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Dead end rush hour. The art of the 2000s in the rear-view mirror

Johannes Saar (1/2022)

An essay by Johannes Saar on the Kumu exhibition "Art in the Comfort Zone? The 2000s in Estonian Art".

 


12. XI 2021–9. X 2022
Kumu Art Museum, 5th floor, Gallery of Contemporary Art
Artists: Kaisa Eiche, The Elfriede Jelinek School of English Language, Dénes Farkas, Minna Hint, Villu Jaanisoo, Sandra Jõgeva, Johnson and Johnson, Edith Karlson, Flo Kasearu, Jass Kaselaan, Alice Kask, Kiwa, Karel Koplimets, Neeme Külm, Marco Laimre, Andres Lõo, Marko Mäetamm, Herkki-Erich Merila, Marge Monko, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Tanja Muravskaja, Female Artists' Sing 'n' Play Society Sheer Joy, Kristina Norman, Kaido Ole, Taavi Piibemann, Mark Raidpere, Tõnis Saadoja, Jaanus Samma, Ene-Liis Semper, Arbo Tammiksaar, Toomas Thetloff, Jaan Toomik, Anna-Stina Treumund, Sigrid Viir, Jevgeni Zolotko
Curators: Eha Komissarov, Triin Tulgiste

 

Suffering against a snow-white background. Me and my suffering. Studio lighting, immaculate print quality, decent frame, anti-glare glass. Black and white, noir, depressed, glamorous, also gothic. You stretch your open wound towards the viewer, holding it in your outstretched hand – look, that's me bleeding out... looking into the camera, all stylish and composed.

 

The theatre of suffering and the comeback of figurative art – that's how the 2000s appear in the rear-view mirror. The human figure, "crucified" in a dozen different ways, is pervasive in Estonian art of this decade, certainly in its most contemporary part, and at least in the exhibition highlights chosen by the curators. The figures appear one by one and are stationary, mostly in frontal view, enveloped in personal martyrdom. And with the human figure comes a tactless physicality, an all too intimate proximity to someone else's flesh, with incisions in its tissues.

Blood flows in this exhibition for many different reasons, but the outcome is always the same – alienation from life and its promises, broken connections with other people, peers, comrades and partners, sisters and brothers. The children of a culture of interruption are on display here, without a story, without a past, amidst social and cultural solitude, in a vacuum, breathless, without a sense of belonging, with a road running invitingly into the distance. Such a Sigsgaardian "Palle Alone in the World" culture is characterised by antisociality, excluding other people, at least pushing them out of the picture, out of the conversation. It is characterised by establishing a distance of communication with a Sartrean justification – hell is other people (l'enfer, c'est les autres). Evidence abounds: the protagonists of Estonian art of the 2000s are grazed by "other people", their wounds and abrasions displayed, there's a social agenda behind their bitter gaze and angst, the scratches from social norms shape the way they bleed in front of the camera. The camera has arrived too late, however; the damage has already been done. This is now a crime scene and the main character, a victim or criminal.

Broken bodies, teeth and souls are scattered everywhere. Although at the turn of the decade sociologists loudly pointed to the existence of a less secure "second Estonia", economic stratification, geographical segregation, educational divisions and an accompanying digital divide, the country was already immersed in the "Welcome to Estonia"1 campaign of self-admiration incited by the government from 2002. The economy boomed, new developments and wages were rising – especially in the Estonian-speaking "first Estonia". In 2006–2007, the field of miracles withered: gross domestic product shrank, people fled to Finland to chase the "long rouble", bankruptcies and austerity measures threatened to drive people to their graves, and cut-backs drove them out of their homes, newly acquired with bank loans. The national airline Estonian Air fell from the clouds and hit a never-ending cycle of loss.

 

 

 

Herkki-Erich Merila, Arbo Tammiksaar
Welcome to Estonia II
2002
Photo, 130 x 80 cm
Tartu Art Museum

 

 

 

The exhibition puts forward an unequivocal statement: in the 2000s, Estonia designed itself as a theme park for a national market economy to attract global tourists and nurture the Fordist need for uniformity. But it was… a fiasco. The tourists never came; the Estonian Nokia was never invented. Utopia turned into dystopia. This downward curve "from boom to doom" produced two kinds of people: those who had never got on the gravy train and those who fell off it on the highest hilltop. Both ended up in "second Estonia".

 

Identity crisis

Ten years on, the outcasts have become a significant social force, a political protest party rocking the boat of the Estonian political elite, which is still stubbornly trying to make it into "the five richest countries in the world". In this exhibition, they are a decade younger than now, their bitterness and wounds still fresh – soldiers of misfortune, shadows on the edge of light, the social price of economic success, the flipside of the coin, the unwanted children of the free market. People from the closet – the excluded, the harassed, the labelled. People that are not part of the Independence Day presidential address and are not seen at the presidential banquets. That explains the expressions and poses. It also explains a certain iconoclasm, the brutal intrusions into the official pictorial language of "first Estonia", its methodical desecration, its ceremonial execution in front of the camera, denouncing it as a simulacrum.

This is why Herkki-Erich Merila and Arbo Tammiksaar's photographic series "Welcome to Estonia" (2002) is the first to greet the exhibition visitor: it has more bitter grimaces than any of the other works; it casts the state-sanctioned branding policy into another narrative more assertively than any other piece. Here scruffy hair, sweaty undershirts, left-wing drinking culture, cheap cigarettes, jingling hip chains and oily glances have sunk their nails into suit-and-tie Estonia – the working class hero has broken into the golf club. Merila and Tammiksaar have hijacked the national image campaign and transformed it as an episode in a completely different Estonia.

And this photographic journey to "second Estonia" reveals a disturbing gap between the wishful thinking of the state and the "incredulous" citizen. The same rift also extends to the next decade, as Enterprise Estonia decides to brand the whole nation using a cartoon-like image of an erratic boulder, and you don't need to guess who picks up the bill.2 The series of portraits by Merila and Tammiksaar, then, is a tuning fork that sets the tone of the exhibition – a symphony of disharmony begins, a melody pattern of interruption is repeated, an unfinished chord is soloing. The exhibition is a critical commentary on the endless "re-inventing" of the national image of Estonia in state workshops, white-collar salon conversations and presidential speeches; a critical commentary on a state for which a comme il faut public image is almost a matter of national security.

This exaggerated image-building effort is also picked up on by others, who also point to the gaping emptiness behind the ostentatious facade. Tõnis Saadoja paints Estonia as an empty, desolate noir ("Hometown Tallinn", 2007–2008), in the face of the optimism stoked by the state. For him, the ball is over, the golden carriage has turned back into a pumpkin and the horses, into mice. In his watercolours, Tallinn appears not as a picture-postcard idyll but as the ground zero of a parallel world, buried in a fog of post-apocalyptic soot. Something has swept the people away from the streets and homes; what is left is a wasteland, the last stop, where all hopes end. Nothing personal – just that there are no people. There is only "second Tallinn", the dark counterpart.

Yet, people still exist, at least traces of them, like shadows under a nuclear mushroom, amidst the global credit crisis of the time. Like body-shaped cavities in the pyroclastic volcanic ash of Pompeii, figures with no one inside. Driven by recession, many ended up abroad, with a beggar's sign, as a shadow of themselves, a parody. Estonia's marketing campaign also ended in bankruptcy. After all, "Welcome to Estonia" was planned as a hybrid attack on global wallets, using little dolls in folk costumes – an alluring startup call to business angels across the world. And while the dolls did travel far and wide, picking up customers on the sidewalks of cities around the world and telling tales about a little country that grows gold coins, there were few believers, especially when things went sour on Wall Street. According to Flo Kasearu, it was then that Estonia's marketing efforts stooped to the level of a corner theatre or even travelling clowns and street mimes ("Estonian Sculpture", 2005/2021; "Mulgi Travels", 2007).

However, Estonia's appearance in the plots of Western street theatre has a longer history. Already in the 1990s, the cultural image of a greedy Eastern European, a post-socialist oik who wants it all and wants it for free, spread in the West. Sandra Jõgeva sells this stigma in the early 2000s, again as a sweet-talking street vendor, again feeding the West's wishful thinking and prejudices about the former Eastern Bloc ("Eastern European", 2001). The art of this decade is keenly aware of the national image-building strategies and is constantly seeking to short-circuit them, to create situationist cultural cul-de-sacs to refute the dominant media messages. Estonia's own national hype and the welfare societies' prejudices about Eastern Europe – nothing is sacred. Everything becomes a burlesque, a hollow pose and a pastiche that turns against the original meaning of the image. The artist becomes a saboteur, a destroyer of meanings, driven by bitter schadenfreude, the resentment of an iconoclast.

Estonia itself is also shivering from a national cultural indifference, the flower chain link with national identity has been broken. Andrus Kivirähk's novel "The Old Barny" (2000), a farce about Estonians' ancient "wisdom of life", has become a bestseller. The poet Kivisildnik writes about the "real" Kalevipoeg – a drunken madman who fights "poofs" and goes to "helvetti". In newspaper columns, the fictional character of Ivan Orav, with his over-the-top romanticised memories of the interwar period of Estonian independence, constantly stirs up scandal. Parodying national culture is gaining unprecedented momentum – everyone is a world citizen all of a sudden, everyone thinks Estonia is a joke. Artists also participate in this carnival of grotesque and travesty; for example, Jass Kaselaan, a conductor of disharmony, a maestro of cacophony, the evil twin of Gustav Ernesaks. His chest is not swelling with the heroic sentiment of national song festivals; the enthusiasm for collective singing has dwindled. In fact, the choir itself has disappeared, with only chimeras remaining from a chopped-up rat king, growling something out of tune about "sprouting crop" and "songs of joy in the fields" ("Stay Free, Estonian Chest", 2007). Thomas Thetloff, on the other hand, acknowledges an erosion of meaning in the compulsory literature in Estonian schools. In his treatment, semiotic noise has been introduced in the work of A. H. Tammsaare – it is still legible, but not quite what it was before. The artist retells Tammsaare's novel "Truth and Justice" (1926–1933) through a dyslectic printing demon, and the moral of the story reaches the reader as a half-blind paraphrase in "Truth and Juicest" (2007).

The 2000s were a decade of the disintegration of national core texts, and the disappearance of consensus. With an ease characteristic of the period, the word "deconstruction" appears again and again in public discourse.

 

Ethnic conflict

Marco Laimre is also deeply convinced that consensus will be destroyed. Tending to take opposition and intolerance for granted, he sees the agonistic conflict patterns of society as a new norm in its functioning. Therefore, he offers a special therapy space for mutual hatred in "Portable Angle of Hate" (2005/2021). Reminiscent of the arched stage at the Tallinn song festival grounds, his work can serve as a background to highlight the xenophobic content of the joyful cantatas of the national song festivals. Before stigmatisation, the "empty-eyed migrant", a golem brought to life through collective conjuring, was only a low-paid shop assistant in a Russian-speaking Estonia, but was then recast as "public enemy number one", who would later appear in the Estonian Internal Security Service's annual reports as a national security risk. 

Estonia in the 2000s still clung to this idea of a "garrison society", characterised by a uniform understanding of people and history. Paradoxically, this was transformed into a collective witch hunt and labelling feast. A nation must have an enemy figure, which creates unity in its ranks; only the collective lynching of a straw man provides a sense of solidarity by making people complicit.

Giorgio Agamben discusses homo sacer, an outlaw camped on the fringes of society, in a temporary shelter, a stopover on the way from one society to the next, awaiting naturalisation as a full citizen. He also maintains that in the 20th century, this camp is steadily expanding, with more and more people finding themselves on the fringes, in limbo, with no sense of belonging, just a razor wire marking the boundaries of legality. At this boundary, identities inevitably crumble. The loss of a sense of belonging and the conflict-ridden self-image of the campers, which does not fit entirely under the umbrella of democracy and freedom of expression, must remain in the rain, on this boundary. That's how they live – in a camp, amidst makeshift solutions. This is the sense in which peripheralisation occurred in Estonia in the 2000s: more and more people fell below the median, into a shadow life, the precarity of making ends meet from payday to payday.

With the relocation of the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn in 2007, however, it became clear that, for many, Estonia has always been a precarious border camp where they have no choice but to bear the burden of a non-citizen, only able to speak as an enemy of the people, an outsider. Kristina Norman's "After-War" (2009) tackles this problem, using the example of the so-called monument war and revealing boundaries of belonging between people, which run through families. She points out that the different views of history among Estonian and Russian speakers have the power to turn Estonia into a hectic border zone where all narratives of identity become equally questionable. It is as if everyone is subject to paranoid passport control at the border, subject to loyalty checks. This wake-up call proved to be a blow to the wonderful marriage of Estonianness and liberalism. Suddenly, it became clear that liberal freedoms in Estonia tended to be reserved for Estonians – the rest found themselves at the mercy of garrison pedagogy.

In addition to the distinction between the "first" and "second" Estonia, another synoptic view emerged in the 2000s – the bringing together of Estonian speakers and Russian speakers in Estonia to form a tolerable society of the "people of Estonia". In the 2000s, the liberal imperative of multiculturalism clashed particularly sharply with that of the defenders of the Estonian language and identity, and as so often in Estonia, cultural issues soon shifted to the level of citizenship and mind control. In the exhibition, these topics are addressed by Tanja Muravskaja and the duo Johnson and Johnson (Indrek Köster and Taavi Talve). For both, naturalisation is a matter of inward feeling, which is not resolved by flag waving, electoral procedures or opinion polls. Instead of the Bronze Soldier, Johnson and Johnson offered another monument to the Russian-speaking residents of the town of Paldiski – "The Ship's Last Sigh" (1899) by Amandus Adamson, who lived in Paldiski. They did this by organising a referendum in Paldiski in the troubled year of 2008. With no success: the statue, which was finally erected in 2013, has since been removed. National integration became a one-off project of relational aesthetics, without a follow-up, without an afterlife.

In this decade, Estonia found its cursed side; it tried to push it away, but went down with it. The result was a social dystopia, a paranoid society without citizens thinking and acting in good faith – powerful images of which are provided in this exhibition by Jevgeni Zolotko's "Grey Signal" (2010/2021).

 

Gender gap

In the 2000s, same-sex marriage wasn't protected by law; ten years on, despite a new registered partnership act adopted by Estonia, the people still find themselves treated as pariahs in the National Conservatives' election programme, as objects of state-funded hate speech, trampled on by anti-abortionists. The law has changed; people remain the same. The gender pay gap also produced "second-class citizens" in the 2000s – underpaid women in social welfare, education and medicine. This wage policy made Estonia a world leader in gender segregation, but the local political debate was non-existent – the politicians remained silent as a boar in the rye.

What did happen, however, was that people of the "wrong" sexual orientation or gender were placed on the other side of the gap, as "others", as enemies of the bourgeois nuclear family, in fact also as enemies of public health – labiles, deviants, a fifth column. They were construed as a procreation problem, a matter of national security, a threat to national continuity. And they were forced to acknowledge themselves as a problem, to own up to the problem, to define themselves as a patient, stigmatised, a subject with limited decision-making power.

This ultimatum-based approach to women in Estonia in the 2000s was attacked by the Elfriede Jelinek School of English Language (Kadi Estland, Killu Sukmit, Helen Lehismets, Helena Palm), active between 2007 and 2012. Their performances brought into focus the concept of imagological warfare, and along with it, the tactics of performative identity and re-enactment. The image is juxtaposed with a counter-image, using adaptation and remix to make oneself heard, borrowing an iconic image to speak in the historical framework of counterculture. In 2007, they revitalised VALIE EXPORT's "Action Pants: Genital Panic" (Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, 1969). The poster action "Produce or Die" (Tooda või sure, 2007) borrows subversive imagery from EXPORT to enforce a different female image in Estonia within the framework of institutional critique, an image that has usurped the usual props of masculinity and incorporated the visual rhetoric of male chauvinism.

In "Studies of the Bourgeoisie" (2006), Marge Monko puts her finger in the same eye, challenging the stereotype of the "emotionally heated woman", which took shape in the 2000s, and the Freudian concept of hysteria, a popular cancelling strategy used against women in contemporary Estonia. However, Monko does not see this as a specifically Estonian problem, but rather a systemic stress arising from the oppressive framework of the bourgeois core family, a harassing social role with a devastating effect on the personality. And she, too, turns to re-staging existing images and posters ("I Don't Eat Flowers", 2009/2011).

Sigrid Viir also looks for invisible taboos that allow the daughter to feel close to her parents as a child but are no longer acceptable for a young adult ("Nude with Parents", 2009). She is obviously scrutinising the social expectation that will lead a young woman to seek marriage at some point. She walks in search of this sense of social discomfort until she is struck by the inappropriateness of parental nudity in the recipe for national reproduction, until she realises that physical maturity entails an invisible "civic duty" to reproduce.

Jaanus Samma, Mark Raidpere and also Anna-Stina Treumund, who passed away in 2017, explore the boundaries of a familial sense of belonging in this decade, but do so away from the heterosexual polarity of the sexes, in a hermetic world of their own. They construe themselves as completely unattainable to the homophobic male chauvinist gaze, reflecting back its boorish tendency to use slogans and assign labels. In this exhibition, they build a realm for the radical freedom of choice and the emancipated aesthetics of the LGBT community. And yet, in this subcultural world of mirrors, the question remains the same: isn't social loneliness an inherent part of living in a society where the agenda of strengthening social ties has been hijacked by a national conservative clique? Isn't getting wounded here the inevitable cost of disagreement?

Mark Raidpere walks the lonely path of asking these questions half-dead from the wounds of family stress, as a stranger in his own home. In this exhibition, however, he clearly highlights the subject of rejection as the problem of a disciplinary society. In his video "Ten Men" (2003), he does this accompanied by the tinny sounds of a music box, creating an association with the misdemeanour case of a wayward child, but also with the capillary nature of power, its ability to shape a person's identity to the extent that, even when the person is shut out on the margins of society, the latter still maintains its jurisdiction over the person – as guilty, as lost, as a threat to public order and public health – pretty much in the spirit of Agamben.

One cannot shake the feeling that the Estonian people of this decade – nationalists, liberals, chauvinists and feminists, non-Estonians, unmarried women and the LGBT community – suffered the same fate. They were increasingly referred to as living on the margins, in the ambit of the discourse of guilt, in the limelight of social condemnation. The whole of society became polarised; it became a kind of never-ending Nuremberg trial, in which all public debate focused on the case of this or that social group. Obviously, art could not remain on the sidelines here; it also had to stick its finger in the hornets' nest.

True, this show has teary eyes, but it's also cool – no one cries their heart out in front of the camera. People choose to go to their deaths in the course of an intimate conversation (Ene-Liis Semper, "Beautiful", 2006); the dead are calmly looking the viewer in the eye (Neeme Külm, "Man in a Box", 2004/2021). No one asks if life is worth living. Existential angst requires no debate about the meaning of life; the concept of life itself is missing from the vocabulary here. This exhibition speaks in a hijacked language: mixtures of ready images and conceptual re-enactments abound. Dead ends and deconstructions of meanings are goals in themselves, especially the malicious looting of an opponent's pictorial language.

 

In the comfort zone

And yet we must acknowledged that this opportunistic guerrilla warfare and depressing resistance made its way into the official image of Estonia – it ascended to being part of the national portrait within the same dystopian decade. Admittedly, it did not make it to EXPOs, but it did find its way into art exhibitions on a global scale, where public displays of regret guarantee success with the audience and a reputation as a bold whistle-blower. It sold well and nursed the country's need for attention better than the home-made branding campaigns, such as "Welcome to Estonia".

The title of the exhibition – "Art in the Comfort Zone? The 2000s in Estonian Art" – is appropriate, but without the question mark. It was a good decade to live in Estonia for those who took the trouble to criticise the state. Paradoxically, it was work like that that became Estonia's calling card around the world. It is the artists in this exhibition that have fed the Estonian pavilions at the Venice Biennale in this century. And they are the ones that have shown Estonia to the world as genuine and self-critical. Unexpectedly, it is this that has added weight and credibility to the tiny nation, rather than the state-funded self-praise.

And the state has not forgotten its heroes. It has learned its lesson – if you want to get rid of your critics, put them on the payroll and slap them on the front cover! And that's what's happened. The Estonian state has put its whistle-blowers and tricksters on the payroll, incorporated them as artists and eliminated them as politicians. "First Estonia" starts to play and wins. Make no mistake, dear, this is a winners' show here, the all-star hit parade of the decade.

 

1 "Welcome to Estonia" was a brand and slogan created for marketing Estonia internationally. It was developed in 2002 and cost almost 830,000 euros. By 2015, four per cent of Estonian companies had used the brand when exporting their products or services. – Ed.

2 The new Estonian brand was ceremoniously unveiled in 2016: the central image resembled a kind of erratic boulder, which the public, however, saw as a vomiting turtle or a crying hedgehog. Creating the brand cost almost 250,000 euros; it was abandoned a year later. – Ed.

 

Johannes Saar is an art historian, critic and educator with a PhD in media and communication from the University of Tartu.

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