10 Question Marks to Artist Marko Laimre

	1.What would you say if I interpreted your last exhibition HERE, which you did together with Ene-Liis Semper, as contemporary Christian art? Semper's departures (e.g. to a 'New home') would in that case be not so much an expression of a psychoanalysis-related latent death wish, but rather an infinite yearning for the kingdom of heaven; and your own trial in the exhibition's opening action, L'île mysterieuse, would treat monk-like piety in the face of the communication catastrophes... I would be most surprised if you could somehow convincingly demonstrate, that my works can be at all sensibly interpreted by way of the trinity, ascension, redemption and the like; nice romantic ideas, of course, but in my opinion they've been exchanged for different options a long time ago... Besides, why Christianity of all the other religions, and not atheism, microsoft, eco, television or Islam for example. Incidentally, everything depends on... what follows (referring to John Deely). If the half-past-eight commercial break tomorrow will have a live programme from Jesus, then obviously your version is the most probable. Quite a big risk, though, to anticipate the demise of Pampers, isn't it? The thing is that since I can't imagine any superior and at the same time contemporary bearer of truth (a kind of moral hard disc, maybe?) existing outside my own self, language and pain, then I'm more interested in the notion of contemporaneity. If it's something that in my closest imagination would be a place (room/point) where they receive your empty bottles, where the future hands over packages that have been sucked empty, then Christianity is just one part of this recycled heap, equal to others. And I fail to see any special reason to associate myself with any specific presence here. In Peter Haneke's film Funny Games, a nice contemporary Christian prayer goes like this: "Dear God, make me pious quickly so I can sleep well in heaven." Stress on the words quickly and well... Well.
	2. Do you consciously plan a certain interpretative horizon for your works? You have no allergy towards ready-made interpretation schemes, psychoanalytic treatments of personality for example? Yes, certainly. It is almost impossible to tell how one or the other work will be interpreted, it depends on so many unpredictable factors... the process of making a piece of art in itself constitutes a whole chain of decisions, interpretations and analyses... This sort of universal psychoanalysis is undoubtedly already written into each and every contemporary work, either intentionally as a fixed decision or as an automatic self-evaluation. Perhaps it would be wiser to bear in mind that every analytic who happens to examine some type of machine-patient, finds himself under examination as well. That's the main problem of interactive art, after all! How this machine of analysis, being in full working order, could keep the input in work. If our dreams could be taped, then... no-one would probably do anything else. As long as there is electricity. As long as there is sleep. The most interesting paragraphs for me as the one who is being analysed, are the ones discarded by the viewer, that for some reason do not fascinate the analyser. These paragraphs thus acquire a meaning, they become significant and the I in the process of analysis changes positions. Art is not a puzzle. Nor a trap. Rather an experimental-semiotic machine about the possibility of one or the other.
	3. In your recent work, for instance in the video Lost Point, you seem to continue with your psycho-trip from the same loony house where Sugar Free started, leaving aside Foucaultian critique of institutions¡ What has changed? The four-liner in Lost Point: "You expected light and work, but got darkness and night instead" in its other reality - painful and endlessly backwards-rolling - is an epitaph in the Sugar Free graveyard. An allusion to the possibility of another kind of demise before death constitutes here their joint black box. What matters is the kind of freedom the work's main character has, maybe even its direction if you will. Its possibility only in relation to camera and screen (surface-screen-shell-crust- ... etc.). Sugar Free functioned as a time machine of some neurotic space; Lost Point, on the other hand, dissolves the chain of cause/effect through a contents that can be claimed to have vanished. Just that. It's not possible to say where it vanished, or to fix its death. But figuratively speaking, it might be possible to actually get/escape/enter through that kind of void from the present neurotic space into another (neurotic?) space. This act is traumatic and meaningful. And technically very much resembles something we call truth. Can't quite get by without Foucault, after all. A link of its own could also be David Lynch's Lost Highway.
	4. How many times must van Gogh's ear be cut off? Why HERE? Before Vincent was done with his ear, a sound action had to take place. Knife in contact with ear. I've always been fascinated by his paranoid dissatisfaction with the persistent symmetry, a kind of anti-stereo movement regarding his auditory organs. The action arranged with a pig's ear in a sound studio is an obsessively presented photo-documentary way of interpretation of Psycho. An attempt to transmit Vincent's auditory sound into an idiosyncratic order: "Kill yourself!", and the readiness of a boxful of round crackers to support it, do not provide an answer to the repetition, but open up an entire chain of possibilities for the mutually transmitting discourses, so far only either sonant or pictorial. What was primary about the exhibition HERE, is significant also here; i.e. occupying ourselves with something we deem possible and important. For example the eternal holes in round crackers, referring to Ossip Mandelshtam.
	5. Could you describe the actual making of an installation. How things around you become signs, turn into organisms, info-batteries that generate meanings and feelings in reciprocal allusions? The Bible in a video picture and a baby's cap in the installation Mother is Washing Windows? Firstly, this book is not the Bible. It's the same Jules Verne's L'île mysterieuse, an edition of 1926, I think. With excellent illustrations, by the way. Last summer I busied myself with notions of screen and machine. I argued about taking the notion of machine-being out of such cyber-aesthetic discourse of modernism and body-machine. Obviously: I-machine, he-machine, she-machine, etc. Closer to social constructedness. Machine-roles and role-machines and all that ensues from that. I found myself analysing a childhood trauma. In my first or second year at school, I once walked home from school, wind-torn trees, grey weather, warm autumn, hands smeared with ink, smell of window cleaning liquid, mother washing windows, the curtains pulled back, etc. At first, the episode seemed to consist of one specific moment, and it is quite beyond me to understand what had left such strong traces on that endless 'I-drive'. After all, nothing happened. Everything was ordinary, everyday. During the process, rather confusing factors emerged if one left out the horror of the deserted air of the house with the dark, curtainless, windows. My specific fact consisted of events that could only have happened either a long time before or after this localisation of memory. I had to draw the inevitable conclusion that the clearly visual and cognitive existence of the artefact, so vital to me, was made possible by completely casual earlier and later events. Further activity consisted of its descriptions. So - 'in a literary sense' I could only say that mother was washing the windows (I was coming from school). The rest of the description consisted of speech and gestures supporting the speech. For me, visual image and utterance mattered most. The rest was pure art process and editing. I set my mind on a three-metre kinetically moving plywood. Mother who would go through the motions of washing windows; something resembling machine-mother or mother-machine. This was fairly easy. The other half of the sentence (I was coming home from school) was more complicated. The question was that if I could relatively easily demonstrate that Mother washed the windows timelessly and without reason, then taking I was coming home from school out of repetition (documentality) would not have worked, it became useless. I abandoned the great kinetic construction in favour of certain primary images, at the same time making them more screen-specific and simpler in a purely linguistic sense. I had taken the cause/effect association to a visually legible result for myself. This book about a mysterious island is tied and a video net is sizzling on its ties. Baby cap is meant for humanisation and personification of the book-object. It has traversed a certain painful, association-demanding action. The wind is swinging the branches and transparent hands glow against the light.
	6.It seems to me that different elements in your various works can be fairly freely rearranged... let us take, say, crackers, flagstaff holders, subjective maps, a straightjacket... What are these? Floating markers? You leave loose ends, but are so particular about titles... All these are extremely necessary parts of certain experimental-semiotic machines. I cannot imagine exchanging a car wheel for a Rubic magic cube. The new machine would be similar to the old, but could be used on the basis of new principles. Any textual part in a work of art, for example, is just as important as anyone who has seen it. Instead of floating, I would employ a somewhat more hysterical and active characterisation of the denominator. What on earth is a floating flagstaff holder anyway! It's true - they are all characterised by an interest in different interpretations, but neutrality, I think, is mere camouflage. A transparent disguise to the most concrete anxiety between language and reality.
	7. You are primarily known for your photo-installations and objet d'art. Was working with video for the last exhibition something essentially different for you? I have the feeling that the essential difference is not proceeding along technological borders. However vigorous the so-called neo-optimist 'Soviet' propaganda, one must always keep in mind that art is not a communication-technological standard-bearer. Obviously in linguistically determined boundaries of one or the other technology, I would still hope that for example video art is not dependent on the variety of effects on the montage desk. Otherwise video art would be like taping a camera on to Lassie's tail and record the eleven year old Lolita, carrying a bunch of red roses, crashing down on the asphalt and scratching her knees. Then use 75 per cent slowdown (it would ease the shivering of Lassie's tail), minimal colours (adding the sublime) and heart-rending sounds of cello, thus turning it into an half-hour profound religious meditation. I don't know. I've worked with a hand mill too. But mostly I work with my head. It's only different in principle.
	8. Some time in 1996 you wrote how changes in the socio-political situation makes you as an artist depressed, because it requires you to 'readjust yourself' and finds a solution in the 'post-depressive' art derivied from a new author's position. What kind of social changes do you perceive behind the altered author's positions of your latest exhibition? Now, four years later, I still think that it was maybe too simplistic, not exactly wrong, but it fails to explain a whole set of phenomena that in the widest sense seem to accompany such a paradigm as creation. Like the behaviour of people within a certain social-economical position. I mean here people of average mentality who discover that the work they are doing is actually useless and even embarrassing. For example, driving a cart, working with clay, secretly writing poetry, researching Taoism, become Vikings, etc... Looking back, I've noticed that during my work of the last six years, the things I've shown, have come about via a very narrow decision. Whenever a work was in the danger of being 'social', 'political' or exploiting 'public' air balls in some other way, I have mostly chosen a self-centred and idiosyncratic position, namely via this kind of impetus. A need to overturn this impetus is probably about to appear, or at least have a more serious attitude towards similar challenges. On the whole, the supposed language of freedom in society is being replaced by the languages of security, bureaucracy, communication technology, consumerism, etc. I don't like this society as a whole, but what can I as an artist possible say in these languages? Kill yourself! Hanno Soans & Marko Laimre Tallinn 7 December 2000
	| Estonian Art 2/00 (8) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2000 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |