Artivity in Human Action: From Artists to Rockets
	Anti Randviir

	Artistic personage Of course a specific topic in the case of John Smith (JS)* is him as an agent in the field of art. On the one hand we could discuss the artistic nature of this fictional character. On the other hand such an approach would not provide meta-artistic discussion with anything novel - yet any artistic creation has been produced by a certain de- or recomposition of its producer's identity. The process can also be described as re-semantization of sociocultural phenomena through a shifted viewpoint inside an artist: thus one can talk about translation as (re)creation of objects via autocommunication. The question of identity rather rises at following JS's 'inner monologue': yet how is the object of representation of the whole project - the two boys from periphery or JS or all three? How is JS so related to idyllic discourse on cosmos that he is the one calling us to "go to cosmos!"? It seems the identities of the observer and the observed are diffused here as often happens in anthropological fieldwork... JS as an artistic personage transfers the mediocre character of his sociocultural status as a stereotype citizen to his production, and there is nothing remarkable, but simply explanatory in that. However, JS as a created figure representing an average social actor provides the interpreter of his works with an alternative viewpoint belonging in a way to Popper's Third World.
	It would probably not be worthy the effort to analyse the actual sensory material JS offers the viewers, for the so-to-speak ordinary fears and dreams of many of us, the ordinary actual and fictional objects surrounding us are indeed the subject matter of any artistic creation. Attention is rather deserved by ways of combining the routine and the outstanding, reality and dream world (e.g. how the space rocket as an object not common in backyards is set into the ordinary context). There is little doubt the majority of male individuals of Western civilisation of Earth have created both two- and three-dimensional images of rockets, there is just as little doubt in that most people have at least once wished they could differ from the rest by an outstanding deed. Thus, regardless of the artists' possible intention and the retinal images spectators are offered, we could pay attention to some artistic devices to be associated with the transfer of both JS and his observed boys to the exhibition room. The exhibition space is also the context that allows to talk about the JS project as an artistic one - this is indicated at the end of the story: yet who would imagine two grown men to build a rocket-like gadget of such a great scale out of wood in the context of their supposed cultural context? If they were smart enough to supply the machine with the engine sounding inside, they definitely would have been clever enough to use metal construction instead of timber.
	Artistic devices: from material to concepts JS has used the textual and the pictorial in a symbiotic manner, texts interwoven into pictorial discourse are the basic element distancing the project from a kindergarten workshop show: texts reveal the status of pictorial discourse and installations, turning the whole scene into a metadiscourse on daily humans. JS's enterprise is noteworthy in the Estonian contextwhere using the label 'untitled' for non-contextual and ungraspable presumable artifacts, artistic only by their feature of having been placed into exhibition space, has been a massive trend. In JS's project shifts in syntactics, semantics and pragmatics can be ascribed to several items of the story. A simplest example concerning the introduction and description of the routine of (presumably JS): "I try to do it in poetic form, because I like it more," says the text before the description of JS's morning, day, evening, and night. There is hardly anything poetic in the form of presentation, whereas conventional understanding of poetry probably should direct the reader to interpret the items (bathroom, lavatory, kitchen, blood transmission room, etc.) in the light not as repulsive as in the case of another syntactic form.
	A possibility of adding another perspective might have been used by attenuating the idea represented in JS's exclamation "... when we read the word 'art' backwards, we get hell knows what". The reversal of ordinary syntactic clues is now only imaginary and probably not graspable (should the spectator reverse his/her route in the room, use imagined mirrors for pictorial, and reverse reading for textual items of the show?). Possibilities of estranging sign systems are principally not that different from turning ordinary objects or culture topics into artistic. By this it is important to keep in mind that the so-called minus-device represents one mode of shifting the interpreter's attention from the learned habitual distinctive features to others. In this sense the very personage of JS's non-existent person gains new light; also the context of Kaido's and Marko's activity acquires potential: by bringing forth, in zoom, one house together with an unusual gadget and equalising others into non-zoomed context, the spectator should guess what only could be seen going on in the others, if zoomed.
	JS's works presumed to be documentary, might be approached, if taking into account only the aspect of showing the story of a boyish dream, from the distinction of the denotative and connotative meaning. In that case it could be stated that denotatively the series represents a story of two lives that might interest wider audiences for the connotations the Soviet powers injected into masses in the form of space propaganda. This has been the point of condemning the project of JS transmitted by Ole and Mäetamm for its impotence of functioning in other than ex-Soviet contexts. However, an aspiration for the stars is a wider dream of man ranging from the Soviet to the capitalist, from the 'primitive' to the 'developed' cultures - even after the recent disaster of US shuttle we were let to know that space exploration is 'what being human is all about'. At this level outstanding undertakings always function against routine, and the story rather turns into a (universal) plot to be filled by culture-specific connotations. The switch between the story and the plot coincides, in this case, with the elimination of the boys and their concrete context from the stage of denotation and their replacement by the connotations of space travel as a cultural topic. Once again denotation, or the 'most correct/important meaning of a text occurs to be derived from the set of connotations. Regardless of the authors' intention, the spectator can discover or attribute several layers of meanings in the JS project. The topic is so universal and the story, not only the plot, so widespread amongst at least childhood dreams that there should not rise the problem of recognising at least something from the exhibition even from the aspect of differences ascribed to the 'low' and 'high' culture species. The only task is to individually set into balance the aspect connected with the so-called non-retinal art. It can probably be maintained that the depth and semiotic dimension(s) of the JS project depend on how spectators are able to distinguish between the semiotic fields of both textual and pictorial (and installation) discourse, and their symbiosis. It is in the minds of viewers to play with meanings of sign-vehicles by relating them to different concrete or abstract objects by activating dissimilar sign-relations. Rearranging understanding of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic regularities has to do with spectators' self-reflection abilities in the space of JS so as compared with not much more justified (semiotic) behaviour outside it. Recognition of one's own semiotic powers on the material offered by the JS project should allow viewers to carry out programs of similar kind themselves.
	| Estonian Art 1/03 (12) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2003 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |