The Curator Exhibition of the 13th Tallinn Print Triennial
| ||
| Event. Image. Clone. Revisited The Curator Exhibition of the 13th Tallinn Print Triennial | |
| Kiwa | |
|
||
|
||
|
One question only |
|
|
||
|
The 13th Tallinn Print Triennial, under the title mutating image took place from 14 September to 21 October 2001. The main event was in the Rotermann Salt Storage; the exhibition event.image.clone., curated by Johannes Saar, was displayed in the Tallinn Art Hall and its gallery. Two large exhibitions were supplemented by a row of smaller ones, including the student exhibition conditionally existent, conditionally non-existent (curator Rael Artel) in the Hansapank gallery. The solo exhibition of the grand prix winner of the previous triennial, Sang-gon Chung, took place in the Tallinn Linnagalerii. This year's grand prix went to the Estonian artist Andres Tali; three equal prizes were awarded to Janne Laine (Finland), Leonards Laganovskis (Latvia) and Peeter Laurits (Estonia). Altogether 200 artists from all over the world participated in the exhibition.
|
|
|
||
|
While answering that question, and especially while following the above motto, I discovered in my consciousness a thought engine, quite unknown to me so far. After activating that engine I began, to my own great surprise, to think in quite a different mould. The prevailing impression was of me as the last surviving artificial intellect on a mandroid planet in a faraway galaxy that has been swept clean by anthrax, too morbid to even try to imagine.
|
|
|
||
|
Little pictures from the eastGoing over Arthur Danto's philosophy of art, summarised in the introduction to the curator exhibition Event.Image. Clone., I was only a few steps away from letting a deeply dangerous prejudiced disillusionment overwhelm me. The poignancy of Danto's philosophy lies in a concept of contemporary art that does not charm the viewer, and in spreading other pessimistic moods. The Estonian poet Priidu Beier has a verse called 'Little pictures from the east' that goes like this (I quote from memory): "One evening in bed my wife tells me/ that she's Countess Hokusai/ I try in vain to transform myself into Richard Sorge/ all right, says the wife finally, bored/ why don't you be a mikado/ this I manage immediately." In order to convince myself of the validity or non-validity of the statement, I also try, in vain, to transform myself into a viewer of art, even into Artur-boy himself. (It should be mentioned here that when curator Saar talks about the above-mentioned Danto as an influential art historian he writes his first name with an 'h' (Arthur), whereas when calling him a boy elsewhere, he omits the 'h'. I mention this here so the curators will feel the stare of Big Brother at the back of their heads.) The opinion of the viewer as an institution presuming absolutely abstract, almost utter, hopelessness, an ethereal core of self-charging role play, unfortunately remains out of my reach. Every one of us, however, should have a marshal's baton in his bag! As far as food is concerned, for example, I am extremely picky. I might even call myself a fighting vegetarian, never forgetting to spit when I pass a McDonald's, and regarding the 'Recipe for Conceptual Sandwich' as the most beautiful writing after the Song of Solomon. |
|
|
||
|
Art(h)urDespite being a dj for seven years, my collection does not include a single CD without a story, a legend, a flash, a collision point with a spaceship, or a point of contact with a rhizome concept behind it. Nor does it contain a disc that would be white label par excellence. With the tender care of a mother rabbit licking her offspring, I have compiled it, just for myself. Not one cheap, bad or tasteless CD, if it doesn't have to be such for a special purpose. The missing art consumer in me, be it Artur or not, sneaks from one exhibition to another, darting furtive glances, relating to everything without any prejudices. The only thing that might produce treacherous blotches on the pristine surface of my alibi is the emergence of those social mechanisms that produce the viewer or consumer, declared long dead or missing. The curator claims that we are the products of our own sociality. Any chance of viewing some work in connection with the exhibition either through the prism of metaphysics or esoterica, is decisively eliminated. But I don't care. From here it gets dangerously close to the clones - a topic that pumps up the most adrenaline in me, because things are pretty tough today with all kinds of twins, clones, copies, Doppelgängers and alter egos. Viktor Sanches, for example, describes a case where the observed person sees himself, in his sleep, sitting somewhere with friends having a good time. At a certain point he realises that he is dreaming, and finds himself observing the scene where he and his friends are laughing. He is the person who laughed, and the one who is watching. Discovering that he can exist alternately in both his selves, a question now arises about the identity of the person who is sleeping and dreaming about all that. It turned out that it was he as well. |
|
|
||
|
Hara-kiriHow can the viewer prove that he is not the cultural clone of the previous visitor, asks the curator, summarising his point of view with devilish shrewdness. His topic concerns the transfer of the possibility of copying images and making reproductions, from the priorities of graphics to social context and cultural theory. A careful observer, however, is also able to enjoy alternative allusions. Anu Juurak's discreetly simulated video project Mirror Space is nothing dangerous; the work in the manner of bazaar entertainment disturbs the viewer's orientation and feeling of place, which in turn should shift his perception and give him a new description of the world. The viewer, however, used to the simulations of modern interactive art, is only dimly aware that someone wants to do some subtle business with him here. Looking at it from a metaphysical aspect, such a heretical act of copulation is naturally as good as hara-kiri. The sense of reality is deconstructed, without excluding the possibility that everything may in fact be his own imagination. In olden times the Estonians did not say, "I got lost in the forest", but "the forest has lost me". The consumer's initiation rite goes with a bang in Konstantin Khudiakov's project Hotel Russia, characterised by eccentricity, achieved through temporal and spatial openness; and in Marina Koldobskaya's gallery of the key figures of Russian avant-garde. Both try to break only into the viewer's imagination about the total illusoriness of reality on the grass roots level of concept. Those, just like Laganovski's treatments of language and gender, or Jokinen/Valanne's 'tester-slugs', do not in fact break into anything more serious than social stereotypes, although this ritual too has today been over-banalised. Evidently for the sake of integrity, the chic modern or even coolly minimalist stuff by Denisa Lehocka has been accepted; and there's also the almost compulsory 'domesticated marginality' - Andris Biezbardis constructs his small worlds in cardboard boxes consisting of things he has found, taking on the role of a social inspector displaying aspects of a Great Creator. |
|
|
||
|
How do I make loveSince I've started examining the exhibited works in a sequence that somewhat leads to conjuncture, one should now logically arrive at special treats. These are the Russians: Maksim Mamsikov's Berkovtsy cemetery and its inhabitants, Ljudmila Gorlova's How do I make love and Arsen Savadov's fashion photographs at a funeral. The latter come first in my top 10 list mainly because, for me, there has always been too little glamour in the so-called 'art gallery art', and also because sometimes you get a far greater kick out of watching Fashion TV than out of some inanity displayed in an art hall. Here the worlds of fashion and art hold hands and blend together so naturally that I already see, in the established form, what I have so far suspected about most contemporary art, i.e. that it produces itself according to updated surrealist principles, creating illogical associations between logical things. The aesthetics of Savadov's photographs eliminates the possibility that there could be any illogical connection between fashion (entertainment) and funeral (personal tragedy for many people). This holds true for the entire Russian gang brought here. The artist and viewer, alienated from traditional culture and having lost the feeling of participating in the world, attempt, as a last resort, to relate to or ritually address the most common phenomena: death, love, getting old. The perception of where this ritual should lead, however, has been lost. Thus we find ourselves right there - in death, old age, love; in the latter in Ljudmila Gorlova's especially depressing labyrinth of social stereotypes. |
|
|
||
|
The EndA prominent man has expressed the idea that our well-being depends solely on how we manage to put together the archetypes scattered in our consciousness. As our schizophrenic society produces too many mirages of archetypes, there is the danger of finding oneself in a situation where in order to recognise them - uncover a jackal behind the mask of a sheep - we give up real, linearly flowing time to establish personal contact with each one of them. Society is seized by fobus archetypicus (phobia of archetypes), a fear of adding every other strange archetype to the ones we already have, and thus proceed either towards health or sickness. I still think that a curator should - considering everything said above - keep curating, even when he already detects a paranoid glance in the eyes of his curated art, and then go even further, where he will be seized by panicky fear. We are all, in a way, inhabitants of the Berkovtsy cemetery. |
|
|
||
|
||
|
| Estonian Art 2/01 (10) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2001 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 | |
|