An interview with Tuula Karjalainen

An interview with Kiasma’s Director Tuula Karjalainen on the eve of the Popcorn and politics collection display.

How do you see the relationship between popular culture and contemporary art?

At the moment, it is difficult to define popular culture: what is popular culture today may, in a couple of hundred years, be on the highest level of high culture, as has happened to the works of William Blake, for instance. In his day, they were meant to be popular imagery. Contemporary art boasts many such examples. On the other hand, there are artists, such as Markus Heikkerö and Olli Lyytikäinen, with his Donald Ducks, who clearly draw inspiration from popular culture, or there is our outstanding media art, which uses popular films and comics and recycles even so-called trash.

What do you think is new in art at the moment, or can there be anything new?

Of course, the question can be asked, everything is new and nothing is repeated, and on the other hand, nothing’s new. But that is not the point. If one thinks about newness, my idea of life is that it’s not a line but a spiral. That is, in some respects, things can look the same, even if we have been around the spiral five or six times, but happened to be in a certain position in the three-dimensional space concept. I think that right now we are somehow in the same position as in the late 1960s, but many miles up – or down – in space!

Contemporary art can be viewed and represented in extremely diverse ways. What means do you find acceptable for popularising contemporary art?

I’m not sure, if it is popularisation as such, but the encounter between the viewer and art can be facilitated. It can be enriched and the audience can be given the means by which to approach art. The viewers can either use them or not – it’s up to them. I think people should be given opportunities. It is not so much popularisation as providing information. I believe firmly in what the new director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Lars Nittve, said when he visited Finland. ”the more you know, the more you see”. What meets our eye, is one level. And our emotional intelligence, information, and time, a mystical whole, is the other. We are familiar with certain schematic structures of perception, of how perceptions cling to our brain and field of perception. It can be approached by providing certain information on art, opportunities to reach its fountainhead. And usually people show great interest, they want to join the stream.

The Popcorn and politics collection display takes the viewer from the 1960s to the present day through various loose themes, which include sexual liberation, urban imagery, and pop art and its different variations, ranging from American to Finnish. What ideas or characteristics, in your opinion, are the legacy of the 1960s for today’s art?

I must say that the whole concept of politics has changed since the 1960s. It was a decade when an awful lot of things entered art – just like the 1950s. But in the 1960s, pop art, for the first time, commented on social issues. The works did not depict comment, but they were comments themselves – there were flags and pigs, which were followed by major trials. It was quite a change in the conception of art. Without it, art would look totally different today. The function of art changed, you could say that the previous decade and abstract art brought a major change, but, nevertheless, a work of art very much retained the essential nature of an aesthetic object. Pop art did not so much aim at creating an aesthetic object, but something completely different. Being active, life itself, taking a stand were primary and the rest secondary, and that was something completely new! This streak of active and social art has continued.

It’s interesting to see how the image of women, for instance, has changed: what it was like in the 1960s, when 98 percent of artists were men. They depicted women in a very radical way. In the 1980s, women began to look at their own image. Women look at men’s images and men look at men’s images very differently. The way of looking, and at the same time, the idea of society has totally changed. But it is in the same position in the spiral: nothing’s the same any more, yet everything’s the same!

In America, pop art was often culture of the surface and light, and it did not necessarily need to have content. European art is laden with content and sense of being, and the works seem to have a purpose. What’s your opinion of this?

There has been social art in the United States too. It is the heart of the thing from where all else radiates. The pop of the 1960s and 1970s also contained quite sharp intellectual criticism and joyfulness. It became somewhat deflated in the party-political odysseys of the 1970s, which took place in the art life in Finland. But that’s history. The pop era and the 1970s were a rich time in our history, even richer than we can imagine and yet know.

If you could travel back in time and take something of the art of the present – ideas, conceptions, or a work of art – to the 1960s, what would it be?

If I could take something to the 1960s, it’d no doubt be media art. Art was already progressing in that direction, and people would not believe what’s true today! I’d like to show media installations and computer art, which were embryonic in the 1960s. Those embryos were so charming! But this immense explosion and amazing technology and these unbelievable things. That’s what I’d take!

Which works in the Popcorn and politics collection display evoke strong passions in you and why?

It is very difficult to say which works especially. Of the Finnish works, I’d say the works by Harro Koskinen: The Pig Family or The Pig Messiah. The treatment Koskinen received was singularly awful in Finnish art life. He was a unique artist in that not even the president pardoned him. Author Hannu Salama was pardoned in his blasphemy trial, but Koskinen never. Those works are a symbol of the times, insurmountable in Finland. It seems that people haven’t quite realised even now how important these works are. Of course, there are lots of other things, too!

As we have been talking about receiving art and popularising art, in the same strain, I could pick More Than Meets the Eye by Maurizio Nannucci. It is a work made of a neon light, a work of conceptual art. The phrase well reflects what it is about in encounter between people and art – it’s much more than mere passing vision. It returns one’s thoughts to the origins of humans and art, seeing and art, understanding and art, comprehending and art. It is the endless dilemma, or ‘more than meets the eye’!

Leevi Haapala
a researcher at the Central Art Archives, is a member of the artistic committee for the Popcorn and politics collection display