Estonian Art 2' 2001


	Screensaver
	Anders Härm & Hanno Soans, troubleproductions, 2001



	A recipe for Analogue TV Analogue TV was a project curated by the Tallinn Team of ArtGenda 2000, Andres Kurg, Marko Raat & Hanno Soans, as a site-specific project for Lasipalatsi, Helsinki. The project was carried out in May 2000 as an installation room and local one-week TV programme. The extensive programme, consisting of TV archive materials, contemporary art activism documented on video, and parts made in the Lasipalatsi Studio, showed Tallinn, the only place in the Soviet Union where the shopping window of capitalism was exposed. Availability of channels from the opposite side of the Iron Curtain once created an interesting set of ideological anomalies. The curators belong to the last generation, now in their late-twenties, for whom Finnish TV was of great importance. They were fed on the schizophrenia of media reality from childhood. The second stage of the Analogue TV project, curated by Anders Härm & Hanno Soans and specially produced for Turku, has a slightly more focused theme and the form of installation, more suitable in an exhibition context. This time art, fake, media and nothing, meet in our screensaver: troubleproductions, 2001

	Time: early seventies. Place: Soviet Estonia, Tallinn, state TV, studio no 1. The crew and the cameras are ready for direct broadcast. Helgi Sallo, the pop-star, is standing in front of a microphone, exchanging the last affirmative glance with her band: "We are ready". The luminous green sign "Silence!" switches on. Countdown: five, four, three, two... And suddenly the mood changes, as she abandons the microphone, steps towards the door, walks around the corner to the right, takes the stairs down, opens the main entrance of the TV Centre, turns to the right again and heads towards the tram station... Let's stop here. The Departure of Helgi Sallo we were referring to, was a short story by Mati Unt, a cult writer from the seventies, once almost as famous as Helgi herself. Unt used a real-life character and twisted her role in the media. It's quite unique. Through that distortion she had her fifteen seconds of glamour. See! There she goes - our lost object, our fetish. No literary merits could make the story as attractive for us as the attitude.

	"Capitalism sucks!" (Silence...) It did sound like another Neo-Leftist slogan from the sixties, once used by radical students charging the barricades in France and in the States. Have you ever wondered if capitalism sucks less now that the sixties have passed? Or maybe capitalism sucks less exactly because the sixties have passed? What has happened to capitalism anyway? Occasionally the desire still emerges to throw smoke bombs through bank windows, to set cars on fire, to conquer the TV tower, to destroy and to break the given rules. To blow up gas tanks, to shoot the police or let them put you behind bars are the other options for socially radical masochism. To burn money, to salivate, to spit vulgarities and bullets - just to continue our list. The only difference now is that the system of tele-virtualized theatre eats it all (and even asks for more) and the storm, if it ever takes place, is located in a fancy swimming pool.

	Let's get back to the first studio. Thirty years have passed. Making trouble has so far been pure pleasure for us. Last spring there were only two scandals connected to the media and cultural production. One of them swirled around Young British Art, an exhibition proposing fake British identity as a metaphor for our cultural position and a strategy for adapting to tasks offered by the new order. The other was caused by a TV show using a fake patriotic name, Esto TV (Esto refers to the quadrennial meetings of expatriate Estonians, once considered to be a political stance against the Soviet regime). For one of their painstakingly aggressive interviews, the anti-star constellation of Esto, inseparable Ken and Tolk, approached the local father figure of Miss Estonia competitions. The situation could be described as follows: "Valeri Kirss - judging from what was on the air - had recently organized another embarrassingly tasteless beauty competition, consisting mainly of endless bikini sessions and distressful vulgarities. As an ageing male lion defending his territory and harem, he was trying to convince the viewers, robes of courtesy unraveling at every seam, that his motives were something far more noble than the simple and sincere wish to sleep with the etalons of beauty as proposed by the TV boys." (Mari Laaniste, art critic) What else can we say about Ken and Tolk? That punk was probably very inspiring for them as teenagers. Instead of leaving the studio in a cool manner, like the fictitious double of Helgi Sallo, they would definitely stay for a while, torturing the TV-crew with improper proposals. Or they would go to the News Department to find something more important to fuck up.

	But what about the social pranksters doing their interventions in the name of art? There are some examples of that in our video archives. For many of those pieces, re-utilising the tactics of New Left is an optimistic launching point. Works with a loosely Situationist undertone, like Marko Raat's For Aesthetic Reasons, Mari Sobolev's Freedom of Speech and Marko Laimre's graffiti action Cure Control could be mentioned here. As the principles of punk TV are also adopted from the strategies of media actionism of the sincerely radical sixties, it's easy to find a common denominator. In the case of a successful intervention, the machine of desire is let loose to disturb the pre-set patterns of social behaviour, staging microrevolutions of identity. In adopting their strategic idiotism to the media, Esto TV seems currently to be more effective than art with a clearly defined social pathos and a somewhat more intellectual approach. Sharing the underbelt rhetoric with every other show doing political sketches and only seldom rising above the general mediocrity of television programmes, Esto TV succeeds in creating a stage for the real life idiocy of televirtualised democracy to climb onto. There is no need for actors to parody a media-greedy politician. There is no need for Ken and Tolk either! The Prime Minister and the ever-charismatic Opposition Leader are hired to do a great job of being Ken and Tolk themselves. So what about now? What about the conclusions? We could refer to Matthew Collings, the TV star of contemporay art criticism; "nowadays shock matters, beauty matters and nothing matters as well." What should be the voodoo we do? We perform nothing.


	\| Estonian Art 2/01 (10) \| Published by the Estonian Institute 2001 \| ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) \| ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) \| einst@einst.ee \| tel: (372) 631 43 55 \| fax: (372) 631 43 56 \|