In the playground of contemporary art - about the reception of Kumu's opening exhibition Skaalanihe/Shiftscale
	Andreas Trossek

	The long-awaited new building of the Art Museum of Estonia opened on 17 February 2006. Most of the five thousand square metres of Kumu's exhibition space houses (more or less permanent) displays that introduce the classics of Estonian art, roughly covering a period from the 18th century to the present day. Kumu's opening exhibition was 'Shiftscale - sculpture at the extended field' (18 February-21 May 2006)*, which somehow strived to fulfil two aims at the same time. Firstly, taking the role of contemporary art exposition (in Kumu's concept that is multifunctional, but primarily focuses on the principle of a national gallery - thus mainly dealing with past art) and secondly, trying to make up for the lack of Estonian art classics from the 1990s on museum's 'permanent display' floors.
	As the building is currently one of the biggest of its kind in northern Europe and Kumu's almost 15-year-old building history was extensively covered 'in the public eye', the Estonian media focused, according to expectation, in its post-opening reception on the building itself, its architecture and cost. The museum, in turn, was gladly willing to talk about different ticket prices, events and visitor statistics that naturally kept growing: by the start of May, two and a half months after the opening, the museum had had about 50 000 visitors. But the newsworthy fact that Kumu actually had an opening exhibition - the first and thus unique as such - was tackled only in a few reviews in the local press. Kumu, too, seemed to have chosen a communication strategy concerning Shiftscale that made the whole undertaking look a bit infantile, so as to reduce 'serious' criticism well in advance. In media information was repeated that this contemporary art exhibition became hugely popular among one of the essential target groups of the museum - children. People learned for example that Hans Hemmert's cathedral-cottage of inflated balloons enjoyed great popularity and everybody also loved Anssi Kasitonni's animations of squirrels. However, if we should recall artworks from Shiftscale that require of the audience at least some experience, an awareness of recent history and context in order to make the displays really 'work' - then this is certainly not the same category as 'children's joyful games'. In a purely emotional sense - to start with frighteningly forceful Markus Copper's Kursk about the sunk Russian atomic-powered submarine or Veronica Brovalli's painful project Divorce II or Cevdet Erek's continent-splitting video The 2nd Bridge, about the Bosporus. One more Copper's work entitled Estonia, quite obviously about another tragic shipwreck (in the Baltic Sea in 1994), was most likely made especially for the opening of Kumu and openly reflects the museum's aims, its purposeful politics of creating an image in the 'international' field of contemporary art that would connect directly with the Estonian state and its people. However, this image-creation process has certainly not realised itself in the same context as the Shiftscale exhibition, which has been literally 'overshadowed' by the new museum building, as if stuck by one side in the recently dried concrete of Kumu.
	There were no separate reviews of Shiftscale in the Estonian media after the opening of the exhibition. Even the participation of a superstar such as Pipilotti Risti did not seem to be a sufficiently significant argument for the local consumer media, as 'the topic of Kumu' was regarded as covered from other aspects (for example: in about a month after Kumu's opening the media 'discovered' a problem that in winter the museum was open to the public only for five days a week and no later than 6 pm). There were, however, more general overviews of Kumu displays, usually good-hearted and therefore a bit boring, occasionally far too critical (Raoul Kurvitz) to be taken seriously. But on the whole it seemed that an average Estonian (contemporary) art lover is too conservative, polite and good-natured to say anything more specific about Shiftscale, except that it was just a usual 'decent' exhibition of contemporary art, whether it's actually sculpture, installation or something else. * Shiftscale was curated by Mika Hannula, Villu Jaanisoo and Hanno Soans. Andreas Trossek (1980), art critic, editor of the radio programme kunst.er, art historian at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia. See also www.cca.ee
	Appendix A public discussion over Shiftscale took place on 4th of May 2006 in Kumu, where two (out of three) exhibition's curators Villu Jaanisoo (VJ) and Hanno Soans (HS) cast some light on how the exhibition was born. The subsequent fragments of that conversation are written down here, transcribed from a recording, with the original wording largely maintained.
	HS: I remember a meeting precisely six months ago when one of the co-curators Villu Jaanisoo and myself discussed the problems of contemporary Estonian sculpture and the doleful atmosphere surrounding it. In fact, I would say this was probably the place where the exhibition was initiated. Shiftscale - sculpture at the extended field was compiled with the assumption that we have overcome the 1990s' existential problems of different creative associations and their need to prove themselves 'at whatever cost', which are totally marginal issues from the point of view of contemporary art. For further explanation, the subtitle of the exhibition - 'sculpture at the extended field' - was borrowed from the American art historian Rosalind Krauss, who wrote a chrestomatic essay that put forward one notion important to us. In Krauss's opinion, looking back on Western art from the early 1970s, it was no longer possible to talk about sculpture in a definitive manner which would value its specifics meaning, in a modernist sculpture it was already then impossible to tackle the issues of sculpture's form or space separately. So she suggests we should look at the word 'sculpture' a bit more openly and arbitrarily. Arthur Danto has also claimed that, in post-modern art, sculpture has replaced painting as the central field of art, but as a discipline it has also expanded and embraced newer and newer areas all the time. Inevitably, one imagines yeast dough swelling out of the mug. As for Shiftscale - when we wonder what in fact we are talking about when we talk about sculpture at this exhibition? We are certainly talking about 'social sculpture' in the vein of Joseph Beuys, but also about some works that have direct references to 'sculpture' in the classical sense of the word. And more generally, we are talking about ways to work with space in contemporary art.
	VJ: If I should add something at this point or replace my co-curator's theorising with talking about 'practice' and ask ourselves why we wished to do this exhibition in the first place, then a nice image we chatted about quite a bit at the start of this process was the idea of an explosion in space. We thought that if sculpture in the traditional sense is a head on a pedestal, we could also imagine an explosion taking place that would scatter all the pieces across the universe. In addition these pieces would turn into something else while they move further away. However, they would maintain at least some connection with the nucleus. In other words, Shiftscale could give an overview of those particular phenomena where sculpture has arrived today. Although the initial idea changed a bit during the working-process, it has survived, at least for me, throughout. The other significant starting point was of course the fact that while there has been a lot of moaning and groaning about the backwardness and weakness of Estonian sculpture, we wanted to show, from an educational aspect at least, those phenomena that actually exist here and now! Looking back, I would assess Shiftscale as a decent 3-point shot in basketball terms. Having been away from Estonia for a while, I also tried to observe the response to the exhibition abroad, especially in Finland and Sweden, and I'd say that quite a lot has been written about the exhibition in the Nordic countries. Still, considering that this is just another exhibition of contemporary art, the response has been positive but also rather neutral. Shiftscale has mostly been compared with ARS '06 - the exhibition opened in nearby Helsinki, to give just one example. But it seems to me that the foreign press has generally managed to understand us. Hanno Soans (1974), art critic and curator of the Art Museum of Estonia. Villu Jaanisoo (1963), sculptor, author of several public sculptures in Estonia and Finland. From 2006 Professor of sculpture at the Estonian Academy of Arts. See also www2.pirkkala.fi/villusoo
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