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Freaks in the Art Hall or the Birth of a People's Artist at "Nogank Hoparniis"

Marten Esko (1/2017)

Marten Esko and Anders Härm discuss the work of Kaido Ole.



17. XII 2016–5. II 2017
Tallinn Art Hall
Curator: Anneli Porri


Marten Esko (M. E.): Kaido Ole's solo show at Tallinn Art Hall closed yesterday; I went to see it once more on the last day. I got no further than the cloakroom and I was already surrounded by people looking somehow proud and proper, and it seemed, not so much art connoisseurs or students – for I didn't see any familiar faces – as a more general discerning Sunday crowd, who were already confidently commenting on Ole's works exhibited right there on the foyer wall, taking photos on their smart phones while handing in their overcoats.

For a moment there in the cloakroom, I don't know why, but I felt as if I was at the Estonian Drama Theatre, going to see some popular play by Tõnu Õnnepalu. The mood of the public? The buzz that had gone before the show? The general atmosphere surrounding any manifestation of local culture in Estonia? It just felt like I had found myself in some universal yet peculiarly colloquial temple of culture – popular, national, mythological, existential and universally relevant at the same – but also inside an artist's lifeworld that seemed to make no concrete statements and somehow lacked focus; or as the accompanying text puts it, in "a parallel realism".

While Kaido Ole had framed his solo show with a meaningless (or very meaningful?) title, an air of national culture was there in all the accompanying texts and interpretations, even more so given the fact that the only external reference in the "curatorial explication" was "Hõbevalge" (Silver White, 1976) by Lennart Meri. Then again, it all seemed logical: both the show on its own and within the context of Ole's previous work – while you can argue about the former, the latter perhaps not so much. What did you think of it (the show, that is, not the cloakroom)?

 

Anders Härm (A. H.): I was there too, but didn't see you. As luck would have it, I went right after the last event – a concert in the large hall – so that the Art Hall was packed. The people were wall-to-wall: professionals and laymen, well-known and unknown. Paradoxically, their numbers kept rising despite the musical event having ended. So, the feeling that you had found yourself amidst a popular event of high culture – which sounds paradoxical – was certainly intensified at the time. Then again, shows tend to get two or three times the usual crowd on the last day anyway.

And it still feels like Kaido Ole transcended some sort of a barrier with this show. Of course, he's always been a beloved artist, it was just that not so many people had been aware of him; perhaps I can put it like that? Although he could have made a breakthrough with his 2001 solo show "Basic" at the then exhibition space of the Art Museum of Estonia in the Rotermann's Salt Storage or the 2012 solo show "Handsome Hero and Plenty of Still Lifes" at the large hall of Kumu, it happened now with "Nogank Hoparniis" at the Tallinn Art Hall at the turn of 2017. In fact, it would be interesting to analyse why this happened now: is it to do with art, Ole or the public? Or was it that all the parties were finally ready for the birth of a new people's artist?

 

M. E.: I'm not sure how to approach this question – a barrier was certainly transcended, but why and why now? It seems that the "final masterwork", as Ole himself described the show, was presented successfully, but this would suggest that Kaido Ole the master is only now making a proper start. In that sense, I think that the reason why this happened now is more to do with Ole than art (I will leave the audience or the general public to one side for now).

Although, in principle, "Nogank Hoparniis" had novel work throughout, it can be seen as a rather comprehensive retrospective, which Ole had not had so far, for the motifs and elements of the show basically map his entire body of work to date. There are straightforward repetitions of characters from his more recent shows: the motifs balanced on a wheel borrowed from his Kumu show in 2012, a cycle of paintings as a reference to 2008 in Draakon Gallery, the burning houses motif from 2006 at the Tallinn Art Hall gallery and so on. One of the most characteristic motifs, the classically Ole-esque "bubble head", who is now "Hopelessly Lost in the Jungles of Abstract Expressionism" (2015), was last seen in an exhibition hall in 2001. At the same time, the "bubble head" was one of the figures – the other being similar to the "Umbra Harvesters" (2015) – that in 1996 first took Ole from abstraction to figuration; and of course, the familiar 1990s abstraction can now be seen in both the details and the entire surfaces of the paintings.

This is somehow (seemingly?) a very logical Bildungsroman. In principle, Ole has reached a point where he is, in a quite free and familiar way, quoting and paraphrasing himself in terms of form (and content) and thereby engaging rather playfully with himself – in a manner that is readable and speaks to a wide audience, through a very broad choice of topics.

That is, I agree that what's happened here seems to have relatively little to do with art more generally; for on the one hand Ole has very firmly remained true to his logic and working method, and on the other hand, this show gave the impression that questions like "How is this art?", which inescapably always arise as a side-effect of any "contemporary" show, had somehow cancelled themselves out. No doubt whatsoever, the public trust him. As to the reason why they were prepared for this only now, I'm yet to come up with an explanation.

 

 

Kaido Ole / Walk to the Lake

Kaido Ole
Walk to the Lake
2015
oil and acrylic paint on canvas, 190 x 280 cm
Photo by Stanislav Stepashko
Courtesy of the artist

 

 

 

A. H.: What's more, in the education room of the Art Hall, presented as a one-picture show, was the starting point of Kaido Ole's creative career, the very beginning: a painting from 1991, though it wasn't exactly part of the show. It was with art like this that Ole first made his way into my consciousness. Otherwise, yes, my thinking was similar to yours: with a "masterwork" the artist has achieved a level where they don't necessarily need to invent a new language or new images to say something new; it is enough just to recycle their own oeuvre and place it in new connections.

So, in a sense, it really is a retrospective, but a mental one. A totally self-sufficient show, it gets its energy from confidently and ruthlessly gnawing away at its own tail. Let me point out here that ordinary exhibition viewing logic was also undermined by a detail that very successfully spoke to me as a curator: rather than an introduction, the show had an epilogue. The introductory text was placed in the last exhibition hall.

Alternatively, this could also be taken as a suggestion to read the show back to front, from end to beginning, just as the artist himself had done, taking pleasure in going through his own work. And if you did that, the final work closing the show was the series of small reliefed collages in the foyer, which one cannot help but feel were a paraphrase of 1960s assemblages by Jüri Arrak. At the same time, these works were the actual starting point of the show – the first thing that the viewer sees, an intro and an outro in one. And if there is a people's artist in Estonia, one whose work is instantly recognisable to most Estonians, it is Arrak. Although this Arrak is not quite the same as the Arrak quoted by Ole. However, Ole did make his way into the same league now, that's for sure; and I'm quite capable of thinking of this as a semi-conscious gesture of self-irony: you either end up in the gutter or as a new "Arrak" in Estonia; there's no other choice.

Actually, this aspect of the birth of a people's artist first struck me at the opening of the exhibition, which culminated with a visit by the new Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid on the opening night: Ole had already previously painted the portrait of the outgoing president Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the opening event was followed by Ole's very intelligent appearance on the "Plekktrumm" talk show on ETV2 (Estonian Public Broadcasting's second channel – Ed.) and, finally, I happened to see a TV3 (an Estonian private channel – Ed.) news report on children visiting Ole's show. And the last time TV3 covered an art story was, I'm guessing, 2012, when we did a show based on private collections at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia. Facebook was also buzzing. Yes, on the one hand, Kaido Ole himself is ready for this, but it also seems to me that the general public is ready to accept a contemporary artist filling the gap in the shape of the so-called people's artist that survives from the Soviet era, sharing the same status with the likes of Olev Subbi, Enn Põldroos, Jüri Arrak and Tõnis Vint. Apparently, the desire for a contemporary art for which all these Navitrollas and Tauno Kangros were only offering a poor substitute, was always there.

As far as the art world is concerned, Ole has been among the essential key figures of Estonian contemporary art since his 1999 solo show at Vaal Gallery, and his "Basic" in 2001 is, in my mind, among the most significant solo shows by any Estonian artist of any time, absolutely the most powerful performance by Ole. And he's continued to be a central figure in Estonian culture through the early years of the 21st century, both as an artist and a teacher. So, the public and the art world are capable of arriving at a consensus on Ole. Everyone agrees: he is a really important artist, and one that "can draw and all".

 

M. E.: Right, I completely forgot about that 1991 starting point installed in the adjacent exhibition hall; it wasn't, however, the absolute starting point or the very beginning, but rather something like a restart, and a very conscious one at that. It was when he became an artist; that is, it's the beginning of the grand narrative of Kaido Ole.

He was also active before that, but, according to himself, it was only then that he really began to make art. There are not that many artists who can state with such awareness and confidence – as well as an ounce of self-irony, of course – when and how they became an artist. I also completely agree that a consensus has been achieved between the art world and the public, and that Ole has asserted his status both by himself and with the help of the public. Yet, with all this, I find it impossible to ignore the emphatically average or ordinary character of his artist position and general outlook on life – although it seems that there may be no difference between the two. This is doubtless another of the aspects that allows him to be seen as a people's artist.

The very fact that he places himself among the masses, at the same level, rather than somewhere above or to the side. It was this idea of averageness, as it were, that the whole John Smith (a cooperative project with Marko Mäetamm between 2001 and 2006 – Ed.) narrative was built on, and with this exhibition, too, Kaido Ole presents himself not as the captain of the event's team, nor as a striker or any other conspicuous player, but a midfielder, perhaps one that makes an assist on a good day.

On the other hand, one cannot ignore a certain traditional or classical dimension to the case at hand. What I have in mind is not the straightforward fact that the barrier was transcended by a representative of a classical medium – painting – as this seems inevitable; rather, the developments may have been helped along by the format of the largest pieces in the exhibition – the fact that they were classical works in the sense of being academic thematic compositions with multiple figures on "big" and universal subjects such as war, death, family and so on. This is a format with great symbolic and historical added value and one that also sort of places Ole's work in the light of that tradition. Despite the virtual absence of any visual similarity with academicism, the syntax seems to be the same (with Ole himself being whimsically aware of this) – classicism, only new, but still classicism.

Having said this, we haven't yet touched on the main theme, the painted installations "The Origin of Estonia" (2016) and "The End of Estonia" (2016). After all, one could say that placing a nation in symbolic brackets was the final step on this side of the barrier.

 

A. H.: I don't remember laughing to myself quite so much while writing any other text than the "Start to the Conceptual Schizo-world" summarising the work of John Smith for the catalogue of the Estonian pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Art that allows one to laugh at it and oneself at the same time provides immense textological pleasure.

Still, in my mind, for Kaido Ole the period of exploration in large part lasted throughout the 1990s: he twisted and turned to find his place, even experimented with sculpture, only to arrive at some sort of clarity with that "bubble-headed" character, which he then gave a final formulation in the solo show "Basic". The wandering in the forest of abstract, high and sublime art – to paraphrase a diptych in this exhibition (a mental retrospective!) that could be construed as a reference to the explorations during that period – apparently concluded with the realisation that all this had to be abandoned.

His creative development between 1996 and 1998 shows that, rather than hitting him overnight, this realisation was a result of an exploratory process and only gradually replaced the formal, high modernist, sublime abstractionism with this humanised stick figure-like, comic book type of character going about ordinary activities, through whom Ole was finally able to speak. From then on, painting in a sense became a means rather than an end, and by the same token he seems to have broken free from some high culture pressure at the back of his mind.

This very clearly sets Ole's work apart from all the rest of Estonian painting at the time, with intellectualised late modernism (à la Kreg A-Kristring or Jaan Elken) on the one side, and "the rowdy rascals of Sobolev" (a group of mainly Pärnu-based artists, whose personal critic came to be Mari Kartau (then Sobolev – Ed.)), most of whom unfortunately couldn't paint, on the other. Ole, Marko Mäetamm and Peeter Allik, on the other hand, all in their own way and independently, created a new language of painting, which spoke to the contemporary art scene that emerged in Estonia in the 1990s and was imbued with neo-conceptualist impulses. Later, he continues this without the help of the "bubble head": the speaker is Kaido, an artist and ordinary person who, like everyone else, doesn't always succeed in everything he does. This, however, turns out to be good material for a series of works, which, in contrast, are mostly a success.

For me, a sort of shift came with his solo show at Kumu, where he suddenly found this new, much more ephemeral language, with the paintings showing these complicated systems only just balanced on a single wheel and threatening to collapse at any time. Holding the whole show together was a kind of metaphor for the fragile integrity of the world. And on the other hand, these fantastic painted systems of his brought to mind contemporary installation art (à la Sigrid Viir or Kristiina Hansen), where familiar and unfamiliar, obscure and ordinary objects are combined to form a symbolic system.

The current show brings together works from 2014 to 2016, which really show a certain classical shift towards painting and/or image as an artistic unit. What this means is that, while Kaido Ole's previous works only revealed their meanings as part of a series or an exhibition as a whole (most of the individual images being incomprehensible or at least incomplete without the whole series), now each image seems to be a complete speech act – on big subjects in life, as you pointed out.

At the same time, in the last couple of years Ole's pictorial language has been more grotesque than ever before. The editorial staff of KUNST.EE tried to steer our conversation, suggesting, among other things, that we analyse Kaido Ole from the perspective of a sort of new surrealism or something. In my mind, there's no surrealism here, neither of the automatist nor of the veristic variety. If anything, parallels could be drawn with the vulgarity of Dadaist outbursts à la George Grosz or Raoul Hausmann.

In diametric opposition to this, however, is the solemnity of "The Origin of Estonia" and "The End of Estonia", which seem to me to fall into a well-established subsidiary theme in his work. So, while the rest of the show carried on the mainstream of Ole's work, "The Origin of Estonia" and "The End of Estonia" in the main hall were examples of the subsidiary theme. First, this national theme is in no way new, as Kaido Ole had, for example, a video installation called "Hymn" in 2007 and a photo installation called "Meeting" in the same year, both of which I would place in the same category. These weren't logical moves from the point of view of the "mainstream" of his work. They were installations on a grand scale (for the most part using media unfamiliar to Ole – video and photography) and I can't shake the feeling that all of them were a little hollow, just a little too solemn. In other words, they lacked a certain level of personal experience, the level of the "bubble head” that usually makes Kaido Ole's work so engaging.

 

M. E.: I agree, "The Origin of Estonia" and "The End of Estonia" clearly stood out from the rest of the show. But then again, it was thanks to the presence of this "origin" and "end" in the exhibition that the whole mental retrospective in the Art Hall was such a total experience. Far be it from me to say that Ole got bored with himself all of a sudden, but it seems (and this is a guess) that, while his "mainstream" work largely deals with personal experience and is based on a personal "aspiration to originality" and developing his strengths, this other category is something that is not worked through with as much clarity for him as is his own self.

In a sense, when I imagine Kaido Ole working on this category, I see him as the "bubble head" in the diptych mentioned above, the one that shows both discovery and error. And this (among other things) gives some assurance that the position he has attained is not going to make him complacently follow the same path as previous people's artists by only proceeding with the main motifs that have proven to work.

 

Anders Härm is an art historian and curator, a doctoral student and lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts and board member of the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia.

Marten Esko is a curator and an MA student at the Estonian Academy of Arts. He has been the director of the Contemporary Art Museum Estonia since 2015.

 

 

 

Gossip corner (or fragments from the reasoning of various evil critics who were unwilling to analyse the show):


"You know, I guess I'm not intelligent enough for this kind of art. And Ole's interviews are always sooooooooooo general that it's difficult to find a concrete message."

Anonymous (name known to the editorial staff)

 

"Perfect post-truth era art. Salon surrealism recycled. A vocalisation of the unconscious for a title and an abundance of colourful images. A chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. From beginning to end filled with the joy of surrealism and the unbearable lightness of saying nothing, which at best makes you laugh like a good cartoon and at worst only serves to perpetuate the understanding, widespread in society, that art is pointless and easily ignored."

Anonymous (name known to the editorial staff)

 

"In my mind, Ole's show is a trivial bubble of self-admiration. We should focus on artists who have something to say, especially at a time where so much is happening. I think that this budgetary policy-based production of publicly subsidised artists is just a way of neutralising art, of reducing artists to a herd of voiceless collaborators. But Kaido Ole is, of course, one of the best to be manipulated this way, so why wouldn't you?"

Anonymous (name known to the editorial staff)

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