Is Ketchup Blood or Something Else? (1)
	Elin Kard

	Elin Kard, Marco Laimre, Marko Mäetamm and Andres Tali's exhibition Violence and Propaganda at the Tallinn Art Hall, 8.04.-28.05.2006s the latter were considered to be the legitimate target for such heroic deeds.
	Walter Laquer (2) is the one who has probably given the simplest and most credulous definition to violence as an activity with the aim of terrorizing people. Most of the definitions for violence are based rather on those sowing violence than the violence itself. According to the definition by Laquer, there is no violence as such, but there is only an individual who acts violently, with the objective being terrifying and harrassing people. Violent people could involve advertisement agents, sales agents, policemen, soldiers or any other individual terrorizing or harrassing civilians in order to achieve a result that could be gauged according to the social parameters. Most frequently, violence is understood as an illegal activity; nevertheless, when the one terrorizing and producing fear is someone hired by the state, like a soldier or a special service worker, then we are not dealing with violence. The other part of the definitions for violence refers to the innocence of the victims, ie to the fact that we deal with peacefully-minded civilians and not the soldiers. In this case, all these acts of terrorism directed towards the soldiers or representatives of the country would be dismissed, as the latter were considered to be the legitimate target for such heroic deeds. Violence and propaganda have never been the weapon for the strong. It has been for those who have not been able to reach the power in a natural way, who have lacked a social role as well as the control over a territory or resources. Namely these essentially significant weaknesses can make violence and propaganda seem strong on the outside. Those with nothing to lose, are prepared to commit the unspeakable. Those who can undertake attacks that the existing political institutions are unable to avoid, inevitably appear stronger than those they are attacking.
	It was already at the times of Roman Law when a human being named Homo Sacer could be killed without a punishment, and thus the person's death lacked the value of a victim. The same concept matches the contemporary terrorists, as well as their victims, and those whose destinies depend on humanitarian aid. The enemy is schematized, possessing certain characteristics, and violence is elevated/promoted to the invisible point of equivalence in the middle of all social corruption/vices. The horror of violence lies not in its potential quantity but in the causes, namely in the concealedness of the causes from an individual's eye, as the identity of an individual is mostly destined by the surrounding environment. There are two kinds of people - some regard ideas higher than people, the others deem people more important than ideas. Violence emerges more easily when idea becomes more important than people. Starting from the attempt to institutionize, to turn into the foundation or a roof of a society, violence will acquire extra drastic dimensions and measures.
	All the above-said, gathered in the frames of deliberately propagandist and pretentious word combination Violence and Propaganda, could be called an ideological platform, which voluntarily and comparatively spontaneously attracted four artists representing different generations. The fact that the exhibition lacked a curator and a concept, afforded the artists a chance, inside code of topic, to act according to their own better judgement. The empty content and over-exploitation of the chosen starting points on the one hand, and the plenitude of possibilities on the other, were probably the main reasons for the temporally linear stretch from the 1940s to the present day, and offered a chance to thematically map only a tiny section of the given, without seemingly directly relating to the topic. At the same time the above-mentioned enabled to unite works with no apparent common parts. Marco Laimre's linguistic constructions, the impossibility of evaluation and expressing opinions about propaganda-generated information, caused by the lack of direct experience, and advertising industry and propaganda-critical approach to propaganda as a primarily linguistic behaviour, with which to manipulate a potential consumer; the blending of Andres Tali's sign systems of totalitarian ideology with his childhood memories, and direct manipulation with the image emerging in the viewer's head, depending on the latter's experience; Marko Mäetamm's manipulations with the viewer's power of empathy by means of a family model operating on the border of real and unreal, but still enabling identification; and Elin Kard's works tackling the recent cartoon conflict in Denmark and the topics of freedom of speech and the relevant ethical responsibility and religious and cultural legitimacy - all these nevertheless hit the ball into the same goal of collective memory, forced on by the media and propaganda, and its possibilities of influencing and directing.
	The main and most significant common denominator of all the works is perhaps the paradoxical lack of any visual violence, or its non-presence. There are no clear and easily determined distinctions between the real and the unreal, and true and false. The actual venue of the exhibition presented by the artists in the form of texts with gaps was in the viewer's head. In order to find suitable replies we could use the question posed in the title: is ketchup blood or something else? Just like pictorial equivalent of violence is not always violent, ketchup, too, is not always an equivalent of blood. (1) Marco Laimre. Kunst.er. Klassikaraadio. 16.04.2006 (2) Walter Laquer. The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction. NY: Oxford University Press, 1999 Elin Kard (1972), MA at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Works as curator at Hobusepea gallery and Draakon gallery, and as project coordinator at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia. Has curated, headed and advertised various projects, held lectures and wrote articles. In addition to a dozen or so personal exhibitions has participated in many international displays.
	Exhibition Violence and Propaganda hosted also two different events inside main exhibition. Emergency Biennale - a Suitcase from Paris to Grozny* - on April 26 to May 10, was an international exhibition travelling around in order to support Chechnye Republic. There were speeches both on violence and propaganda by a few dozens of internationally acknowledged artists in order to highly express the critical ideological, economical and ecological issues. The conference day The Moral Choices of an Artist in Cultural Conflicts was organised by Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, on May 27. * www.emergency-biennale.org
	| Estonian Art 1/06 (18) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2006 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |