Eat ethical pâté in Estonian-style niches!
	Riin Kübarsepp

	“Everything starts with the fact that we see what we really want to see. Is cutting an eyeball in two with a razor a cliché? Yes, as long as it is not your eyeball! It is difficult to give up something, being quite alone in your doings. A time will come when the lion and sheep will eat out of the same bowl. Fresh, blood-dripping meat is what we need!!! It is very healthy to consume every morning, say, four-five chicken hearts or a few slices of soft cow’s tongue. Man must retain his complexion and have potential, as much as he can. A definite advantage is a large shoe size that must be stuck in the door. One should be more careful with fingers. Instead of peeping through keyholes, let us open the doors, using the picklock if necessary. Tools of life and death are suitable also for other types of usage. All this, however, remains between the beginning and the end, diminishes and fades in the glow of the two great meanings. Throughout ages, man has been tortured by the question: “Why are we doing what we are doing?” The answers are often hidden deep in the unconscious, and the person himself often cannot grasp them fully, let alone a bystander. Despite that, different interpretations are ceaselessly offered, although the possibility of different interpretations is bigger when the action is more complicated. Castration carried out with the sound of fanfare is pretty for those who are able to appreciate music. A matter of taste! For a creative person, rationality, logic and common sense are not primary criteria. This makes it difficult to answer the primitive question: “What do you mean with this work?” A creator is richer than the viewer who admires the result by the creative process. The satisfaction and enjoyment received from that process constitute the engine of artistic work. Eternal topics, life and death, offer plentiful possibilities of expression, as well as interpretation. What you see and feel in our work can be compared with excretion. The material well worked through squeezes itself out, thus making room for the oncoming raw material waiting to be digested. For fear of violating the existing rules in society, we let the excrements dissolve in the sewage, rather than spread it on infertile soil without any shame. What you see is satisfying our natural needs. Or maybe it is satisfying our sexual urges in an unnatural way?”
	This is what Erik Alalooga and Meeland Sepp said about their art project at the Estonian cultural days in Basel [Unternehmen Mitte, 16.11.–03.12. 2006 – Ed]. Erik Alalooga and Meeland Sepp do not yet belong in the bulky overviews of official Estonian art, such as The Short History of Estonian Art or 22 +. They have nevertheless been mentioned in various international art catalogues and collections. Just like two brothers, they balance and inspire each other with their ideas both on the conceptual and material level. Their work cannot always be seen in the category of installation, but of sculpture. In their installations, they have decided to turn sculpture as a form upside down, thus opening the metaphor of a kind of ‘non-form’. As a student of Jaan Toomik [video and performance artist, professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts – Ed], Alalooga defended his MA in interdisciplinary arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts with the writing, Sauna – cradle of the world revolution, plus the installation Välk & Pauk (Bang & Blast). Alalooga explained that the sauna with its pagan roots indeed symbolises the Estonian unconscious, which has the place of a certain ritual in our mythology. In the artist’s opinion, the dark black steam room evokes a sensation of infinity that seems to embody the cosmos, and the heated pile of stones represents the sun. In the middle of that pseudo-universe is MAN. Claude Lévi-Strauss has written about wild thinking where the original sources of thinking and deeds are sought. In an ethno-futuristic key, these sources are also sought by Alalooga. In the author’s opinion, it is here that the history of Estonian ready-made and performance art begins. Alalooga often uses old discarded objects, providing them with a new coat. This kind of trash art concept and aspect are precisely his aim. At the performance art festival MOHNI 2003, Alalooga erected an installation at the seashore, using the weights of the former fishery and the workers’ old metal cupboards for clothes. We can draw many parallels here with the work of Anthony Caro, who also focused on various metal forms found in industrial refuse. Richard Serra’s aggressive metal structures in urban space have much in common with Alalooga’s work as well. Serra tried in a tirelessly conceptual manner to demonstrate the ability of material to convey certain type of energy and tension that emerge in any specific environment.
	Meeland Sepp who teaches welding and metal cutting at Academia Grata [alternative art school in Pärnu – Ed] is considered in artistic circles as a sculptor with a scandalous reputation. Because of his powerful and veristic manner of presentation, his work is much more aggressive than Alalooga’s. Via his construction of machinery of pleasure and torture he examines the nooks and crannies of human subconscious and psyche. The original springs and biggest inspirational sources come from the land of the notorious Viennese Actionists, such as Herman Nitsch or Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose chief principle was to discover truth in art, and not myth. The Jungian I and the Unconscious best characterises Sepp’s work. At the annual Estonian Artists’ Association’s exhibition in 2006, Tehnobia, Sepp presented Machine of Producing Erotic Gravitation. The subtext of the work is also specifically Jungian. He tries to separate the individual from the collective psyche. On the basis of his works, in similar battle, it is the collective that usually wins. In his performances with various machinery he uses the so-called mass scenes where there is no place for the individual. This strategy is the trademark of the group Non Grata, as he, after all, is one of the most remarkable members of that group. Sepp’s machinery of torture seems brutal, referring to the approaching chaos, but in fact he merely wishes to experiment. As an artist, he is always ready to take risks and face challenges, trying thus to find out the truth about himself. How then do the large-scale joint forces function within the frames of one artistic element, where masochism is always opposed to sadism. Paraphrasing Honoré de Balzac, only the savages, peasants and provincials ponder about things in all their aspects. In conclusion, everything turns out perfect nevertheless. This kind of thinking alludes to an archaic image of the spirit of nature. The latter exists and is primary in the work of Alalooga and Sepp as well. Sepp’s works reflect sexual urges that from the point of view of a bystander (read: the audience) are tragically self-destructive. The author himself reaches a catharsis via such artistic orgasm, something that other human souls do not necessarily achieve. Anyway, Sepp’s works seem to be mostly based on visual and internal spiritual pain. In his work, Alalooga is more erudite and refined, whereas Sepp is more genuinely sincere. The works of both Alalooga and Sepp are generally quite irritating in their singularity. At the same time these are not always place-specific works. The purposeful opposition place versus location is frequently reflected in their exhibition places. The system mostly starts functioning when the welded rusted metal constructions are placed in a sterile gallery room with white walls. The recently quite topical debates in Estonia about monuments take a different shape in the work of Alalooga and Sepp. What part did monuments have in ancient cultures when stone figures were sculpted, or in the conceptual art at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries? Here we meet the old dichotomy where an answer is sought to the relations between the eternal and the ephemeral. Especially in art. Riin Kübarsepp (1978), art critic, MA student at the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts
	| Estonian Art 2/06 (19) | 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 |