About a Dance Macabre for an Unknown Princess
	Jan van Imschoot

	I have been in Tallinn three times, one time in late summer, two times in winter. The first time it was nice warm weather. People were enjoying the feel of sun on their skin, everybody looked happy, and young and beautiful people walked casually around like they were stars on the catwalk. I felt like I was on holiday in Italy and all the sorrows of the world were hidden in the shadow of some dark corner. But I was not in Tallinn to feed my laziness. Eha Komissarov, curator of the Art Museum of Estonia, who had invited me to prepare a show, took me by the hand and showed me cultural Tallinn. Speedy Eha took me around the Old Town and talked about Estonian history, about Hanseatic cities and a certain historical connection with medieval Belgium. Michel Sittow, a great portrait painter, learned his job in the Low Lands. In the well-restored palace of Peter the Great, I saw a bust of the Russian emperor and I thought it was a portrait of Orson Welles. In the same week I also met Estonian contemporary artists, visited the Estonian Academy of Arts, galleries (e.g. a very interesting show by Agur Kruusing) and finally I went to an opening in the Rotermann Salt Storage, the Exhibition Hall of the Art Museum, where I was impressed by the video installation and performance of the young artist Kiwa, who seemed to be a mystical mix of Andy Warhol and Johnny Rotten. I was amazed by the energy and the complex-free attitude of young Estonian artists. They had not yet been poisoned by commercial success and were still lacking in the self-satisfaction which is characteristic of many Belgian artists. To make art, and to become an artist anywhere, is complicated. World wide, artists have the same artistic problems and questions. Of course every artist needs a pat on the back now and then, and it is nice to work in a comfortable way, but this is not essential in making art. In the western world, the dog who barks the loudest gets the best meat. Mental freedom is the highest form of liberty and artists should keep this in mind.
	On my second visit it was snowing in Tallinn. Before I could set up my show I had to wait a couple of days. So I walked around the medieval town as powdery snow gently fell and soon a white carpet covered the city and absorbed the sounds of my footsteps. My conciousness of time was in shock. Caspar David Friedrich and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart accompanied me and I had the feeling that Arthur Schopenhauer was laughing cruelly behind my back. The exhibition I had prepared for Tallinn was complicated and was titled A Seat of Revaluation: about Contemporary Colours and Mystical Sins. With this play on words I wanted to organize a mental walk through the history of painting in confrontation with contemporary points of view. It started with an installation where the visitors could write down their comments on art. Then you could walk around as in a cloister corridor, where I had hung paintings with biblical themes, not as a religious epitaph, but as a search through Jewish and Roman sources to comprehend our cultural background. Historical elements are mostly present in my work to give me the opportunity to create an artistic reconstruction of events of our past. Now that Europe is assuming one identity, a lot of people are hiding themselves in nationalisms because they are afraid of open fields where they can no longer see the borders. They are looking in a linear way to find their identity, but history proves that no European country or people has had a linear development.
	For me there are a lot of similarities between Belgium and Estonia. Both are small countries pressed between two powerful blocks. Belgium is a hinge point between the north and the south, between the German and the Latin world, between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics. Estonia, I suppose, lies between the east and the west; between the Slavic and the Scandinavian, between the Reformation and the Russian Orthodox Church. Therefore I made a series of 20 drawings, which became the centre of the show, and was titled Dance Macabre for an Unknown Princess. This work was based on a detail of the painting by Bernt Notke, which is hanging in Saint Nicholas Church in Tallinn. I used it in a metaphorical way to create a tale of Estonia's cultural heritage, seen through the eyes of a spoilt and prejudiced stranger. Nothing seems to be what it truly is when you are not well informed. A stigma is a wound, becomes a mouth, turns into an eye, is a vagina. It is the fertilisation of my imagination. Knowing I am not a scientist and certainly not a politician, I let poetry influence my mind to have a dialogue with the spectator, a dialogue with the silent and modest, but also intelligent and friendly Estonian citizen. So I hope art can also be a part of the realisation of a Europe based on many different identities, but with a common history and a common peaceful future. Jan van Imschoot (1963), internationally established Flemish painter situated in Gent working in the mode of 1990s new approaches to painting. In January 2004 he had his personal exhibition in the Exhibition Hall of the Art Museum, Rotermann Salt Storage.
	| Estonian Art 1/04 (14) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2004 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |