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It is possible, without a doubt, to talk about this particular Ando Keskküla painting in some other way. One could dwell at length on Estonian Hyper-Realism, on Keskküla as one of its central figures, on the 1970s, on photography, etc. I am, however, not so much interested in this painting and Keskküla, but rather in what the painting depicts, i.e. sport. Since the heat of national patriotism and the flame of passion in the hearts of armchair sportsmen has by now gone out like the Olympic fire, this would perhaps be just the thing, and the painting would be an excuse rather than a reason. Keskküla's cold Hyper-Realist eye has captured something essential about sport which makes the excuse just as good as any reason.
Sport should be something 'humane', measuring the abilities of a human body by human means of measurement - seeing for ourselves, say, who's in front and who's lagging behind, who is slower and who is faster. A photo finish, on the other hand, is something non-human. It records what remains outside human perception. It turns the body into a mathematical logarithm, numbers and bits, into a kind of mechanical cyborg, a combination of numbers that moves on the screen in slow motion. A photo finish transforms victory into a part of abstract mathematical reality, the settling of scores between machines in a world which exists somewhere beyond the decimal points. It's only a spectacle on the screen that has made the real competitions radical nonsense. In the opinion of Michael A. Weinstein, Professor of Political Philosophy at Purdue University, all Olympic Games could now be mixed together using the already existing shots. Thus there is no need to actually organise the Olympic Games - good video archives would suffice. So it also does not matter whether Keskküla painted this painting yesterday or twenty years ago.
It is, however, quite interesting how this painting came about in the first place. Keskküla painted it as a commissioned work in 1980 for the Moscow Olympic Games (Tallinn was involved too, hosting the regatta). Amongst artists associated with the circle of Hyper-Realists, sport as a subject matter was by no means rare. Keskküla's Finish with its air of alienation and coldness remains at a distance from its object, quite differently from Rein Tammik's Hockey Player (1975) and Lemming Nagel's Weightlifter and Cybernetic Stone (1977). Considering the trend's ideological starting points, Keskküla is therefore more 'Hyper-Realistic', whereas Tammik and Nagel display sharp irony.
Keskküla's irony is revealed on a far more subtle level - a finish is, in a sense, a metaphor for orgasm. Everything that precedes - training under the supervision of medical science and pumping chemicals into the bloodstream, even the competition itself, is but foreplay to achieve the total liberation of energy at that precise moment. The finish, however, is not the sportsman's personal orgasm; it is a collective orgasm. A sportsman is actually a humble 'spermatozoon' in the outlet channels of national/collective energy. A sportsman is an expendable unit that can be easily sacrificed (a fired weapon-body, to use Weinstein's term) in the name of the perverse satisfaction derived from nationalistic heat. A sportsman is a sacrificial lamb for the national feeling of unity. Sport is the ethical version of war. Our weapon-bodies are set against the weapon-bodies of others, and the war correspondents/sport commentators weigh the pluses and minuses of their weapons: the success of the arms race/training, efficiency and secrecy of new technical improvements/chemicals. Whether a bomb hit the target, or almost hit it or missed. And a whole army of TV channels makes sure we buy this video war in the evening, together with beer. A huge number of Doctor Frankensteins toils in this substitute war industry, every one of whom dreams of inventing a perfect monster who would be indistinguishable from a human being. Not just any human being, of course, but the best of his species, a superman whose powers would reach beyond any human limits. A perfect weapon-body. It would be even better if he could levitate and his gaze kill. Still, like the creation of all cartoon characters, at the beginning this particular conveyor belt manufactures only faulty products with one defect or another, which find their way to a rubbish heap after only a few years' usage. If we want the world to survive, the arrival of the final Terminator should be postponed as long as possible. In that sense, each Olympic Games is a postponement of the end of the world.
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