Ars Fennica 2009 candidate Jyrki Riekki

”Always Bite the Hand that Feeds You”

Ars Fennica, the biggest Finnish prize for visual art, is awarded in November. How does it feel to be a candidate? What is the point of art awards and art itself? Artist Jyrki Riekki has the answers.

Jyrki Riekki is one of the five candidates for this year’s Ars Fennica. I find him at home in Nummi-Pusula, an hours drive from the Helsinki Metropolitan Region, getting ready for the candidates’ joint exhibition.

Riekki’s studio is in a barn in the yard. It is there that he creates his paintings and installations in which people and animals, symbols of decay and death, as well as childhood heroes, all blend into a noisy riot of colour and material.

”You must be able to laugh at everything,” says Riekki. ”Some people see something wrong in painting as a profession – so art and spending tax money can be provocative. And at the same time we manufacture and sell guns in Finland. Why don’t people get upset about that? Or about the way urban space is used? We’re bad guys all of us,” Riekki explains the revolutionary nature of art.

The practice of art is a ritualistic, intense event for Riekki. ”I want to be totally open and uninhibited when I make art. Nothing is sacred, and yet everything is sacred. The work goes fast in a way, but also damn slow.”

Do you plan your works ahead?

”Never. They come straight out of the experience of being. I’m kind of childlike when I work, I can’t make sketches.”

The Ars Fennica exhibition is a joint exhibition by the five candidates. The other four candidates are sculptor Matti Kalkamo, artist Mika Karhu, visual artist Jussi Kivi and painter Petri Yrjölä.

How has the joint exhibition affected your own creative work?

”It has not affected my work at all. We’ve only discussed how to divide the space so that adjacent rooms won’t have works that are too similar in size.” The challenge for Riekki in the exhibition is to get things ”finished enough, but not too finished.” It is necessary to leave room to manoeuvre in the hanging stage.

One would think an art competition does not go too well together with a rebel attitude. How does it feel to be a candidate?

”If it were a contest, I wouldn’t be in it. I’m not a competitor, I’ve just been nominated as one possible recipient of the award. All competitive situations are wrong. Everyone must do what they believe in. If you start thinking about what others think about your work, it’s no longer real. You must always bite the hand that feeds you.”

But it is the biggest art award in Finland.

”That’s nice of course. Kiasma is perhaps the most highprofile place to exhibit art in Finland. And with all that money you could finance your work, do something wicked... And maybe buy some musical instruments. Yet in my mind I’m looking for something negative about it – like, who am I to fawn on anyone?”

For Riekki the greatest thing about the award is that it enables the winner to work independently. He distrusts the idea that an artist should market himself and be a businessman. Realising large art projects is often difficult in a small country like Finland.

What is art needed for?

”One cannot go on for very long without some spiritual nourishment. Imagine life without music and poetry. Without art life is nothing but dry bones.”

”Art is necessary to make things alive, to cheer us up and prod the community. An artist can be a shaman who sees, from a mountain top or a valley, from high or low, things that are important to the individual and the community. Art is about the meaning of existence.”

Of course art has personal significance too. ”It’s simply necessary, when you’re pathologically creating things all the time – paintings, sculptures, object works, music, writing. It’s a way of living and breathing.”

But can or should art be understood?

”Art is part of our existence, and it is its own justification. No one is under any obligation to be interested in art. It’s an experience that some are quite passionate about and others are not.”

”The word ’understand’ implies a reduction in the definition of art. Art has its own meaning, which is also its language. Can or should people be understood? What do we understand about anything, really – about the world, the stars in the sky or a lawn?”

Sanna Hirvonen
Senior Curator of Education, Kiasma