10 Questions by Peeter Linnap to Raoul Kurvitz

	1. Your work can probably be divided into 'periods' as with other artists who have been busy for a long time. What stages can you differentiate in your work? Oh, come on, you want me to start dividing my life into compartments like some senile 'classic'. But all right, I have in fact occasionally felt like someone who has already died several times. Although more detailed divisions are also possible, my work, at least to myself, can be quite clearly and distinctly separated into three stages. The first started with the founding of Rühm T (Group T) and was a series of actions beginning in 1986 that revolutionised the local art scene. We thus anticipated what was happening in society by more than two years. This was a sort of 'band period' - to tell the truth my art grew out of a rock band. My architecture studies at the art university were merely an alibi for a considerably more significant activity, the existence of Reval, a semi-underground band where the singer was Henry Laks, later a pop star. I was the 'artistic head', wrote texts and played the drums. Cooperation with Urmas Muru introduced a totally cosmic funk; he was the main force behind Group T's activities. We started off our conceits by winning the Estonian architectural competition for the Tallinn Fashion House - today the site is occupied by the Hotel Radisson, whose planning and configuration quite inevitably took into account our ideas of that time. It is strange to recall now that even in the field of art we declared ourselves 'new classics'. Our initial group also contained Hasso Krull who wrote under the pseudonym of Max Harnoon, already one of the best informed postmodern theoreticians back then. In 1987 and later, Peeter Pere, composer Ariel Lagle and several others joined us. Some reports seem to refer to Group T as my personal family undertaking - it included my late brother, poet Andres Allan, and all my lawful and otherwise beloved wives: Lilian Mosolainen, Ene-Liis Semper, Maria Avdjushko, etc. Every single one of them is very much a professional in her own right. This period lasted until 1992-93. The time of the Singing Revolution, the collapse of the horrendous Soviet mega-state, and Estonia's newly regained independence, saw more than fifty performances in all the Baltic Sea area countries, the 'Nordification' of trans-avant-garde and neo-expressionism, decadence, punk and techno, radical-liberal yuppie-anarchy, mythological painting and post-structural philosophy, the transformation of Kurvits into Kurvitz, and among other things, the transformation of 'the death of the author' announced by Roland Barthes to the 'death of a work of art' - and its rebirth as the result of the direct energy transmission between the author and the audience (my performance concept of the time; copyright: R. Kurvits, 1986). An entirely crazy, totally self-destructive period, which should logically have ended in our own deaths, but around 1993 when I was struggling to keep body and soul together, I had to admit to myself that I was still alive (my brother Andres Allan was not so lucky). A lengthy oscillation between heaven and earth now ensued, until 1996 when I managed to get my bearings again. I then focused on spatial installations, ascending through the Venice Biennial to a not overly modest solo exhibition in the Tallinn Art Hall. That successfully concluded my second period, the 'development of post-Group T Kurvitz'. The current period, 'continuing and furthering the already established handwriting', is the third. It started very dramatically in spring/summer 2000 with the tearing of all my previously functioning, existential threads, and with my exhibition About Love (Vaal-gallery) on deeply personal topics. This 'period' is still in a rather vague stage of development and it is too early to make any general observations about it. Although I take the things I do very seriously, I'd prefer to keep at a certain ironic distance from them. "You won't get me alive!", or something along those lines.
	2. How have these TURNS, Group T, Kurvits and Muru, USA, post-New-York, etc., changed you? Each time, radical changes in my creative accents occurred in synchrony with the dramatic turns in my private life and in the world in general. So I cannot really appreciate which of these circumstances came first or followed, and what caused what. Every described 'period' is founded on a 'shattering' private drama simultaneously with a turn that has shaken the world; creative 'turns', however, have taken place as premonitions rather than results.
	3. You went to New York, terribly bored with Estonia. You were fed up with the daily drifting between the Academy of Arts, Art Hall and your studio. Has something improved in that triangle syndrome? The triangle 'Academy - studio - Kuku-club' is, of course, only a figurative detail or metaphor, but I will gladly answer the question anyway. There are no such 'magical triangles' in New York where you are likely to get stuck. The triangle 'MOMA - studio - Blue Lounge' that seemed fascinating in the morning may well be replaced by another triangle in the evening, like 'PS-1 - Russian Vodkaroom - a friend's studio' (you might find yourself evicted from your own studio or home by your landlady who went mad in the afternoon). I notice that this indeed later liberated me from a certain routine, while I was readjusting to the Estonian situation. I don't think I will find any 'magical triangles' here any more. Hopefully.
	4. You and the USA. When you left Estonia you were socially engaged and someone perhaps quite spoilt by the critics. Did you have to start from scratch in New York? Did you have to change yourself AT ONCE? I can see at least three questions here. The first - the USA and me - I will answer in the next section. Whether or not I am 'spoilt' by critics is an altogether different question. Looking at it from a distance, it may easily seem that I am a seriously spoilt character. Alas, the media is in the habit of kicking out those it first places on a pedestal, and over long periods I have perceived a consciously cultivated institutional rejection from a number of people. And the third question - NATURALLY I had to start from scratch in New York. I only stuck to my creative credos and artist's handwriting - these seemed to be valid enough, and in that sense the NY experience increased my self-confidence no end.
	5. Following up on what you just said - what sort of experience did you get from the 'leading country in the world'? Do you share the opinion of some political scientists that America's heyday is over, and it is slowly but steadily declining? My relations with the USA are rather rough and rather private - I really liked those WTC towers enormously; I saw their destruction from the roof of my studio with my own eyes, and felt personally affronted because of these attacks. A quick aside to the everyday life: living in America I noticed the 'zero-tolerance principle' spreading among the population. It involves their condemnation and rejection the moment they discern the smallest thing about 'the other' that they don't like. I thus find it only fair to apply zero tolerance to them too. For example: get lost. Clear off. Beat it. All of them, without exception. Until the nation as a whole realises that it has not been able or willing to do something about the fact that they are represented by the administration of such a mental teenager as Bush, ignoring the Kyoto treaty, the UN and even NATO - until then every American should be ashamed of being American. Many of them already do feel like that. Similarly to us who had reason to feel like 'Soviets' under the gaze of the free world. Increasingly this is no longer a matter of any specific government or power structure, but a matter of the ordinary American citizen - I am positive that there is plenty of rot in US citizens' perceptions, attitudes, and constitutionally determined presidential 'democracy'. 'The most developed country in the world' - this is pure illusion. For over more than a decade the USA has consumed more than it exports; so the country in relation to the world economy, and the individual citizen in relation to his country, live on credit. In order to advance its economy, or indeed survive at all, the country which more than any other needs globalisation actually produces ever deepening isolation. If this policy continues, only the totally blind will not be able to predict the immediate bankruptcy of the USA. (I would not even like to comment on the 'commercial plan' of the Bush administration to associate economic improvement with increasing the defence budget and starting real wars in order to justify the priorities of the war industry. The lesson learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union should be only too fresh in the mind of even the stupidest person.) I'd like to conclude with the words of Leonard Cohen in his song Democracy is coming to the USA (quite a good title, isn't it just?): "Yes, I love the country, but I do not like the scene".
	6. Some critics have regarded you as someone who expresses 'pre-culture consciousness'. Do you agree, or is this yet another literary speculation? Take it as you will. I am indeed consciously interested in 'pre-culture consciousness', but the consciousness of my interest in fact contains a certain paradox. Although my outlets and tonality are quite different, I would here like to offer Pasolini as the paragon. Saturated with the deepest nuances of the history of world culture, Pasolini could talk for hours about antique, early renaissance and elitist modernism, stressing after each few sentences: "Poetico, poetico!!!" But Pasolini's work tells first of all about the most primeval pre-aesthetic and ethical urges that stand outside morals, and about their horrifying beauty. The paradox also lies in the fact that such 'pre-culture beauty' can be perceived only through consciousness that is POST-CULTURAL in essence.
	7. I have read somewhere that art to you used to be a feeling. What is it to you now? About 15 years ago I said in an interview: "Art is a feeling that emerges with the intense perception of the Existent in relation to Nothingness". The same sentence starts off my artist's statement on my web page www.kurvitz.com - the only difference being that the word 'perception' has been replaced by 'state of mind'. Art is a state of mind.
	8. It has been said that art's status quo changed radically at the turn of the millennium. Would you comment on that? It seems that in developed societies the real position of art and most of its possible functions have been clearly cut out during the last few decades, so that the new millennium certainly did not bring along any radical changes. On the basis of consecutive events unravelling after 11 September 2001 I would nevertheless expect some aesthetic and essential shift in the international perception of art and culture. In fact I'm surprised that it is so late in coming. I'm afraid it's simply because the set of real events is at a very early stage, and major upheavals are still ahead. Since nobody can predict these events, it would be absolutely pointless to sketch the possible art paradigm changes now. In my own art as a 'state of mind' at least I foresee the increasing connection with another, a more general sort of state of mind - meaning the joint symbiosis of a 'new type of war' and the ecological crisis in human consciousness which is still in its initial stage, but concerns all of us. This will naturally bring about changes on private existential levels.
	9. Outstanding persons invite contradictory opinions. Some think that to such people 'everything is allowed'. Others expect perfection of the Wunderkind-type people, almost in everything... The problem lies not in whether someone is a Wunderkind or 'outstanding', but in his or her personal special requirements and habits, as it were, that do not necessarily suit the usual norms. When someone regularly smokes 2-4 packets a day (like me), enjoys his most active working period from midnight to 5 in the morning, accompanied by loud music (like me), and despite the best intentions leaves all six coffee cups he is using at the same time scattered around the flat (like me, and worse things that I won't even mention here), then it would be best for him and society if he did all that alone and somewhere deep in the forest (which I indeed do, as much as possible). 10. Most artistic people have periods of low energy. I remember Dennis Oppenheim retreating into himself for years, or Estonian avant-garde artists desolatedly hitting the bottle. Have you experienced something similar, or do you effortlessly and cheerfully slide past them? Indeed I have those low energy periods, and very painful they are too. ... What would be the question we didn't talk about... Kurvitz, what about NYC then, will you go back there? Reply: Everybody asks me that, as if they couldn't help it (you didn't ask - my compliments). I have been putting off the return, partly because of money, partly telling myself that the situation after 11 September is totally unacceptable to me; still, I am reluctant to make a final decision. The most recent blow to me as a chain smoker was the total ban of smoking in NYC. Besides, my previous words in this very article about the USA (and I'm prepared to say plenty more elsewhere) are hardly likely to get me a visa in the near future.
	| Estonian Art 1/03 (12) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2003 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |