A Need for New Institutions

Estonian Institute
Airi Triisberg
chairs I was asked to write a short comment on a rather wide spectrum of topics, under the title Not Enough Audience. Over-Supply of Culture. Rigid Vocabulary of Cultural Industries. Institutional Critique. A somewhat exaggerated line of reasoning, one might think at first sight, especially considering the fact that I was explicitly asked to limit the arguments to the national space of Estonia, where the notions of cultural industries and institutional critique have a relatively vague meaning.

A hint to what was meant by the, to some degree, pre-constructed mininarrative that was proposed in the title I found in the recent article by Reet Varblane, the art editor of the cultural weekly Sirp, where she stated that the year 2007 in Estonia was characterised by the fragmentation of the art world into ‘(incomprehensibly) many small events’, a fact which ‘causes confusion and controversial feelings’. “The supply of art [production] exceeds the capacity to consume”, she writes. In her article, Reet Varblane refers to the recent emergence of a number of, more or less, self-organised initiatives in the field of contemporary art, consequently admitting that the fragmentation of different publics into different segments is a feature of an open democratic society.


chairs Why do these developments then appear to be confusing? What seems to be at stake here in seeing as a problem the low number of visitors and high level of enthusiasm that arguably ends up in too many different cultural events is not the question of supply and demand, but the struggle over the old-school notion of a homogeneous cultural audience that is being catered to by institutions. In that sense, the recent emergence of several independent initiatives indicates a tendency to think, in more up-to-date terms, of a multitude of engaged publics rather than passive homogeneous audiences subjected to the consumption of cultural goods. This might not only lead to a situation where the dividing line between the ‘producers’ and ‘publics’ becomes more fluid than it has been traditionally conceived, but it also potentially opens up the possibility of resisting the growing pressure of neo-liberal imperatives of economisation and instrumentalisation that the cultural institutions are currently facing.

Although it is a hasty move to allude to these ‘controversial feelings’ that were diagnosed by Reet Varblane as a result of the recent occurrence of decentralisation processes on institutional critique, self-organisation often emerges from a need for new types of institutions. This is specifically the case with the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, a recently opened art space in Tallinn, initiated by Marco Laimre, which has set itself up against the institutional policy of the Kumu Art Museum. In a situation where the Department of Contemporary Art of the national art museum is obviously not answering the needs of artists, the newly established museum defines itself as a grass-roots endeavour that is experimenting with more engaging ways of instituting. Though currently operating rather along the logic of a project space, it is exactly thanks to its half-imaginary character that the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia challenges the very notion of what a museum can be.



Airi Triisberg (1982), art critic and cultural producer. 2006 BA in art history, currently doing her MA in cultural theory. In 2007 she co-initiated an independent collaborative platform Public Preparation (with Rael Artel).


| Estonian Art 2/07 (21) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2007 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |