Black Balland Theoretical Sneakers Marko Laimre's exhibition Black Ball in the Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, August 2002
	Anders Härm

	Today when 'everything' is forbidden, we find ourselves in a heightened state of alert because the stoker makes the introduction, the hockey player finds the puck, and the snow shoveller screams horribly on a winter morning, preparing the ground. Therefore: the room is not yet ready! Marko Laimre
	We all know the school textbook's definition of semiotics - it is a science that examines signs and sign systems (considering the unattached nature and arbitrariness of the meanings). Marko Laimre calls his method of making art experimental semiotics. Whatthehellisthat? The encyclopaedic meaning of experiment is very vague, but basically it is a test, an experience. Using the purest philosophical officialese, we are told that an experiment is the main method of empirical perception... so be it. Every experiment is certainly a creative act, and since the notion of experimental semiotics itself has been created on the same basis, there is no cause for hair-splitting here. This notion, a welding of two terms, should therefore signify a test with signs and sign systems that help create new ... What? Notions, things, objects, etc. A thing produced by the method of experimental semiotics, however, is an idiosyncratic act of speech that leads us to mainly one place - out of the discourse. The chief problem on that empty playing field is that there is no language to describe and analyse it, because an idiosyncratic act of speech that establishes itself, creates a new language. Its grasp can only be imagined, largely because the background forces are made up of already existing notions, which, however, do not make much sense if torn out of context. So, all we've got are extremely vague outlines. Experimental semiotics itself is a black ball. This is why we often see bewildered art critics standing helplessly in front of Laimre's works, unable to kick the ball into any known goal, because their intellectual foot is not shod in the necessary, defensive, theoretical sneaker. Such sneakers are not yet on sale in the theory department store. Football of the discursive analysis is impossible, as there are no rules for discourse. We have not agreed on anything yet, which is why everything is allowed.
	A crash on the highway of interpretations Before kicking the black ball into the unknown, it would seem necessary to count the pre-experimental semiotic preconditions, but we must be content that these will be outlined in the course of the analysis. The most obvious sub-current of the Black Ball is the model of paranoia. As David Lynch's name cropped up here and there in the context of the exhibition, the initial impulse of the model should probably be sought somewhere on a lost highway. David Lynch himself has described his film's paranoid effect in connection with Robert Montgomery's film Woman in the Lake (1947), where the action is wholly conveyed through the eyes of the protagonist: "since the camera's glance is never 'objective', the visible field is continually threatened by the invisible so that even the closeness of the objects to the camera becomes threatening, all objects acquire a potentially ominous character, danger lurks everywhere - for example when the woman approaches the camera we perceive it as an aggressive invasion of our intimate sphere." Looking at Laimre, the same effect is from the opposite direction - everything is looking at us, and the result is no less irritating. A prerequisite of total paranoia is the belief that absolutely all objects are in some way connected with a total conspiracy against the subject. What then is persecuting us here? A cap, pizza boxes and a page of a German language textbook, all provided with a small security camera that keeps a sharp eye on the viewer. The biggest paranoid object is Completely Nothing. Looking at it from another angle, we get Absolutely Everything - this is the metaphorical, violent and unfair general key to the whole exhibition, because Laimre will never play himself into our hands with such a simple rhetorical castling. Standing in front of the above-mentioned works, your range of vision includes a display which is not reflecting you, but maybe someone else or nothing at all, but certainly the room where you find yourself. The much-loved video mirror of the 1970s has gone nuts and is doing weird things.
	The reader must surely guess by now that the ball is being played towards Lacan's goal. According to Lacan, any kind of video or audio-technology belongs in the field of the 'Big Other', among the control mechanisms of symbolic order where the sound and picture are transferred in time and space in harmony with reality. In the paranoid world, the authority of the Other becomes unstable and machines find themselves at the mercy of a shrewd and evil trickster. This is what happens in Lynch's Lost Highway, and this is what happens at Laimre's exhibition. In the first, the Other's other is a weird, devilish Stranger, Dick Laurent's friend, who has taken all the channels of objective information into his own hands. Laimre's work Untitled is a quern bearing the lettering "You are DJ". Turning the quern round, we hear the Sex Pistols's song Bootleg, horribly drawn out and distorted. If we took all that seriously we would be real morons. Now, thank heaven, this category applied only to Lacan.
	Psychoanalytical pizza Laimre has served the art critics a huge psychoanalytical pie (or Peter Stillman Pizza as Laimre would probably call it), and is expecting them to swallow it whole. Let us make a little trip into the world of the Lacanesque and other psychoanalytical images: the nice dried flies in Tallinn in Winter - nothing but the Real; personal fingernails collected over the course of several years in The End of the House is "At the End of the House" - naturally abject; a pretty little Lolita in Everything is Forbidden - what else but a nice little Humbert revealed behind the author's hidden desires. Psychoanalytical basting is most clearly visible in Completely Nothing - a gruesome empty face, camera peeping out from behind the missing teeth. All these works have come straight from the pawnshop of psychoanalysis, where you can endlessly borrow any kind of ready-made model in order to psychoanalyse all the art works of the world. The number of meanings of psychoanalysis is, after all, finite, because psychoanalysis is dead. We have indeed reached the end of the house - this time it's the end of the discourse house. Laimre is actually inviting us, art critics, on a stroll through his own head, because where else could that discourse house exist. What advice should be sought from papa Lacan in analysing the image of the fingernail 'abject hockey player' and/or 'snow shoveller'? If in the 1960s Orlan distributed an artist's kisses on street corners, live Gilbert and George sculptures could be seen at the Thames, and the shops sold Piero Manzoni's shit - it was supposed to be criticism of art-legitimising mechanisms. Compared with the sixties, only the legitimising mechanisms themselves have changed - the touch, authenticity and the signature of the artist have been replaced by clear-cut images and easy definability into one or another key of analysis. As with everything else, there are naturally only a limited number of those as well. With the best kind of art, there is only one, because it is easiest to display them like that at the art stock exchange and on magazine pages. Lucid symbols, lucid definitions from the storeys of a relevant pawnshop. Endlessly boring and dry repetitions. I would like to stress yet again - a (experimental-semiotic) question still remains: what the hell to do with the 'abject hockey player'?
	Investigating Idiotic Space According to political self-definition, Laimre is an individualist anarchist. This in itself is a totally idiosyncratic position, as it requires no consensus with anyone and nothing except itself. This position can be quite easily compared with the notion of the Conceptual Persona in the 'theory of philosophy' of Deleuze and Guattari. A Conceptual Persona is the author's agent, through whom he asks questions that are dangerous and unpleasant for the discourse, taking the discussion out of the boundaries of discourse. It does not matter whether the conceptual persona has been named, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, or not. Zarathustra is just a format of conceptual thinking.
	Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between affective and conceptual thinking. They regard the first as typical of the literary and artistic, the second as typical of philosophical and scientific thinking. At the same time they fully realise that all this is not so easily distinguished, and that the two can also intertwine. As for Laimre, this kind of opposition can hardly be applied at all. A Conceptual Persona, the Idiot, creates a Discourse of an Idiotic Space on the outer wall of the House. I believe that this is what Laimre has in mind when he also calls his art a research of Idiotic Space. This in fact is the very room that is not yet ready; the one "where the stoker makes the introduction, the hockey player finds the puck, and the snow shoveller screams horribly on a winter morning, preparing the ground."
	| Estonian Art 2/02 (12) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2002 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |