Revolt against memory in contemporary Estonian art
	Kaire Nurk

	The problem of memory is topical, both in the traditional Old World (the AICA annual conference in Rennes in 1996), and in domestic art, floating in the turbulent currents of newly independent Estonia. There are practical problems: how to preserve art? Should Orlan re-record the old videos of plastic surgery with the help of new technology, even if it swallowed all available resources? Will the Estonian Art Museum be built despite the fact that there is no money? Every advancement springs from the status quo. Body memory. And there are theoretical problems: how much and what can art remember in every specific instance? Did Joseph Beuys proceed from inspiration only? Is modernism suffering from amnesia, and postmodernism from the cult of memory? Is the only striking contact with pre-modernist art in Estonian art Enn Põldroos's Universitas Tartuensis (1982), which lies prostrate in the storage cellar of the Tartu University Art History Museum, behind an office cupboard - or is postmodernism in Estonia seeing the light of day somewhat more? In the 1990s - yes. Destudio. Peeter Linnap. Laurentsius and AD. Evi Tihemets. Valeri Vinogradov. Leo Lapin. Rein Tammik. And the Saaremaa art biennials that led Estonian artists, by the hand, straight into the nooks and crannies of the memory of political history. The Kuressaare castle, pregnant with historical layers, actively participated in the dialogue; Estonian institutional art politics shied away.
	Revolt against memory In addition to the interest in the past, not very intensive or wide-spread, there is also a multi-faceted amnesia that prevails in Estonian art. Several exhibitions have examined and demonstrated the logic of the development of Estonian art. The exhibition Recollections of the 20th century artist, curated by Eha Komissarov, was perhaps the most suggestive, or at least the most decisive and clear-cut of them. Although ignoring the last decade, the exhibition pointed out the potential that made possible the breakthrough which occurred in the second half of the 1990s. Comparing start-of-the-century Kristjan Raud and end-of-the-century Kiwa at the exhibition, Johannes Saar admits: "the beginning and the end do not understand each other, because there are other beginnings and ends between them". So maybe there really aren't any radical changes going on at the moment, because the entire 20th century abounded in them. Recollections... , a huge exhibition both in size and concentration of contents - the art of one nation embracing the entire century - was squeezed into a tiny space: only 7 rooms plus one almost hall-size room. This could be the reason why this exhibition was so long in the making; works of lesser significance (as always in art, a certain subjectivity is inevitable) had to be rejected. Uniting and combining different approaches, a clear picture emerged.
	What is of utmost importance in this context is the final room of the exhibition/century - expressing an essential change in the relations between the artist and his work, dedicated to abstractionism. Abstractionism is the gate to a different perception. Here the artist no longer concentrates on any object outside himself or his picture: through the process of work, he totally focuses on himself. In the new French aesthetics of the 1970s - 1980s, as expressed by Gilles Deleuze, art in the contemporary 'performance society' is able to maintain its position as art only when it "creates an audio-visual image that can be associated with the audible and the visual in an irrational way, without the mediation of language, thus forming a mental image that establishes a direct contact between the sensations of sight and thought." Deleuze admits to similarities with abstractionism (Krull). Against the background of art history that has mostly been a commission of smaller or larger court ideologies and visual narration, abstractionism has thus significantly intensified the mental contact between artist and work, opening up a more direct channel than ever before. One of the results of this is the emergence of an ever more organic art. In the new art, and we see it also in 1990s Estonia, the artist/man has unprecedently/inseparably become part of the work. It was abstractionism, according to Deleuze, that made a substantial investment in the vitality of contemporary art.
	With the exhibition Aids in culture. Disappearance of immunity in art, curator Johannes Saar made the role of the artist more profound and richer in nuance. "Estonian artists are on their way. The creators of an egocentric world are turning into sensitive weather stations whose identity and message is the surrounding environment." The essence of a work of art is the reflection of continually changing surroundings via a human being. Art no longer depicts a fire; it shows us people who have survived it, or joy, or pain. Small or big, it doesn't really matter. Still - how to characterise the change that in the Estonian art world has been occasionally received as a "total collapse of the aesthetic and ethical values, which have so far maintained the meaning of art?" (A Brief History of Estonian Art, Helme, Kangilaski) The same book determines the abruptness of the change: "it was clear by 1996 that art, having left the area of traditional media, and grown out of the youngest generation, has managed to acquire a significant position and is addressing questions that have no connection whatsoever with the art of five or six years back, to say nothing of normative aesthetics." The change of course is also confirmed by Kiwa, representative of the youngest generation (one of their first undertakings was the Kiwa & Co three-day Lillipop Fiction in 1996 in the Tartu Rüütli Gallery. Karin Tarto, writing in the newspaper Sirp, said: "Can this Pinocchio exhibition be a beginning of something big and international?") who talks about his generation which, "over the last two years or so has made a name for itself without in any way relating to the sacred traditions of Estonian art." The young do not deny memory as such Ü they just might not have enough information and experience to relate to the art of the 1980s and earlier. Maybe the generation of radical changes can say something significant about the altered situation? This generation was born in the 1960s and studied art in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, acquiring quite a traditional education. This generation actually 'remembers' the former codes, but in its work it seems to have forgotten them. This generation exists 'outside classifications' (Kelomees, 1997). This is a generation which has experienced changes, even provoked them, and not received them ready-made from the surrounding world. This is a generation whose relations with radical change are not consumerist, but creative. The latter involves the destruction and denial of what has been learned, not the forgetting of it. In other words, this involves re-recording, creative re-recording. I am going to present a partial mapping of that denial, a choice both subjective and objective, somewhat occasional and intuitive, trying to present common features on the basis of the four exhibitions of four artists. The choice also relies on the changes gathered into compact discussions in the Estonian press, or those that have been generally accepted.
	Denial of big narratives In the first work under observation, Jaan Toomik's video installation Way to São Paulo (1993), a mirror cube floats in water, reflecting the changes and sparkle of the water, and occasionally the contours of the coast. The coasts are Tartu, Prague and SÑo Paulo. This was the route Toomik would have travelled had he taken the direct route from his native Tartu to the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1993, his first major performance abroad. We know that São Paulo was the straight road for the young artist to the international arena. In Toomik's other work, the video Nameless (also known as Father & Son, 1998, Linnagalerii), the artist is skating on a field of sea ice. He whizzes straight at the spectator, traces a few designs and straight lines on the ice, and vanishes into the distance again. We know that the artist spent his childhood by the sea, and he has intense recollections of the inexplicable call of the distant expanse of water. And by 1998, the artist's connections with his native country were quite similar to the skater on the field of ice who came in order to go away again. Then there are Ülle Meister's plaster casts and digital photographs of hands (Ülle Meister and Jüri Kass, Nameless, 1998, Tallinn Art Hall Gallery). Hands are an artist's attribute. The hands of a woman artist doing traditional dry point are strong and precise. Another thing to fill the photographic space of that exhibition, is the hair of Meister's daughter. The hair photographs resemble Meister's traditional graphic art, for example Through Red (1993), displaying a metre-long dry point horsehair.
	In the fourth work, a brief whistle stop of a ceaseless process, Episodic Memory in the Tartu Art House's monumental gallery (2000), we see Erki Kasemets's buttons - exactly the number of days the artist has lived. On the cartons, Kasemets records little details of his life: taking out 100 kroons from the cash machine, covering the floor with varnish. "This database does not include any remarkable radical changes in history; there are no heroic deeds or catastrophes. ...the chronicle of banalities /.../ (Sobolev). All these works reflect clearly autobiographical material. "A person is no longer faced with objects that could be marked as non-self, the Other" (Saar, 2000). Has social memory been forgotten? No prominent world narrative can be directly ascertained. However - having said that, the row of milk cartons filling the room begins to have the effect of totality. The full sentence of Mari Sobolev goes like this: "The only function of the chronicle of banalities is to maintain the empty packaging of the recycled life." Removing all excess, we get the archetypal foundation: "The purpose of chronicles is to maintain life." Using computer technology, Küri Kass has set fire to hair in some photographs, and frozen it in others - an ancient tale of fire and water? And Jaan Toomik's tales of fire and water and eternal change? Mari Sobolev acknowledges: "Toomik has not discovered a single new topic or employed a single new trick." The artist is instead groping through the foundation of the ancient experience of being: fire and water as two inseparable opposing poles of life. Destruction and rebirth together.
	Denial of beauty The artist cannot guide or shape the composition of reflection or the mirror cube, check the colour harmony in the chaos of thousands of milk cartons and spots of colour, nor can he shape the proportions and patterns of the hand in a plaster cast. The result, nevertheless, is beautiful. (?) The result is the beauty of nature and randomness; beauty possessed by a human being or whatever other object/subject. It is the denial of beauty that is guided by the artist, proportioned and painted. Basic means of artistic depiction - line, colour, surface - are not involved in the process of achieving beauty. "Marks lets the emancipated line move freely, on its own. Freedom here means having no prejudices, following momentary impulse" (Vabar, 1991). The result is - beautiful. "Kasemets can appreciate picturesque values, but is not interested in painting /.../ An item (milk carton) and its representation (painted milk carton) approach one another critically, and painters struggle with the fact that the result of the short circuit is picturesque Ü picturesque values tend to live longer than classical painting, because they rely on new materials" (Saar). The relationship between the denial of beauty and beauty is ambivalent.
	Denial of a work of art Jaan Toomik travels from Tallinn to Tartu in order to capture the ripple of the Emajõgi waves, trees and thickets on the riverbank, and people and a passing canoeist on his mirror cube. Toomik is not painting the sparkle of water, nor sculpting the old willows or drawing urban contours. "He became a silent observer, his art lost physical dimensions and began to exist only in the reactions of the viewer: in catharsis, disappointments, anxiety, embarrassment, etc," says Johannes Saar (1995). Ülle Marks and Jüri Kass take pictures of real hands and hair and make a cast of the existing hand. "Albert Anni depicts nature; Kasemets does not depict milk cartons, but paints on them" (Saar). Artists do not reproduce what already exists; they present it. "A picture ceased to exist in its literal meaning when Toomik replaced canvas with deformed, torn or layered surfaces where the holes, folds and scratches are layers of matter that have become a true material of memory." (Komissarov) The artists seek, find, travel to the spot, gather the already existing and record this sought/found/discarded organic-biological-geographical-social-psychological trace - bearer of memory - on a video or photograph, or take a plaster cast or use it ready-made. When the exhibition is over, the material is shut into a black video cassette box; ribbons of text cut from the milk cartons are wound on a huge roll, and plaster hands are given to art collector Matti Milius. The presentation is packed up. The three-dimensional gallery space is now empty. Leaving the gallery, we come to the riverbank and observe countless reflections, shake hands with Ülle Marks and see Toomik arriving from São Paulo and going to New York, and an endless row of milk cartons on shop shelves. In an interview, Kasemets said: "My art may be called trash art. It is like the art of life, a long and subjective process that should produce additional value." "Art islets are fucking Greenberg rubbish. As for the civilisation of a big city - it's all art" (Kiwa). "Notions and differences vanish, all associations are occasional and temporary" (Saar, 2000).
	Denial of the author of a work of art Denying a work of art also logically means denying its author, as indeed happened in the case of Roland Barthes, although for different reasons. Old sibyl culture has accumulated a memory bank. Handy computers guide mankind into the past. Mankind has acquired a time machine and sets off eagerly. The memory bank is accessible both to the artist and the spectator. The artist has no need to establish himself as Author and limit the freedom (of movement) of the Spectator. Toomik, Marks and Kass, or Kasemets - none add any explanations. Eha Komissarov has repeatedly mentioned Toomik's attempts at neutrality. Toomik and Marks often call their work Nameless, or give no title at all. How, indeed, to name the nameless? They transmit/mediate the work of God-Author, its endless polyphony. The indescribable. There is no aggression in the mask of a hand; it instils the feeling of stability, although the thin plaster cast is extremely fragile and may shatter in a second. The mirror cube keeps losing its memory - there is nothing secure or stable. One thing is still certain - the change. Changing goes on unchanged. The author's dictate of conceptions and entitling retreats. The 'death' of an individual Author celebrates man.
	Revolt or post scriptum Returning to the abstractionism-investment, perhaps the most direct means of communication between a work of art and man, one can claim that during its development (no need to feel uneasy about this word here), art has, through smaller and bigger, temporary or perpetual, memory losses, through specific historical revolts or denials, achieved an ever closer contact with man. If we know who man is. According to Albert Camus, man's human nature includes metaphysical revolt, i.e. revolt against injustice, slavery, and terror. The moment, however, that metaphysical revolt forgets its basic idea, it itself turns into injustice, slavery and terror. "An idea of revolt cannot manage without memory: it is perpetual vigilance", remembering the original idea of metaphysical revolt (Albert Camus. Metaphysical Revolt) What can Ülle Marks's hands in plaster or photographs remember, or Erki Kasemets's buttons and milk cartons or Jaan Toomik's skater, or indeed the skating Jaan Toomik himself? Maybe they remember the original revolt? Regardless of denial, they carry with them a pure affirmation, undestroyed and unbitten by nihilism. Dionysian, Nietzschean affirmation (Hasso Krull). Juta Kivimäe has written about the Marks-Kass exhibition: "A gesture of benediction or prayer of the open palms is a manifestation of non-violence; the twisting hands in the photographs are also very peaceful and contemplative." Loss of memory in art, although never being absolute even within art, perhaps constitutes intensive remembering of something very important at exactly those moments of amnesia. This article is based on the paper read at the Tartu University conference of ethnology called Culture and memory
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