paintings melt together into one marginal matter that could dissolve into same marginal nature. But here is the rupture of perverse and alienating influence of representation and artistic intervention, which appears explicitly in the context of forest, that includes a table full of alcohol, stupid animal costumes, paintings fixed at tree trunks. According to the idea of nature as the end of art, this view is a parody of art and human activity in general. This idea is supported by Siram`s installation of artificial swamp, a synthetic platform, worn out and stinky, because of constant exploitation in the gallery. This is actually a very ecocritical message that could be developed to the extent of slogans by Church of Euthanasia, such as „Save the Planet, Kill Yourself“ or „Six Billion Humans Can`t Be Wrong“. The whole exposition seem to say that there is no place for landscape, not in contemporary art, not in nature. As a conclusion, such a position Estonian contemporary art context might be a good start for new discussions in all problematic issues, pointed out above.

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