Who-what-artist?
A hundred years ago hardly anyone was an artist. Today, ’Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler’. A hundred years ago the world changed and art with it. Today, everything is drowned in a deluge of the self.
Artists have always been considered special, masters of a skill. On the other hand, the Indians had no special word for artist. Arrows simply needed to be painted, otherwise they would not hit their target. The ritual tools of the shaman and the witchdoctor have put me in the same state of rapture as the cave paintings of Lascaux; in the beginning Art was. In the words of our own backwoods primitive Alpo Jaakola, ”Art does not change from its original divinity but backward”.
Originally, the artist was an instrument of this divinity until God was nailed to the coffin that is the church and the artist became a hireling of religion. He no longer created images inspired by magical ecstasy, but as an advocate of the ’holy’ policies of the power structure. Yet the artisans of holiness managed to instil startlingly genuine holiness in their altar images, which the ’dark non-sages’ have lost. The Renaissance and the emergence of the natural sciences gradually did away with the holy, while the rising bourgeoisie provided work for artists, commissioning portraits and landscapes.
Painting was revolutionised by the invention of paint tubes which allowed the artist to leave his studio and go stand by a field to illustrate his immediate relationship with the landscape. Later, the invention of photography shifted the artist’s duty to the ego. After all, Pablo Picasso said: ”After Vincent van Gogh, every artist has to create his own art history”. Thanks to Marcel Duchamp who turned a toilet bowl into the watershed of Contemporary Art nearly a century ago, what we face is this question: in the general confusion, who-what-artist? Contemporary artists can work with any material whatsoever, from dust to live sharks. Or they can make their dog the artist or be their own dog. They can paint a picture of the dog or the dog itself. But what is the point of it all?
HOLY SHIT!
Last autumn, the ’wormworker’ Teuri Haarla renounced his artisthood at the Happihuone (oxygen room) by Töölö Bay in Helsinki because the curators had decided his earth work was a piece of art and cared nothing for its inherent sacred value. Haarla’s renunciation came in a speech that included his private declaration of faith. The snake of history bit its own tail! The Lost Holy is found in the private Ideal Excrement. The curators should have knelt in front of the piece like the ancient Tabu cult and not made indecent proposals. The product of the Ego is the untouched essence of contemporary holiness.
We are faced with the same thing in Pentti Koskinen’s performances where he takes the piss out of himself for his audiences, or stands with his thumb in his bleeding anus in one of his ’pervormances’ with his God, or has his feet washed as he lays on a wet street.
Understandably, many abhor his sensational pieces but they may well be compared with the dread of holiness, which after all is an illness of contemporary culture. His works incorporate common expressions ’It stinks!’ and ’Shit!’ But at the same time they have a healing aspect. Acknowledgement of holiness while degrading yourself. The lotus rises from the mud and shit turns into the gold of fertility. A prophet is convincing only after he has revealed his true self.
SOCIAL HEAT SCULPTURE: SAUNA
”Peeling potatoes is a piece of sculpture” declared Joseph Beuys who was also responsible for the German phrase ”Every man is an artist” quoted above.
In the 1960s, Beuys invented an expanded concept of art within the Fluxus movement, which offered a third alternative to the socialist and capitalist models of society: social heat sculpture! In Finland, the sauna has always been such an alternative; naked Finns have always assembled in the heat of the sauna. Papu’s peat sauna by Töölö Bay in Helsinki, the tent saunas of the Renvall brothers, set up alongside their film discos, and DJ Tiksa’s and Kimmo Helistö’s Steam sauna, which left its home in Helsinki to travel the world, even visiting a hotel roof in New York City; they all represent heat sculpture. Tiksa’s performing word-art and outsiderism inspire people to think up hot ideas.
HUNDRED YEARS’ COLLAGE
Kurt Schwitters collected trash from the street and invented the collage a hundred years ago. Last century was indeed the trashiest and most collage-like in human history. Puritan staticness has been dismantled almost violently, iron curtains have been ripped apart to reveal the most secret of places. Getting rid of fascism, racism and the suppression of women, protecting unspoilt nature, deposing money from ultimate power, etc.; to verify dis-tortions has become the holy act of art, too. Green politics began with environmental happenings which altered politics. The forest drama of the ’Indians’ living in a natural state in Kittilä shocked the entire sick society into counterattack. One of them built his wigwam in the treetops and invited people to return to the trees. Such a total life-style work is fully comparable to Contemporary Art’s idea of providing art, social critique and a new form of living. Veltto Virtanen’s Kipu (pain) party combined play with gravity in a revealing and theatrical manner with Parliament and the media as its stage. The emergence of disabled artists has also been extremely important. The exhibition of paintings by the mentally handicapped of the Kirsikoti in Lieksa revolutionised the art world and decisively changed people’s attitudes to disabilities. The next big step will be the dive into art by mental patients.
THE RISE OF PERFORMANCE
The surrealists photographed and filmed each other in the strangest settings and performances. Dreams have a clairvoyant ability to communicate to us physically experiences in their mysterious contexts; the Ego wanders in dreams as a film director, set designer, animator, actor and a performer inside consciousness. Performance art finally threw the artist out of the studio or invited others into its own studio, as did the artists Irma Optimisti and Pekka and Lauri Luhta, inviting people to their Là-Bas studio in the basement of Helsinki’s Cable Factory. Or Roi Vaara to EXIT, also at the Cable Factory, where hundreds of artists arrived from around the world to take part in every kind of show imaginable.
In the early 1980s, Roi Vaara turned performance into a one-man protest movement, stuffing sausage into his mouth until he vomited in front of a condemned but historically important building in Lohja (which was eventually demolished and replaced by a parking lot), grew flowers on asphalt, walked as the White Man into a world conference of critics at the Old Student House in Helsinki, walled up one of the windows of the Academic Bookstore with brick, planned art actions and installations in the Ö group with Harri Larjosto and Pekka Nevalainen where ”anything could be anything”. It was a complete about-turn for the role of an artist.
SUBJECTIVE IMPROMPTU
In 1985, a summer-long joint event took place in an old, condemned youth club building in Kangasniemi, which transformed the entire building during its course. The building was painted inside and out and each of its spaces took on a particular form.
The words ”Aino Museum of Finnish Contemporary Art” were written on the gable of the building, as a parodic comment by contemporaneous artists on what a museum could be. The idea originated in the East Village in New York City where I took a suitcase full of Ö art to local dilapidated galleries to which anyone could bring their work. The process continued in Helsinki in the form of the Pirtola and his Toverit (comrades) exhibition at Gallery Pelin, where the walls were filled with works of art on a first-come-first-mounted basis, and at Jangva gallery where works were changed daily and amateur paintings and revolutionary declarations existed side by side in harmony.
In the early 1990s Pekka Kainulainen and I set up an entire school as Art in Helsinki where the students could decide their curriculum. We raised money to pay the rent by organising exhibitions at Finland’s largest gallery at the Helsinki Railway Station with 200,000 daily visitors and, finally, Yoko Ono’s and John Lennon’s WAR IS OVER poster.
Aino was also the beginning of my video diary on which I have recorded these events that either are or are not art. A magical media dream became real on the Finnish cable TV channel ATV in the late 1990s and early this decade. ATV let me film and edit my own art programme as I pleased, without forcing any format upon me. Either it was a last flash of media freedom that would become the top spot for art or then the first taste of a great future.
ADVENTURERS OF WORK ART
The creative adventurer spirit could be used to create flourishing centres where people could find and identify themselves. This requires the transformation of the artist’s attitude from someone gawking at a circle in the confines of the studio into a full-fledged society builder. Ritva Harle is such an avantgardist, for example. This East Helsinki working rose has employed the unemployed to build her log berms, in her housing estate projects and at Unelmagalleria (Dream gallery) where people have had a chance to leave their caves in the flat-mountains and get to know each other. She has not received funding from culture or art appropriations for her social sculpture but talked the money she has needed out of social services. Harle’s example indicates how officialdom is ready to accept artists’ ideas and can get enthusiastic about totally new activities. The same took place in the Myllypuro district of Helsinki last Christmas, when the housing-estate artist Jonna Pohjalainen had the windows of the concrete blocks decorated with light-ornaments the inhabitants themselves made from bicycle wheels. Such a brave combination of kitsch and social radicalness does not, of course, diminish the value of gallery art, the weekly turnover of which is simply astounding. Instead, it is related to the changing role of the artist in society. Various institutions could well employ artists, as proved by Petri Kaverma with his Giverny project with the art school Maa (Earth), by placing students under artist guidance to work in Helsinki’s hospitals and homes for the elderly.
HEY BRAINS, HOLD ON!
Contemporary folk art or DIY Art has emerged parallel to Contemporary Art. DIY artists, the self-made guardians of their own lives, generally know nothing about the art world but whip up their works from recycled scrap in their backyard shed-studios. Para-doxically, this grass roots and deep woods art is the most expressive of all contemporary art, even if the artists do prefer to stay in the trees. Their works are animal pictures for forest animals, the savannah with its palm trees and lions among the Northern woods of Kauhajoki. Or an entire Karelian-style villa in parts in the artist’s basement, or a marker-pen-ticked pop art catalogue of magazine cut-outs in the one-man Punainen Torppa museum in Petäjävesi, woodblock cubism and social satire in Siuro, white-painted ’mercy Mercs’ and ’Jesus combines’ in the front yard of a conceptual raw Pentecostal preacher in Pohjanmaa. Finland seems to be bursting with DIY Art which is a visual expression of folk humour and flash of holiness like that present in folk poetry, fairytales and mocking ditties and which is what keeps this country going. Every man wants to be an artist.
Erkki Pirtola
