Nuclear physicist at the window
Andres Kurg

	The first issue of the magazine Art and Home (1979) contains a series of pictures of a flat filled with plaster heads of various sizes; it almost seems as if the heads have taken over the entire normal space for living. One photograph, a detail view of the same room, shows an elongated plaster portrait of a skinny man, with an emphatically large skull and shining glass eyes; through the window behind the man we see a monotonous row of similar houses, probably in Õismäe. The man is Nuclear Physicist, one of the best-known works of sculptor Ülo Õun, and the pictures in the magazine were in all likelihood taken in Õun's own home. Nuclear Physicist was first displayed shortly after its completion in 1969, at the spring exhibition in the Tallinn Art Hall. Õun's other works, generalised portraits of representatives of various fields of life (I wouldn't dare refer to them as human types), date from the same period: Chemist, Surgeon, and Fighter. Characterising Õun's works of that period, the vocabulary is more or less the same: the faces are grotesque, seen from an ironic point of view, parodying, satirical, with a rough finish, as if not quite completed, not traditional. A similar, occasionally rigid, critical description tries to emphasise Õun's peculiarities in the wave of art innovations of the 1960s, oppose him to the manifestations of Estonian sculpture's handicraft skills and painstaking finishing, and stress his remarkable freedom in expressing sculpture's inner values. In the key of the Soviet all-work-is-good rhetoric, Nuclear Physicist a dozen years before would have depicted a diligently modelled scientist brimming with pathos, either carved in stone or cast in bronze. He might have the same high forehead, a reference to brisk intellectual activity (a cliché taken from phrenology, which official monumental artworks have repeatedly used, without any sense of criticism), or a concentrated glance, which sees distant, even unimaginable worlds unattainable to ordinary people. The 'official' features of Õun's work, however, are horribly distorted and augmented: the fanatical expression of the Nuclear Physicist suggests a possibly crazy scientist, detached from the world, his morbidly thin appearance inevitably bringing to mind an existence within a higher than allowed radiation zone. The main difference, from both the officially approved monumentalism and the moderate abstractionism of his colleagues, lies in the freedom of treating sculpture's own rules and petrified hierarchies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ülo Õun only used plaster, regarded as a material much less 'dignified' than traditional bronze and stone, or simply a preparatory material for 'real' work. In 1972 an art reviewer wrote, hopefully, in the cultural weekly Sirp and Vasar (1) (Hammer and Sickle), that in the future the artist 'will try with real materials as well'. In addition to its temporary nature and the typically casual impression that plaster offers, Õun emphasised this by painting the figures with pastel colours (Chemist) or inserting glass eyes (Nuclear Physicist). When Õun produced this portrait, he was making stuffed animals at the Natural History Museum, where he was assigned after graduating from the Art Institute. The glass eyes were obviously the same he used while stuffing animals for the museum's glass cases. Probably these same features, tricks of the trade obtained from making the practical stuffed animals and transferred to the figures in the art hall, have given cause to associate Õun's sculptural innovations with the then extremely topical pop art, and with upsetting the established hierarchies of material and technology. Revealing the realism code of sculpture, disturbing it with the realism code of stuffed animals, kitchy 'real' eyes instead of plaster 'artificial' ones, or the later huge portrait heads - these factors make it possible to interpret Õun in the surrealist key. I'd like to leave these lines of argumentation aside now and return to the magazine photographs mentioned at the beginning.
	The photographs were published in the magazine Art and Home, a most important publication for Estonian art and culture in the 1970s. Its editor and designer was artist Andres Tolts, who turned the practical home design magazine into an ambitious publication devoted to spatial arts and environmental theories. It additionally had a Russian-language parallel with a print run of 40 000, thus making it one of the largest magazines in the entire Soviet Union at the time. The series of photographs of Ülo Õun's sculptures illustrates Jaak Olep's article 'Sculpture in Interior', one of the many articles belonging to the magazine's favourite genre, artworks at home. The singularity of Art and Home, which primarily focused on the visual side compared with the standard interior design publications back then, lay in its policy of illustrating articles with series of photographs taken at real homes (sometimes they were staged). Even more, most of the magazine's original pictures had been taken at the home of the editor or his artist/writer friends. Art and Home, therefore, uniquely maps the homes and studios of artists who had acquired a special place in the mythology of non-official Soviet art. These locations showed artworks that had often failed to find their way to galleries. Especially in retrospect, that art was surrounded by a mysterious atmosphere of freedom, in which stagnating reality had momentarily halted. In Laughable Loves Milan Kundera, perhaps the most famous author to depict the specific East- European private sphere, has written about a couple for whom their regular meeting place in the male character's apartment becomes inhospitable, where suspicious neighbours cause the familiar secure atmosphere to break down: 'Home was not home. There we felt like housebreakers who might be caught at any minute; footsteps in the corridor made us nervous, we kept expecting someone to start pounding on the door' (2). To solve this situation the man asks an artist friend to lend him his studio. There, in an enormous room beneath a high roof, amid paintings propped against the walls and the carefree artist's lifestyle, the narrator is suddenly seized by a 'blessed feeling of freedom': 'I sprawled on the couch, pushed in the corkscrew and opened a bottle of wine. I chattered gaily and freely...' (3) The special attention Kundera has devoted to the private sphere in his novels and short stories dealing with the paradoxes of the Communist regime has been analysed by Slavoj Zizek. In a traditional understanding of the private escape from totalitarian society, the islands of everyday life with their 'small joys and pleasures, laughter and tears' (4), as described by Kundera, are considered to be beyond the reach of ideology, and their distance enables one to make the ideological ritual look ridiculous. In order for this apolitical position to be possible in the private sphere, it requires public participation in the ideological ritual and becomes thus utterly conformist: 'it is not sufficient to ascertain that the ideological ritual is mere appearance which nobody takes seriously - this appearance is essential' (5), writes Zizek; by following it one already supports it. What Kundera, in Zizek's view, wants to show is not the possibility of the untouched life sphere but the 'compulsive' character of the depoliticised private life; how ideology is present there in the form of absence, marked by the ban of 'free political discussion' (6), avoiding the real issue, etc. That is why, Zizek concludes, 'there is always something damp, claustrophobic, inauthentic, even desperate, in the characters' striving for sexual and other pleasures.' (7) Yet, despite this suffocating conquest of the private, totalitarian society created several specific phenomena or reactions that were more than just a cynical escapade. For Zizek these are foremost embodied in the 'extraordinary flourishing of authentic friendship' (8), visits, dinners, and closed-circuit intellectual conversations. Art and Home, which maps real homes and spaces, could well be seen as the mirror of this two-sided private sphere. On the one hand, there are tiny generic flats with intensely patterned wallpaper or immaculately white walls, trying to rise above the surrounding time and space but where this surrounding space nevertheless intrudes, and on the other hand, as most of the original photos in the magazine had been taken in the home of its editor or his artist friends, the mythologized homes of artists that enjoyed more freedom were represented. Besides, in the case of the young generation of artists at the end of 1960s and at the beginning of the 1970s, critics have spoken of private film evenings at home or happenings taking place in the closed circuit of the studio. Articles and illustrations in the magazine Art and Home suggest a common understanding that the private sphere was a place to escape from the uniform public environment. Desperate beautification of introverted home spaces, and densely stacking the rooms with objects, seemed to be in proportional relation to the homogenisation of the exterior and the filling it up with industrially produced houses. The tiny generic flat in a system-built house could be remodelled and refurnished in most imaginative ways; the small private territory within a generic block of flats could become almost anything else than it was at the moment. Thus it is not surprising to find on the pages of the magazine, photos of interiors that try to ward off external space: rooms stacked with artworks, rooms with paintings, posters, decorative pottery and even small or large sculptures. Here I come back to the illustrations of the interior with Ülo Õun's sculptures. Three big plaster heads have been crammed into a small living-room, looking at whoever enters with weary emotional faces. One of the portraits, a man with gleaming glass eyes, the Nuclear Physicist, is standing in front of the window sill, against a backdrop of daylight, while behind him is seen the monotonous skyline of a new housing area. This is the moment when the public sphere, described by Zizek, which so desperately has been held off, invades the seemingly autonomous private sphere, where behind the superfluous decoration, love of art and patterned wallpaper is always something more, its hidden compulsive character. (1) Mare Ruus, 'Four sculptors', Sirp ja Vasar, 25. 08. 1972. (2) M. Kundera, 'Naljakad armastuslood', Loomingu Raamatukogu no 39, Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1965, p. 64. (3) Milan Kundera, 'Naljakad armastuslood'. Loomingu Raamatukogu no 39 (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat 1965), p. 64. English translation in: Laughable Loves, (Nobody laughs), Faber and Faber 1999, pp. 35-36 (4) Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment. Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso 1994), p. 65. (5) Ibid. (6) Ibid., p. 63. (7) Ibid., p.64. (8) Ibid Ülo Õun (1940-1988), sculptor. Introduced irony and grotesque to Estonian sculpture. Andres Kurg (1975) is an architectural historian. In 1998 graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts; 2000-2001 MSc at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London. He has written architectural criticism and curated exhibitions; currently works at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
	| Estonian Art 1/04 (14) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2004 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |