Terror, error and horror

Estonian Institute
Marco Laimre
House First we chance upon a picture of a house in an old newspaper. The way one occasionally notices something stupid. Almost unthinking, this kind of discovery usually sinks into the infinite flow of oblivion. And then you dream about it at night, and it haunts you before sleep and so on and so on...
Only very seldom can a totally random circumstance rescue this discovery; pull it back to the present world, into the daily life of analysis and deconstruction. So, first we chance upon a picture of a house. We do not yet know why this particular house interests us or what weird things are going to happen with the picture. However, even at this initial stage we can draw some conclusions.
It seems to be a picture of a house, of a kind that has been built all over Estonia in the thousands. Nothing special, just a standard project. A combination of low cost, functionality and comfort. Still, we wouldn't call this house comfortable. This house is a result of the banking policy of pressuring people to take out loans until they reach the breaking point. To a certain extent the building is anonymous, nondescript and gives the impression that it has just been completed.


Terror We do not yet know who lives in this house. We could ask, in the words of a well-known Russian fairytale (Terem-teremok): 'Cottage, little cottage, who lives in this squatty place?' Maybe it is inhabited by a solitary electronics nerd, with thick-lensed spectacles and watery eyes, peering from under eyelids swollen from all those soldering fumes, who suffers from fits of hysterics? Or it could be a former poet of nomenklatura, with rheumatism and ulcers, picking his nose and waiting for retirement. Or it may be a place where terrorists come together in the evenings to discuss things. Yes, this seems the most likely version.

Having covered the windows with heavy blankets, they caress their automatic rifles and grenade launchers in candlelight. Or reflect, eyes sparkling, on how to infiltrate the Olympic team by heavily bribing the sports minister. The presence of terrorists would explain the oddly sickening feeling that this house evokes. Something evil is really being conceived there.
Let us write TERROR on the picture, and see what happens next.


Error Well, well.

The outcome does not seem too convincing. Quite feeble. Such pictures make the headlines typical and not very telling. They contain a criminal scoop reiterated ad nauseam. Either someone has killed someone, or the terrorists have really been hiding at that address. Equally, this could be a picture of a sales catalogue advertising a residential house called Terror. Why not, if there is market demand.
After introducing such economic logic it is naturally difficult to add anything else.
Within its closed economy it is suffocating and finite. At first sight no escape trajectories. Entering such dead ends we start playing around with words and their sound similarities. To while away the time, so to speak. Reiterate: terrorterrorterror.
Suddenly we get: ERROR! Indeed, this describes our situation adequately. We eliminate the denominator T from the picture. Therefore we have another version.


Horror Now we are of course back at the beginning. Almost. In reality we have tightened the screw once again. True, having progressed through the above-mentioned analysis we are faced with nonsense. With a nonsensical surrealist result. Via that movement, on the other hand, we can derive a useful method. This enables us to look at things from a distance, and perhaps even more weirdly. The situation would naturally be different if, for example, we wrote on the picture: LITTLE PIGGIES. Historical dread of a serial killer would enter and describe the incident specifically. It would actually describe the situation too precisely.
However, let us have another look at the details. It is winter. Snow. It is by no means a typical Christmas picture, a timeworn little farmhouse amongst snowdrifts. We can nevertheless assume it is Christmas. Naturally a family-centred occasion. Father, mother and son. Let us try to arrange these elements into a logical discourse. We have got: a family, a house, Christmas and horror.
It's beginning to look like a sort of Christmas horror. Very well. We seek help in a collection of anecdotes. A collection of black humour, naturally. We quote:

Father Christmas comes and the whole family gets presents. Now it's Ants's turn.
Father Christmas: 'What poem are you going to read then?'
'I don't know any.'
'You can perhaps sing well?'
'No I can't.'
'What then can you do?'
Mother: 'Ants, why don't you cough up blood, you certainly can do that!'

This anecdote suits us very well. It is logical, describes the situation and at the same time contains sufficient horror emerging from Ants' ordeal. Besides, mother's command, 'Cough up blood!', includes abject impossibility. Looking at the same picture of the house again, we can write without undue effort: HORROR. The ambivalence of the anecdote frees us from previous dead ends and adds an explanatory matrix about why this picture of a house is so important.



This project premiered at the Lecture Day on 13 March 2004 in the Exhibition Hall of the Art Museum, Rotermann Salt Storage. The Day was titled Terror, Error and Horror, and took place within the framework of Marco Laimre's personal exhibition Questions and Answers.

Marco Laimre
(1968), installation and perfomace artist. In 2001 participated in the Venice biennial. See also Estonian Art 2/2000 and Anders Härm's article: www.cca.ee/en/tegemised/naitused/venice/veneetsia01/marko


| 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 |