Imaginary side of an iceberg: the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia – a parable or a call of nature?
	Maria-Kristiina Soomre

	The year 2007 will be remembered in the history of heroic deeds of Estonian art as the birth year of a new institution – the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (CAME). It is too early to predict whether history will preserve the institution itself or, rather, the situation that gave birth to the museum. Today we can primarily speak of an imaginary museum, a concept, an opportunity; we can reflect on the museum as a name. The museum is working in an area of good prospects in the district of the Tallinn harbour; it is housed very near the Tallinn City Concert Hall in an abandoned industrial building that is a part of the creative park Kultuurikatel / Culture Cauldron (still under construction) at Põhja Blvd 35. The initiative group of the museum includes several active participants of the official art world.* The public-targeting activities of the museum, its work primarily focused on exhibiting young artists’ works, actually proceeds from this street address, but the museum as an idea is living its active life in the minds of the initiative group and its routine work is done at different addresses. The public practice of the museum has so far been centred on the freshest, even on only the half-ripe, art of students and no ambitious political statements have, seemingly, been made. The founders of the museum would, most probably, prefer to treat the CAME as a provocative Molotov cocktail sent flying into the windows of the neural centres of the local lukewarm art world. But precisely what do we have here?
	These rooms in the territory of Kultuurikatel have already been used as an exhibition space for grading the Estonian Academy of Arts students’ works. Under the badge of the Contemporary Art Museum, two exhibition projects have so far been shown to the public and the brand of the Museum (and its logo bearing a black and a white flag) has thus been launched. In spring 2007, the doors were first opened under the name of the museum, displaying the EAA students’ exhibition Dream Economy, curated by Marco Laimre. This was an “analysis of architecture, real estate and dreams from the London Tube up to Moscow and from ‘nowhere’ up to the village of Soodevahe behind the Tallinn Airport”. The project discussed the “so-called ‘free trade zones’ between dreams and reality and economic conflicts between illusions and spatial necessities” (quoted from the curator’s text). This was slightly more than a routine end-of-theterm grading, something – at least nominally – contemporary but, at the same time, nothing too … exciting, at first.
	The second exhibition of the Museum, by a new set of EAA students under the same curatorship, titled Something is Wrong, offered more exciting, or at least more interactive, art, such as a modernist model of a prohibition and surveillance society from Timo Toots (the installation Don’t, consisting of two pedestals, a red button and a composition of toy bricks that would collapse after an onlooker had pushed the button, and a live showing of this over the Internet), or Kristiina Hansen’s comment on the quackery industry in the form of a machine for divining the future using coffee grounds. In his accompanying text, the curator Laimre interpreted the exhibition as follows, “Something is Wrong is an exhibition of photo, video and interactive art, analysing the coherence of our everyday reality. The exhibition displays propositions and descriptions of the present time, offered by the newest Estonian art, which poses questions about existence. Something is Wrong discusses manifestations of the truth that lies behind fantasy by using humour, horror and a multiplicity of representational forms, and bravely hails different art practices and other social projects.” As the damp and unheated rooms of the Museum do not favour projects of longer duration and, consequently, of public-related social practices, the same exhibition later travelled to the South, to Tartu.
	By claiming that art is, actually, not the ‘most interesting’ aspect of CAME as a phenomenon, I by no means want to underrate the young authors who have exhibited at the first two projects or will exhibit in the future, but I believe that the exhibition activities are, in both the ambitions and practice of the Museum, only a means of creating social and political capital (this is not an accusation of corruption). In one of the few media interviews about the Museum, its keeper, Marco Laimre, describes the CAME as an ‘anarchist property’ (EE 04.10.07 “EKKM – seen või umbrohi kultuurimaastikul?” / “CAME – A Fungus or a Weed in the Cultural Landscape?”), and hints that the creation of the museum was conditioned by a need and a favourable situation in the arts. Art historian Anneli Porri analyses the activities of the museum and sees it as a model ‘collective institution’, an institutional (institutionfree?) intersection of the art world, a meta-institution based on idealistic adherents (Sirp 02.11.07 “EKKM – mis siis valesti on?” / “CAME – What’s Wrong?”)
	In order to understand the position of CAME, it would probably be fruitful to attempt to describe the present situation in Estonian art. I cannot adopt the role of a detached observer here, as being an employee of the Kumu Art Museum, I carry a part of the symbolic collective guilt. Namely, during its two years of operation, Kumu has developed, in a certain sense, The CAME in the Culture Cauldron into probably the most painful reference point of the local art world. This project, which draws together about a century of dreams, expectations and hopes, this massive building devoted to the history and present day of Estonian art, signifies too many too different expectations, which will make it hard to find positive allies in a society that has not yet completely overcome the changes of the 1990s. A kind of opposition to it has developed among some artists. The artists voice their reasoned and unreasoned criticism of Kumu quite readily, but focus their criticism mostly on the permanent exposition and, primarily, on the art of the Soviet period, where everyone has an opinion about the historical truth. The circles of contemporary art temporised for a long time; some of them did not identify with Kumu at all, many others, however, projected their most radical expectations and most current plans onto the Kumu’s fifth-floor gallery, the exposition of contemporary art. From the right and from the left, directly and in the corridors, Kumu was accused of both a lack of radical views and of a too intense exhibition programme. After a long time, even some instances of almost serious theoretical institutional criticism were heard. An absurd situation developed, where Kumu was accused of not being a Kunsthalle and at the same time for exhibiting contemporary art at all. The idea of founding and developing a ‘museum of modern art’ was proposed (Leonhard Lapin, and even Marika Valk, the general director who had built Kumu, toyed with the idea), but this was never followed through on.
	At the same time, the rest of the institutional playground was in full swing – the Tallinn Art Hall was living probably its best and most interesting days in a long time, and small galleries affiliated with the Artists’ Associtation exhibited young art in its well-recognised quality and consistency. The only Estonian non-profit private gallery, the Rael Artel Gallery started regular work in Tartu in spring 2006, having by that time already established itself, in a garage in Pärnu and in a flat in Tallinn, as a representative gallery of independent young and contemporary art. The Pärnu Non Grata group directed its activities beyond its borders, as well as opening a gallery in another abandoned factory building in Tallinn that had also been hijacked for art. The Academy of Arts has more and more forcefully supported its students’ participation in the active art scene, etc, etc, etc.
	To sum up, we can say that we have gone through an effective period of institutional self-determining and a strengthening of positions. At the same time, the problems of financing art have become less and less transparent in the face of growing competition, which has unavoidably led to symbolic oppositions between state and independent institutions. State institutions, which have to design their exhibition programmes around the burden of the task of earning their own resources, are supported by the same sources as independent institutions, based on curatorship and fellowship of adherent views, even though their budgets, as well as their social responsibility, may differ by a thousand times. This situation could well be called schizophrenic. In this light, the emergence of the CAME is truly symptomatic. A museum of contemporary art that is opposed to Kumu, its opposition being veiled in rhetoric but programmatic in practice, was not born to ‘re-create Estonian life’, to shoulder art political tasks and to fulfil the, so far, overlooked functions. The CAME is a classical institution with an institutional critical agenda; it is an inflammation bacterium that will either destroy the organism or help to strengthen it, depending on the organism’s immune system and readiness. The CAME is a challenge (we could even say a call of nature), an (almost) imaginary museum, because it (probably) cannot be any other way. * Team of the CAME includes Anders Härm, Elin Kard, Neeme Külm and Marco Laimre. Maria-Kristiina Soomre (1978), art historian and critic, project manager of Kumu auditorium. Recently curated the exhibition Biennial of Dissent ’77 in Kumu Art Museum, a project from the series Archives in Translation (2007).
	| Estonian Art 2/07 (21) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2007 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |