Self-Portrait with a Semiotic Noose
Hanno Soans

	"Artists seem to examine their surroundings with a keen eye that takes in every tiny detail. Such a glance registers with a particular lack of mercy those details that have always existed outside the boundaries of the traditional sense of beauty and are hence objects not worthy of art. With its 'rubbish-bin poetry' it tries to shake everything habitual. In painting, it seems to be constantly accompanied by an ironic smile. It's there even in a self-portrait; instead of a traditional picture of its kind, the Self-portrait with a Noose with a defiant undertone was born." Evi Pihlak, History of Estonian Art. "What is offered to us as a description of a picture is rather an explanation of how the picture is thought about, and not what the picture actually depicts." Michael Baxandall, Language and Explanation, 1985
	I don't think I am doing anyone any injustice when I describe people of my own age, and even those a decade younger, as a generation of amnesia. The phenomenon of memory loss and subsequent erosion of meanings are directly connected to the shifts that have occurred in the production and consumption of visual culture over the past few decades. In conditions of pictorial over-production and visual recycling, traditional memory mechanisms have been replaced by short-term memory. Amnesia progresses. I have no wish here to strike a sanctimonious posture and condemn the shifted relations between technology and pictorial perception. Quite the opposite - amnesia offers me relief. I am even prepared, with a strategic purpose in mind, to romanticise it. From this perspective the tens of millions of Americans suffering from chronic concentration disorders, who are living proof of the unplanned impact of television culture, may seem the avant-garde in the global psychological experiment that promises most intriguing results. My favourite film director Harmony Korine is allegedly also gripped by the typical concentration disease of the TV generation - Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD. My knowledge of art history contains huge gaps. I identify myself with these gaps and feel almost physical revulsion towards doing something about them. In the middle of this professional complex sits, overbearingly, a defensive reflex against Estonian art as a discipline and a discourse. I have never been able to feel sincere, permanent and unmotivated interest in the history of Estonian art, and the gaps in my cultural memory are indeed most clearly evident in my relations with older Estonian art. A thorough review of Estonian art history would nicely supplement the symbolic course I had in my second university year. Alas, I have only managed to tackle a few authors, and not bothered about periods. I have but fragments of what has been of interest to me - the pieces form a picture of a young art historian. Although this aspect of my professional self-portrait clearly indicates insecurity, I draw my conclusions based on the fundamental frame of generation shifts in values. To adapt the short-memory culture as a gnoseological basic position of the TV generation to professional demands of art historians is just as difficult as an art historian voluntarily alienating himself from the dominant cultural codes. This complex - an art historian's ADD - is worth digesting. Otherwise, failing to find pictures of interest or seeing mechanisms to maintain that interest, we have no business at all in this field.
	The art of the first Estonian republic is where my professional complex is most clearly revealed. This period contains a few shots, emerging as bright splashes from the midst of what cannot be made conscious, like memories in Freud's Psychopathology of Daily Life, which overshadow the logic of development and description of Estonian art history. These few paintings are, in the infectious manner of expression of Deleuze and Guattari, like escape routes. Such routes make it possible to forsake the basic text of Estonian art history, which persistently returns to the European key-books with their haunting problems of identity, breed and origin. My discontent seems to grow out of the very same source. The moment I accept the dubious notion of one's own culture I am faced with questions of how and through which works I could gain a foothold in national pictorial culture. It is not only the matter of how history has been written down or what its 'objective' nature in some hypothetical past is, but how to experience the inherited works. Whether and how it would be possible to regard them as a personal existential problem, something inherently one's own, just like the scene of Colonel Aureliano Buendia being shot in Marques's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a performance with Beuys explaining art to a dead rabbit, or the poem on the back cover of Undusk's novel Hot. In order to find escape routes in Estonian art, I have to turn to works that demand attention not merely at the moment when a professional glance determines their temporal and stylistic frames of reference and hence fixes their place on the walls of an imaginary museum. I want works that demand active interpretation. Such pictures emerge unexpectedly and in the oddest of places, violating the discipline of the military drill of history, simultaneously and repeatedly posing embarrassing questions about the operating mechanisms and representation schemes of both themselves and the viewer. How is it possible at all, in the conditions of visual inflation, that there are pictures to which we come back again and again? What are the images of which we cannot rid ourselves, and what conditions do these images that really haunt us meet? Wouldn't it be possible to find a place of dialogue in the history of Estonian art - meaning bilateral negotiations with contemporary art - through them, without finding ourselves immediately harnessed to the art history harrow? I would now like to proceed to the comparative analysis of two specific paintings, Adamson-Eric's Self-portrait with a Noose and Nikolai Kummits's Sorrow. Both ignite a hermeneutic code that seems to refer to a secret and invites us to seek out details in the picture that would reveal it. (1) These are like interpretation traps, semiotic nooses that have the power to grip and hold the viewer. This pairing of paintings, Sorrow and Self-portrait with a Noose, is probably the only connection between Kummits and Adamson-Eric, two artists of totally different character and destiny. These two shots are primarily associated through a premonition of suffering or violence that the artists express via opposing operations. Both scenes have a promise of death 'sewn into' them. In one it is seen in the tormenting-agonising atmosphere and in the axe left on the floor that is keen to act at the very next moment; in the other, via the image of a noose, which the author flaunts as a chance to commit suicide. Both paintings are in fact self-portraits: Adamson-Eric's as a traditional iconic image, Kummits's as a self-portrait indirectly, via a mental image, an interpreter. The violent motif in Kummits's Sorrow is deeper, more systemic and discreet. With a blood-red signature the author refers to his own presence in the barn scene with a girl and an axe. The device he uses to model anxiety has a specific art historical background that certainly amplifies the latent violence - Caravaggio's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted for the Order of Malta. Remember the blood on the 'murder weapon', the knife used to cut off St John's head, trickling down to the floor and finally forming the author's signature. Caravaggio has in fact quite a few traumatic, impossible, suicidal self-portraits, symbolic suicides. The most complicated of them perhaps being the head of Gorgon's Medusa, cut off yet still alive although already unable to direct its blood-curdling glance at us. The artist created this picture - which was supposed to show something so terrifying that it could not be tolerated without artistic conditionality - as a traumatic self-reflection because Gorgon's glance is the lethal mirror where he recognises himself as Gorgon. "Showing the deadly quality of Medusa in a painting is a way of supplementing the act of indexiality which underlies all acts of showing. "Look! That's how it is" is an act that claims universal validity for the semiotic act of demonstration by incorporating its negative "Don't look now!" which marks narrative moments of danger in the hic et nunc." (2) The violence in the scene painted by Kummits can rather be deduced or referred to. It is based on the relations of symbols. Only those who perceive Caravaggio's bloody self-performances in a specific shot can hope for maximum effect. The glance of a seemingly petrified woman in a gloomy room is fixed on the axe on the floor. The viewer, used to new shots, perceives increasing tension before the decisive event. The author's blood-red signature that runs on the floor parallel to the axe blade, can be classified at the first wandering glance that feverishly seeks answers in the picture as an indexical sign, witness of indubitable carnage. It becomes clear only on closer scrutiny that this is not a scene of murder - at least not directly - but a picture of extreme poverty and helplessness to which the author has added his signature in blood. Kummits, a determined socialist in his views, class membership and perception of life, includes in the picture the tragedy of his authorial position, the artist as depictor of misfortune, messenger of bad news, a condemned grim topic. The place in the picture where the double articulation of matter and depiction occurs is a Baroque crease where the viewer's doubts and questions directed at him are being folded. Perceiving the bloody splash and the author's signature in the picture, the viewer learns to what extent his own self depends on the metamorphoses taking place in the picture. The semiotic noose is fixed there in the viewer's eye. The painting reveals Kummits's identification with 'poor people', who keep cropping up in his works. The axe on the floor, however, reminds one of Raskolnikov's shrill voice, a tense note, that produces a crack in the static world of Kummits. This painting has a clearly Dostoyevskian undertone. Adamson-Eric associates himself with the motif of violence in a more poster-like manner, with a manifest clarity and self-confidence so frequently seen in contemporary art. Here he presents his position as a Parisian bohemian artist as a strategic posture; it contains cultivated casualness and theatricality. What becomes important against the background of his middle-class home, tailor-made suits and safe income are the playfulness and freedom of conscious selection - the determination with which he leaves Pallas. From the existential point of view, the noose can be regarded as an attribute of the freedom of choice. In this picture, it is hypothetical and distant as a choice; as an attribute, however, it is just as handy as the earring that Adamson-Eric displays as a confirmation of his status as a bohemian. Even if this is an exaggeration it helps us focus our attention for a moment. See how it stares at us, its potential viewers, despite the noose - I certainly know you who have come here to prod me with your glance, and I know what you think of me. The same glance that confidently reflects back the viewer's more dewy-eyed attempts at interpretation, is just as strong an irritant as a swaggering suicide symbolism. The semiotic noose is born between two viewers. At the time when the pivotal icons of European pictorial culture were created, e.g. Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's David, nobody thought it necessary to endlessly interpret them. The true thriving of art history texts started in parallel with modern life in the second half of the 19th century. It is on the increase. But why do we need others to keep explaining the pictures to us? This is how American art historian James Elkins begins his book Why are our pictures puzzles?. It seems that only hermeneutic subjects, such as semiotics, steadily help us overcome alienation from our art history, allowing us to personally write ourselves into our own pictorial culture. Paradoxically, the texts born in that way accumulate to form the sebum of history, thus increasing the sense of alienation even more. Only the understanding that the objects represented by signs in the works of art are fundamentally subjective, and that they fully depend on reception, offers semiotics a unique chance to communicate with an art historian who chronically suffers from lack of attention. This is the understanding that he is not expected to produce an endlessly dragging text, but instead a skilful hint that the noose in the picture in fact hangs around the neck of every single viewer.
	(1) In the book S/Z Roland Barthes brings out five different narrativecodes that the reader activates in a Balzac short story. In case of anarrative picture, these codes can be equally well applied to visual arts. (2) Bal, M., Quoting Caravaggio, The University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 136
	| Estonian Art 2/02 (12) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2002 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |