Ten Questions by Ando Keskküla to Andres Tolts

	1. In your younger days, you were considered a bohemian and a witty figure in public life. You often ridiculed the political hypocrisy of the period, and the mentality of grabbing something for one's self, which went on under its cover, quite sarcastically. You used to call such people the chaps from the Union of the Consumers' Co-operative of the Estonian SSR. Suddenly your life-style changed radically, without any apparent reason. What happened? Nothing drastic happened at all. The fact that my life style changed radically, without any apparent reason, as you put it, was perfectly natural because natural things do occur without apparent reasons. There's a time for everything; I just grew up. Being bohemian excludes responsibility and is only possible when you disregard other people. Beginning my new life together with my wife Mare Vint, I realised that drinking binges and an active social life are not the only means of free spiritual expression. There are other ways to achieve peace of mind and enjoy life. As regards the so-called 'co-operative chaps', this breed has always been flourishing, whatever name we choose to call it. It's a sphere of people without any kind of intellectual interests; they're vulgar and uneducated. How many people are there in the world anyway, who are truly interested in culture and need it. Culture tends to be confused with entertainment and according to popular opinion, is also something that everybody actually needs. Not so. Intellectual interests, or the lack of them, have no relation to anyone's financial state, but to a person's innermost nature. Wealth in itself is neither good nor bad. Both rich and a poor people can belong to the 'grey mass'; these are people without personal opinions who fail to value the freedom of an individual and his obligation to make decisions and choices. They wouldn't know how to anyway. Their contact with culture lies in consuming it, in the direct sense of the word. They long to be like everybody else. They want to be a mass, but simultaneously to stand out with their wealth and power. My attitude towards such political hypocrisy and the practise of grabbing something for one's self has remained just as sarcastic as it was thirty years ago. I can't see any connection with the bourgeoisie here. What is bourgeoisie anyway? In the Soviet Union they belonged to Soviet nomenklatura; now they are merely corrupt upstarts that have nothing to do with Christian values of life. I don't want to judge others though. I value freedom highly and consider it necessary for an individual to have his own space where he can exist and function according to his personal criteria of values. A person should enjoy life, and my present life-style suits me very well. Driving around Estonia, for example, I have seen evening skies like nowhere else, and I love that. Why is it like that, I've no idea.
	2. Many of those that you used to mock back then, or at least the same type of people nowadays, have become the buyers of your paintings. Thirty years later, what do you think of the 'gentle charm of the bourgeoisie'? My dear friend, these people have not become, nor will ever become, the buyers of my paintings. If a company or firm belonging to any such a person does have my paintings, it is due to the combined effort of galleries and interior designers who have convinced the owners that it is prestigious to hang such kind of art on their walls. Maybe contact with art like this will stimulate future interest in something else besides power and money. Luckily, there are people, and hopefully their number is increasing, who are prepared to spend money on art while satisfying their intellectual needs. 'The gentle charm of the bourgeoisie'? What is bourgeoisie and its opposite? Is the opposite proletariat, lumpenproletariat, peasantry, aristocracy? All that is so old-fashioned and Marxist. Does an artist have to belong to the lumpen or aristocracy? Using their own revolting expression, all those Marxs and Trotskys should be cast into the 'dustbin of history' once and for all, and the lid firmly closed. But rest assured, sooner or later someone will turn up eager to lift the lid and peep inside; envy and evil are not going to vanish.
	3. The changes in your way of life also seemed to indicate a decision to continue polishing and varying your established system of images. In the foreword of your jubilee catalogue, Jüri Hain mentioned notions like 'serialisation' and 'large series' that can be taken as a euphemism for 'self-repetition'. You are without a doubt one of the most extreme artists in Estonia who has limited himself (or has resigned himself to his limits) by using a minimal selection of images, and continually rearranging them. Pursuing one line throughout decades of the rapidly changing world of art, your art as a whole looks increasingly programmatic, as if based on a certain intellectual attitude. Could you describe your attitudes and principles that have not changed over the course of time? My general attitudes have not changed so much. I've always trusted my instincts, and if you have a gift - visual sensitivity in case of an artist - you have to serve it honestly. If you have your own visual experience that you believe in, then you have a duty to further it. Art cannot be based on doubts; you must be certain of yourself. Creation always means choosing and giving up. Life is short and man is mortal; there's no need to look for the philosopher's stone, but to cut your own stone instead. Refuting your own self and changing something for the sake of change and trends is rubbish. You have to feel sympathy for what you do. It's stupid, even insolent to poeticise your own troubles and worries and then present them as art. I am awfully glad that I exist and can thus participate in everything to add something that was not there before. I have already said somewhere that I value harmony and order. I can't help loathing chaos in spirit or in life either. About the series you mentioned, I can say that one painting is definitely not enough to realise the visual ideas of the series. They are expressed rather in process and continuity, within a scheme of limited composition that can be taken as a 'standard skeleton' on which I grow individual 'flesh'. For me, this means an analysis of the individual and the general; this is possible namely by making use of the serialisation.
	4. As young artists, we were both fascinated with esoteric and occult disciplines and their sign systems. Your work still reveals either direct quotations or at least a certain logic with which you construe signs in your pictures. What's your relation to occult sciences, Rosicrucianism or freemasonry today? My relation to Rosicrucianism and freemasonry is merely curiosity, like 30 years ago. I do not belong to any lodge. My sympathy and interest towards Christian mystics and the above-mentioned occult movements can be explained by the fact that the principles contained in them confirm my own experience and observations. They also support the perception of a world which believes in the cognitive mediating role of the visual image, sign and colour. I believe that a work of art can be a materialised, spiritual idea. I've always been fascinated by the border of contacts between reality and illusion, the abstract and the natural. Hence, the frequent co-existence of the abstraction and the realistic image in my works. I don't draw a fixed line between the reality and fantasy; they exist simultaneously.
	5. Tiit Pääsuke once referred to your exceptional choice of colour and colouring. I could not agree more. Is this your 'genetic peculiarity' or does it perhaps originate from spending your childhood on Suve street in Tallinn, and the milieu of Pelgulinn? It may well be my childhood home and the milieu. Maybe it's due to my great wanderlust through all sorts of wastelands and in scrap metal yards. A child's first visual perceptions and observations are naturally very intense. They're not to be forgotten; they hide in your unconscious.
	6.Is it only on summer evenings in Pelgulinn or on the wastelands where one might have an inkling of the harmonies between rusty brown, military green and warm blue? Indeed an entrancing view of the Toompea stronghold over the rust red tin roofs, if I now recall climbing from my attic to the roof of the house, I could enjoy. There was blue sky overhead, at all times. (I obviously never climbed there in rainy weather.) As for warm summer evenings, these induced sadness in me even in my childhood. I now know that summer evenings are followed by autumn, winter and death. But you don't have to live in Pelgulinn (I lived on its border, in Kelmiküla - The Village of Rascals) in order to be aware of all that. I have had similar experiences in New York, Sicily and Berlin. The same Pelgulinn everywhere. 7. It seems that in your later work you have paid special attention to the colouring, at times even construing it. I have never taken the efforts of some critics seriously who have tried to label you as a painter or a follower of painting traditions and referred to your 'brushwork' or 'colour harmony'. In your case, the first is unnoticeable; it's flat. The second, every artist in advertising or fashion deals with. It is not possible to define you in this context. But besides the sweeping, primitive world of colour pictures, which is standardised by the letter combinations CMYK and RGB, I am interested in the possibility of other worlds of colour. Colouring as a colour space is quite a different contextual notion from 'colour harmony'. How important is colouring to you? Colouring is really important to me. The tasteful harmony in the vein of applied art has never appealed to me though; this is a dead world. For me, colour is a message expressed by nothing else but colour. It doesn't matter what the pretext is to exhibit one particular colour, be it a real object, sign or line. The reality of colour is equal to other phenomena of the rest of the real world, including material objects. Perhaps this explains some people's inability to understand abstract art; they want real objects. Such people find it impossible to understand art if there aren't any objects or a literary story. Those that open their eyes, will understand. I think that in visual arts, at least in painting, the colour space is more important than is generally believed. Brushwork is complete nonsense. It's of no interest to me whatsoever; I don't care whether the paint is streaming or carefully applied. Everything depends on the wish and the picture's structure. 8. Colouring may well be the key word or formalistic code that can provide painting with 'another breath', instead of the ridiculous efforts of recent years to pitchfork this field of art (or a particular artist) into media. This would naturally require a subtlety of mind, obviously achievable only for precious few. What do you think of the collective painting exhibitions of recent years? The trouble with recent years is that some painters, having heard of the 'death of painting', have panicked. They now hope that by implanting all sorts of stories and elements which are alien and unnecessary, they are saving what can be saved. They do not trust themselves or the possibilities of painting, and struggle in the clutches of various trends. They have no idea what they actually want. All this talk about no criteria for good and bad art is nonsense. Criteria do exist; they have always done so. It means the realisation of a wish, as fully as possible. Of course if the wish is stupid, there's nothing to be done about it. Painting has a niche which enables it to express what the other fields of art cannot. If you know that, there's no cause for panic. Contemporary art theory often creates confusion. It leaves aside the independent possibility of expression of the visual message, or at least underestimates it, while being completely word-focused itself, like the Old Testament. Art theory, and hence artists, no longer have faith in the unique expression that is at their disposal; they seek help from WORDS. Such straight transference of literary theory does not, thank heaven, yet exist in music. Composers still have faith in sounds. As for pitchforking into the media, this follows quite different aims and rules. This is another subject altogether. I haven't seen any of the collective exhibitions of recent years, although I have taken part in them. 9. My thesis is that 'art does not belong to the people'! (No-one requires that in science or medicine, after all.) Would you sign to that? Naturally. People have never been interested in art, but there are always some who care. 10. Do you still have our correspondence, dating from when I served in the Soviet army, that we planned to publish one day? I suppose I still have them somewhere, though I'm not sure where exactly. From today's point of view this would be a real anachronism. Imagine - telephone, e-mail etc. It was the nineteenth century! Wasn't it just splendid and moving too, the way we corresponded over the whole year, you in Bologoye on the plains of Sarmatia, and I from Tallinn-Reval in (Soviet) Estonia. We wrote a letter every two weeks because it took that long for a message to travel. We discussed what was going on in the world, described our experiences, and expressed opinions. Our thoughts were so similar.
	| Estonian Art 2/99 (6) | Published by the Estonian Institute 1999 | ISSN 1406-5711 | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |