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FRESH KUNST.EE 1/2024 OUT NOW!

 

Why Did We Not Celebrate Our Birthday? Editor-in-Chief’s Letter of Explanation

Andreas Trossek (4/2015)

Andreas Trossek delivers a speech to celebrate KUNST.EE’s 15th birthday and discusses the history of Estonian art periodicals.

 


This year KUNST.EE is celebrating its 15th birthday; although, we did not organise any celebratory conferences or symposia (Greek: symposion, 'to drink together'). After all, if we only consider how writers' fees have been frozen for the last six years, no one really feels like partying. Let's be honest, just like every other printed art journal in the age of digital media, KUNST.EE is a niche publication, essentially a prestige project. Notions like "profit", "capital" or "added value" are almost exclusively symbolic and cultural, not financial or quantifiable. True, if one would consider the number of subscriptions, the magazine has never done so well as it is now. And thanks to the financial support received from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia almost a year ago, the previous numbers have now been digitised and are freely accessible online as pdf files. So yes, indeed, life has become more joyous. However, I feel I owe a thorough explanation to our readers and subscribers for why the music wasn't blasting and rivers of wine weren't flowing. Although it could have.

KUNST.EE covers art and visual culture, as it also states on its title page, so whether we like it or not, in Estonian journalism it has a hefty responsibility; no other art periodical of a similar size is published in Estonia (almost 400 pages of art writing and criticism is printed every year). KUNST.EE is also among the 14 cultural publications published by SA Kultuurileht, a foundation mainly funded by the Estonian Ministry of Culture; however, the magazine is the only one among them that exclusively focuses on art and visual culture. As the editor-in-chief of KUNST.EE, I have repeatedly said "We almost have a state monopoly," jokingly, yet completely seriously. As we all know – noblesse oblige. However, there are a few broader themes that need to be pre-emptively discussed, and these are mainly concerned with history.


I

When it comes to periodicals, the most important thing is continuity. It matters, in fact it matters a lot. So the question is, how big can the gaps be for it to still be possible to patch them up and maintain the continuous history of something?

This art quarterly was founded in 2000 on the ruins of the almanac Kunst. "Almanac of figurative and applied art" said the title page of the publication established in 1958 and closed in 1996. It was published by the publishing house Kunst, which was for a long time the only publisher in the country working with visual arts. After that, almost a four-year gap. It was a time when in freshly capitalist Estonia a considerable number of daily and weekly newspapers were established (true, many of which were consolidated or closed down already by the end of the 1990s) and several well-known local art writers and critics found themselves working as editorial staff (e.g. Ants Juske, Heie Treier, Harry Liivrand, Johannes Saar, Mari Sobolev (Kartau) and Katrin Kivimaa). Yet soon it became clear that the newspapers with their decreasing sales and barely any profit from advertisements did not have enough space for critics to tell all, and that art workers would also need a specialist periodical just as it had been during the Soviet period.

In 2000, the first issue of the quarterly at hand was published, with Heie Treier as its editor-in-chief. It had received support from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the Estonian Artists Association; henceforth the periodical was also supported by the state, by the Estonian Ministry of Culture. The quarterly that had a rather novel sounding and internet-inspired brand with the added suffix ".ee" (although it obtained the web-domain ajakirikunst.ee only in 2009) was back then simultaneously making reference to the future (today's Estonia as an "e-country", where many services can now be used without leaving the computer), the present (the state-wide "Tiger's Leap" project that established internet connections in all Estonian schools by the end of the 1990s), but also the past, adding only three extra characters to the name of its predecessor, the almanac Kunst.

Furthermore, KUNST.EE has been published in Estonian and English since 2012, as visual art tends to be an international phenomenon and most Estonian artists have been working beyond the borders of national culture and the local art market for quite some time now: press releases for solo exhibitions, participation in biennales and triennales or sales efforts at art fairs outside Estonia have almost inconspicuously become a routine part of local art newsfeeds.

 

II

Considering format, an almanac and a quarterly are, of course, two different things. The simplest possible comparison can be made when looking at the increase in volume and more intense publishing rhythm. The increase in volume corresponds to the explosive expansion, diversification and fragmentation of the Estonian art scene after the country regained independence – never before have there been so many solo exhibitions, group shows, art conferences, and so on, in Estonia. Admittedly, KUNST.EE would probably never be able to cover everything happening on the local scene; however, the periodical's perspective is wide enough to cover and analyse the most discussed and notable events so that they would receive attention also outside the inner circles. "The publication of mainstream of Estonian art", could be one short summary.

By and large, the quarterly KUNST.EE has therefore exactly the same role in the Estonian cultural scene as the almanac Kunst during the Soviet period – it discusses art in an in-depth manner. This is also why the title page says "established in 1958". Which is also the reason both the previous numbers of KUNST.EE and the almanac Kunst are available for downloading on the quarterly's website. Last but not least, this also explains why there are many people in the editorial board who have previously been involved in publishing the quarterly/almanac, like the founder of the quarterly Heie Treier or the last editor-in-chief of the almanac Sirje Helme.

From 1958, one might assume it is an initiative of the Soviet era, and in a sense that is actually true. The publishing house Kunst was founded in 1957, when Nikita Khrushchev was in power, at a time when the central authorities of the Estonian SSR founded publishing houses focusing on different fields (literature, art, nature, technology, health, etc.). The task of the Kunst publishing house was to publicize Estonian art. They mainly published albums, monographs and research, but also periodical almanacs like Kunst or the more applied art oriented almanac Kunst ja Kodu.

It could be argued how different things would have turned out if the Second World War had not ended with Estonia losing its independence. Namely, it is a historical fact that in 1928 and 1929, the foundation of fine arts and applied arts through the Cultural Endowment of Estonia financed the publishing of the magazine Taie – "Magazine of Estonian art" as its header stated. In 1928, issues 1, 2 and 3 and in 1929 the joint issues 4 and 5 were published, the latter also remained the very last.

A gap of almost 30 years is, however, too long to be able to say the almanac Kunst continued the lineage of Taie – although we could say Taie was its predecessor; and that when the country gained independence the idea of an art magazine was always around. Under occupation the Soviet rule took advantage of this idea to legitimize itself among local artists and by the end of the 1950s it managed to centralise art publishing in the Estonian SSR. (True, one could gleefully fantasise here that in some so-to-say alternative reality the current quarterly could have easily been named TAIE.EE if this Finnish-sounding word had managed to root itself more deeply in Estonian language than the German loan kunst.)

 

KUNST.EE 15

Dummy sheets of a new Estonian art quarterly from the year 2000. Design by Tõnu Kaalep. The brand name "kunst.ee" was coined by Sven Kivisildnik. The initial square-like layout plan was based on the legendary American magazine Artforum, but Leonhard Lapin suggested using the format of the Estonian almanac Ehituskunst instead, because printing it was more cost-effective.
Photo by Andreas Trossek.

 

 

III

Therefore, if one would generalise a bit, one could say KUNST.EE is celebrating not only its 15th, but also its 57th anniversary this year. Not to mention its 87th or maybe even its 105th birthday – if we also include the magazine Noor-Eesti ("Magazine of literature, art and sciences" the header of the magazine published 1910–1911 states) in our list, this way the history of Estonian art periodicals would be even longer, not to mention Noor-Eesti's earlier albums (1905–1915), also illustrated by Estonian artists.

Unquestionably, facts are facts. On the other hand, remembering and forgetting always go hand-in-hand. History relies heavily on interpretation, yet there have been very few interpretations: the history of Estonian art periodicals is essentially missing in the academic sense. Many of the dissertations on art (history) written in universities routinely reference various articles; however, a broader analysis of the cited material is yet to be written. This would require an interdisciplinary approach that would draw on both journalism and art history. To be honest, I cannot really find a reason why this has not yet been done. Is Estonia too small? Is the field itself too small? Are the specifics too difficult to tackle? Are the researchers lazy?

For example, no dissertations have been written in the Institute of Journalism and Communication at the University of Tartu that would focus on the almanac Kunst or its successor, the quarterly KUNST.EE (although some work has been done on how art exhibitions are presented in newspapers like Postimees, Eesti Päevaleht and Äripäev). More or less the same goes for the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Department of Art History at the University of Tartu and the Institute of History at Tallinn University.

Fortunately, the researchers of journalism from the University of Tartu have begun studying the consumers of cultural media and trying to grasp the level of the awareness of readers. And, true, a few art researchers from Tallinn have also written a couple of things on the history of art periodicals. Linda Kaljundi, for example, and following in her footsteps, Andres Kurg, have both published in-depth studies on the role Kunst ja Kodu played in shaping the everyday environment during the Soviet era – mostly focusing on the period Andres Tolts was editor and designer of the magazine – and Elnara Taidre, who has researched Tõnis Vint's work, has also not ignored his visionary designs for the almanac Kunst, on the contrary. Still, these studies are typical of the art historical approach, focusing on the artist, time and again on the genius creator, rather than the larger system.

While the almanac Kunst has sometimes been referred to as one of the most avant-garde art magazines in the whole of Eastern Europe, the question of how exactly its "avant-gardeness" was publicly manifested (ideology?) have not been answered at an academic level. Or, what were the (political) reasons that made it possible for this quarterly to take part in the ambitious 2007 project in Kassel, "documenta 12 magazines", which brought together around a hundred art magazines from all over the world, and why this quarterly was the only publication from the Baltics to make the cut?

Is the history of art periodicals not a "sexy" enough research subject for local academic circles? Or are (art) researchers, constantly fishing for quotes, so used to art magazines that they paradoxically do not even notice that these magazines are published? If something is researched at an academic level, it must be important; but if it is not, does that mean…

 

IV

The general public sadly often only sees art journalism as the mouthpiece of artists: art periodicals as a discursive space for artists to publish their thoughts or to receive critical feedback for previously expressed ideas. Nevertheless, what I am talking about when I discuss the history of art periodicals is actually art writing (current criticism, interviews, essays, portrait pieces, etc.) as an independent discipline, which functions alongside mass communication and the writing of art history. In order to study it, the toolboxes of both journalism and art theory need to be employed. The artist, the critic, the art historian, the journalist and media researchers all have to be heard simultaneously, and to an untrained ear, this may sound, indeed, like a cacophony.

Artists oftentimes measure the relevance of art journalism by the number of times their face or works are printed. Publishing houses measure the viability of publications by the number of subscriptions. Media sociologists, in turn, compile questionnaires, asking a restricted sample of people how they liked one article or another. Each method of observation obviously provides a somewhat different overview, a shard of the spectrum, that is. However, if a media-centred quantitative analysis were to meet the qualitative approach of art research in some future study, we could perhaps also start making further reaching conclusions on whether, for whom and why art journalism is needed in Estonia, and what the role of this publication is in that continuous process.

One has to keep on working; one can party later.

 

Andreas Trossek is the editor-in-chief of KUNST.EE

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