Estonian month: Art ist kuku nu ut – a festival of contemporary art in Tartu

A nine-hour trip with a transfer in Riga is a condition to get to one of the two Estonian towns starting with “T”. Experiences in Tartu and Tallinn were three weeks apart, while a week prior to the events recounted below framed a month in Estonia that made me focus on local cultural microclimate rather than the national scene.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Apart from the (still) legendary school of semiotics and Yuri Lotman, its main protagonist, Tartu had not left any significant marks in my mental geography. And yet this town with a population only half as big as that of Klaipėda provoked, by its sheer indistinctiveness and modesty, curators into selecting it as a host for a contemporary art festival that mixes, in equal parts, professionalism and topicality with freedom and (self)irony. Art ist kuku nu ut ^[1] – this narcissistically self-loving and self-referential nonsense of a title is the very password that unlocks every one of the art events that make up the festival. It is what everyone wants it to be: exotic (with ridiculousness and musicality so characteristic of the Estonian language), distant (besides the initial “Art”, no other word sounds like anything), witty (English speakers translated the title for themselves into an amiable Artists Are All Cuckoo), refusing to be unduly serious and, above all, very open to interpretation.

It was indeed all of that and even more, especially for the local art public in Tartu that found the title, though familiar-sounding, completely illegible. It seems that the festival’s originators and executors – curator Rael Artel and artist Kaisa Eiche – succeeded in creating a temporary in-between space where local public and artists and curators from abroad could take part in a shared activity of a somewhat schizophrenic character: simulating a metropolitan contemporary art scene in a peripheral Eastern European spot. Schizophrenic in that all the participants in this simulation knew only too well how artificial it was and yet took a look, with their eyes wide-open, into the context and peculiarities of the town that hosted it. An exposition by Marina Abramović, a mega-star of highest calibre, set in a comically crooked Tartu Art Museum (Art ist kuku nu ut sign on its façade amounted to a cherry on top of a slanted cupcake), in combination with vodka and pickles that were freely distributed to the crowd listening to prolonged opening speeches outside the museum, are what prevents one from drifting between works by the iconic artist – as you would if you were in a high-end exhibition in one of the art capitals. It is no easy task to step into the shoes of a urbane art connoisseur when a crowd reeking of alcoholic beverages is exploding tiny exhibition spaces and a perpetually boozy teenaged weirdo/narcissist/punk keeps bathing in the beams projecting Marina’s Art Must Be Beautiful, highlight of the exhibition.

It is hardly surprising, however, that Rael Artel, the festival’s art director, chose to treat Tartu with, in her own words, a “class A star” – Marina’s radicalism, ironic resistance to the accepted rules of the art world (or, rather, industry) have established the Balkan artist firmly in the global scene. To host such a festival and a Marina Abramović show in Tartu is a radical decision. By radical I mean marginal rather that extreme: to come to a place on the fringes of Europe and – as if mocking the system of contemporary art – to create a fleeting illusion of a megapolis, knowing full well that New York couldn’t care less and, at the same time, that something significant is being created. That something is potentiality – that’s what’s important. Potentiality is what exists next to actuality – certain parallel situations that open up possibility for logic-defying decisions, actions, and scenarios. Art ist kuku nu was, simultaneously, a collection of such situations and a process of bringing them about: scenarios were being written and deleted, reflecting the extremely volatile Estonian weather.

The topic of marginality as potential was well developed in Acts of Refusal*, an exhibition curated by a German duo Ellen Blumenstein and Kathrin Meyer (The Office, Berlin) spanning over several Tartu Artists Association buildings. The original idea came to Ellen when she stumbled upon an idea in Paolo Virno’s essay “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus” proposing that withdrawal is a productive act: refusal to adapt to the dominant mainstream, ideology, and convention establishes new values, perspectives, and… realities. The pieces by international and Estonian artists that were selected for the show are by no means a collection of straightforward manifestoes advocating yet another variety of fight-the-system values and positions. Quite on the contrary – they are more reminiscent of diaries, observations, and apprehensions by some eremitic originals: one cannot destroy the system; one could, at most, create one’s own micro-systems within it.

An installation by German artist Andreas Bunte May the Circle Remain Unbroken could well be a concentrated expression of the theme behind the show as a whole – interweaving personal escapism, aspiration to seek refuge in (indifferent) nature, and attempts to change society with space, by creating new architectural forms and re-drawing maps. In a room lined with rough wood, one sees images of a wooden shelter projected from a 16 mm film and hears indistinct narration from an old radio; looking at re-drawings of unfamiliar maps hanging on wooden walls feels uncanny: as if one is invading someone’s accidentally discovered forrest hut and the master could be back at any moment. Eremites are frightful, a well-known banality, and yet the fright is mixed with bewilderment, an overpowering curiosity whether they have discovered something we don’t know, reached conclusions that could change the current system we ourselves find annoying and yet lack the resolve to resist.

By contrast, the protagonist in Estonian Dream, a film by Estonian artist Flo Kasearu, is an overly normal member of the post-capitalist society who attains a degree of abnormality trying to lead her ordinary burgher life in an alien context. With her husband constantly absent to support a house and numerous cars, the naïve and compassionate (towards animals and journalists taken hostages by terrorists) Estonian blonde is forced to build a hermetic world that is depicted through daily entries of an online video journal. An attempt to remain simultaneously in two systems and tremendous efforts to be taken as one of “our own” by both Estonians (she periodically sends them video greetings and appeals to common cultural – or, more specifically, gastronomical – memory) and Americans (the greetings are, after all, in English) alienate her from both – and makes watching this neurotic Eastern European quest for normalcy a thoroughly embarrassing experience.

Besides other externally-oriented (towards social, economic, cultural systems) works, there were several that turned withdrawal into a productive act on an exclusively personal-creative level. Certain pieces by Dutch artist Martijn in’t Velt – already familiar to public in Vilnius from an exposition at Tulips & Roses – astonished by their sheer visuality. Painting?! I had to double-check the floor plan of the show – yep, Martijns took up painting. Having indulged in games with the spectator’s perception – exhibiting objects no different from everyday things (keys, crumpled paper, etc.) – Martijns picked up a brush and took a huge step sideways (by no means backwards), away from the somewhat expressively limited post-conceptual art. While the latter comes across as highly discursive and demands of the artist strenuous intellectual effort (one has, after all, work hard to invest a bundle of keys with value and meaning), the process of painting allows one’s mind wander off. (At least that’s what Martijn thinks – his work, at least in this exhibition, is more akin to painting walls than canvases. In case of the latter, as noted on numerous occasions by painter Andrius Zakarauskas, it is very difficult to “turn off” the painterly mind and let the hand move freely.)

Withdrawal, therefore, produces new meanings and perspectives on various levels, while, at the same time, inevitably correlating with the system from which it withdraws and which it resists, if only by refusing to act altogether. Oh, how familiar these strategies are to great many Lithuanians who perfected them back in the Soviet era!

The topic of exodus was methodically developed in the third exposition of the festival, Leaving Tartu**, that brought together the town’s younger generation of artists who responded to the organizers’ call and offered their interpretations of what “leaving Tartu” means. This is where, contrasting with the previous show, illustrativeness fully blossomed. An endless collection of ticking clocks, live broadcast of coach departures schedule, a bus stop sign erected next to the gallery entrance… An yet this insistent manifestness was not revolting, it merely underscored the already-mentioned schizophrenic quality of the whole situation: after seeing a first-rate show –Acts of Refusal – one is forced to wake up, to realize the simulacrum-like quality of the feeling one had just a moment before, and to leave it behind like a skyscraper in “Shanghai”.

The whole festival was punctuated by a pleasant routine of the daily talk sessions organized by Ytter ^[2], a group of women artists and writers from Bergen who came to Tartu on Rael Artel’s invitation. Within the spaces of Noorusgallery hosting the Nordic Pavilion, they presented several works by Scandinavian artists and invited visitors – comfortably seated under a pink parachute and treated with endless supply of coffee and marshmallows – to share their own experiences in art projects (an impressive 1857 ^[3] gallery run by artists or behind-the-scenes of theVoodoo exposition in Stockholm’s Museum of Ethnography) and compare and contrast their respective national art industries. Often these discussions – one might initially conjure up an image of aristocratic tea-party chat – would grow into heated debates on the ontology of art and its role within the society and the state. This particular event, however, did not turn into a metropolitan simulacrum. Quite on the contrary – a small number of participants and slow tempo of the surrounding town created an atmosphere of light-hearted aristocratic afternoon inviting every passer-by to join in, whereas big-city discussions often resemble university lectures with more intimate after-parties being closely guarded from the intrusion of outsiders.

Art ist kuku nu ut embodies a whole range of acts of productive refusal (to comply to norms and laws) that engender new possibilities, parallel platforms for alternative scenarios. This enterprise by two people forces one, time and again, to consider the advantages of an unobliging existence in the periphery and, at the same time, the inventiveness*** of using them, of smuggling in a piece of art scene from a sprawling metropolis.

Arriving in Tallinn three weeks later for a marathon of the Photography Month made the centre-periphery considerations take a different course – or, rather, overflow its borders. But that’s another story.

* Acts of Refusal participants: Barthol Lo Mejor (EE), Andreas Bunte (DE), Libia Castro (ES) and Ólafur Ólafsson (IS), Rubén Grilo (ES),  Tehching Hsieh (tik kataloge) (TW), Jos de Gruyter (BE) and Harald Thys (BE), Flo Kasearu (EE), Bernd Krauß (DE), Eva Labotkin (EE), Alon Levin (IL), Olivia Plender (UK), Laura Toots (EE), Martijn in’t Veld (NL), Peter Wächtler (DE). Exposition accompanied by a catalogue [?]

** Leaving Tartu participants: Anna Hints, Eva Labotkin, Marja-Liisa Plats, Toomas Theloff.

*** Art is kuku nu ut is, in a way, a continuation of art director Rael Artel’s investigation of centre-periphery that is best exemplified by Living in the Forrest exposition currently running in Białystok, Poland. The curator actually lives in a country house surrounded by forests between Tallinn and Pernu and her business card, instead of a street address, gives “Forrests of Estonia”.

 

Photos: organizers, artnews.lt, Ytter.