New Wave.

Estonian Artists of the 21st Century

In retrospect, it seems that the last decade of the 20^th century was a time in Estonian art when exhibitions of young artists proliferated. With exhibitions like “Noise”, “ Artel of History” or “Altogether, Much and Now”, one’s generational affiliation, ideological preferences, esthetic convictions, and elementary presence were demonstrated—here and now.  A clear contrast to the status quo and established practices and hierarchies of local art world was demonstrated. Artists were ablaze with a wish to validate their own truth. However, at the end of the 1990s, when the institutional landscape became defined and contemporary artistic idiom became accepted, the need for joint actions on the ideological front disappeared. On the one hand, the art scene normalized. There developed a more or less Western institutional playing field and the changes in values that had taken place became established. Suddenly, the feeling that by importing jet another successive revolution, one could succeed in establishing a new idiom and achieve key positions in the art world with one stroke disappeared. With the cessation of Soros funding another lever for programmatic innovation disappeared. Under cover of stabilization, a conservative shift took place—an attempt was made to marginalize the social and political dimension of art, the annual exhibitions of the Artists’ Association were revived, and the specialized associations started to speak increasingly loudly of their own privileged status. At the same time, these niche exhibitions turned out to be relatively unimportant, and young artists did not develop a need to consolidate and confront them. The more interesting of the younger artists from the end of the 1990s and beginning of the zero-zeros were suddenly no longer elbowing their way onto institutional playing field or trying to be appealing to the white cube. This art uses sub-cultural identification models that are based on friendship for establishing small temporary spaces outside institutions; it has virtually abandoned the exhibition format in favor of interdisciplinary environments. However, in parallel to that the majority of softer young art adapted without problems to neo-conservative, safe formats, adding only a pinch of generational herbs—a bit of pop, some sub-cultural references, everlasting existential anxiety, and links to the classics. The fact that an attempt to highlight the art and artists of the zero-zeros with an attempt to generalization is only occurring now, already demonstrates the discursive diffusion of the decade. The perception of some chords therein requires a greater temporal distance and generating practical (also art political) relationships, since this art does not present itself through clear contrasts, camps and declarations. Earlier, one mostly spoke of the zero-zeros through the 1990s, as if this decade had not developed its own self-consciousness. Perhaps, now is the time to search for new bases for describing art under the conditions it specifies. One can speak of a need to somehow understand and define the current situation in new art after the publication of the book, 22+. The next important milestone in this context is the organization of a young artists’ biennale this fall.

The New Wave exhibition, which is occurring in time between these two events, is trying to chart the new artists and propose outlines for the new generation of contemporary art. The substantive selection was preceded by an almost formal merger. The question was rather simple for us—whether and how a coherent, adequate and appealing platform can be created for those who started their activities in the years starting with 2000. Can an exhibition be created that would allow for substantial generalizations?  At first, we thought that the show would become a kind of  “best of” for the works created during the zero-zeros, to which only some works created especially for the exhibition would be added. However, the best from the beginning of the decade would unavoidably come from the artists that started in the 1990s. We also considered the possibility of extracting a topic from the total production that could be the basis for all the art of the zero-zeros to date. However, this would seem to be forcing a peconceived image on the entire generation. In the end, being open to what the artists have to offer, seemed the most sensible. Only a few years ago, this task would have seemed almost hopeless. However, now it seems that the precondition for such an exhibition—a critical mass of artists, based on which it is possible to make a selection without putting all the successful works on display—is evident. We hoped that by assembling various artists in one exhibition hall, some clear topic blocks would develop. Maybe not very clearly discernible, but at least organically corresponding to the nature of the works.

The main axis of the exhibition is formed by artists from Tallinn and Tartu. In our opinion, young Pärnu artists are riding too much in the wake of the Nongrata and Kursi school, which, as phenomena, belong to the 1990s and ideologically date back even further. The “guarantor” of the selection is our own experience working with contemporary art. However, this does not mean that the decisions made on this basis cannot be interpreted as well as criticized.

Since this is a zero-zeros exhibition, our selection cast aside all artist positions that aspired to timelessness, universality, lyricism or perpetuity. We also consciously left out traditional creative methods, which statistically forms a relatively large part of today’s young art, as being escapist. As opposed to the expansive world observation of the 1990s, at the beginning of the zero-zeros, opposition to the rhetoric of euro-politically manipulated openness was amplified.  However, in the process, unsuccessful national-conservative cultural models are often reproduced. Principally, it is an artist position that borrows from the nostalgia of the closed local culture of the Soviet period and does not provide any new means of describing the world. From the viewpoint of contemporary art and culture, this is an absolute dead end.

Interestingly, the exhibition does not include the central theme of the previous decade—the body. There is no art that delves into the labyrinths of human consciousness and offers itself up for limitless psychoanalytical interpretations. This is not something that we ruled out in advance, but it seems rather that younger artists have themselves knowingly discarded the body as the means of expression inherited from the previous generation. In younger art, mental crashes find much subtler expressions that avoid expressiveness and transgression. Estonian art’s great export articles—video installations based on the transformation of one image—have also disappeared.  Also lost are sloganeering feminism, photos from historical archives, scratch-based childhood recollections, and scrap metal installations.

A total of thirty artists and artists’ groups are participating in the exhibition with thirty-nine pieces. Although the exhibition is not assembled one-by-one of theme blocks, the material can still be classified with the help of keywords.  Although some themes are represented by only one work, they have much wider support in the landscape of young art. 

The greatest discovery of our fieldwork is related to activities in Tartu. A number of preconceptions were overturned as we found an active contemporary art scene waiting for us in Tartu. In addition to the Tartu Higher Art School and the photo journal Cheese, there is also the “presence” of Andreas W, Erkki Luuk, and Kiwa, the intelligent program of the Rael Artel Gallery, and the existence of a demanding niche audience formed by the student community that has created an interesting synergetic environment, in which the activities of the participating artists are closely intertwined. If Tallinn’s young art is, to a great extent, captivated by star mythology, and Pärnu represents its antipode—the village-idiot anti-star—thereby becoming subject to the dialectics of success, this is not a problem in Tartu.  Since they do not tend to generate a round-the-clock lust for media or self-mythology, they are perhaps able to more intelligently relate to the world around them.

If we try to generalize, then Tartu art seems to be characterized by a very specific relationship with textuality at the language and pictorial level. Direct and indirect influence of semiotics is clearly discernible. It is not only the knowledge of the semiotic nature of artistic texts, of the creative process as an act of speech, of power relationships encoded into linguistic systems, and the understanding of language as a material that shine through, but also the need to establish a dialogue with theories and to test them in reality. In addition to Tartu artists like Taavi Piibemann, Toomas Thetloff and Anna Hints, Laura Kuusk could also be mentioned in this context. She deals with the modes of visual representation in her art—the relationships between picture and text. 

A separate block at the exhibition is formed by the narrative videos that use a documentary idiom. If at one point at the beginning of the zero-zeros, the most interesting Estonian artists in the eyes of foreign curators turned out to be filmmakers Marko Raat, Andres Maimik and Esto TV, it indiated that a certain shift had occurred in the expectational horizon of contemporary art, for which young art did not yet have an answer at that time. The choices of foreign curators were based on the need to dispose of the traditional image-centeredness of fine art and the tendency toward symbolism, to redefine the relationship of fine art to reality, the need to find new means of narration, and to provide alternatives to the model of reality created by Reality-TV. During the last few years, an appreciable number of young artists, who work in the documentary mode have developed, like Kristina Norman, Liisi Eelmaa, Minna Hint and Johnson & Johnson. Relatively at ease with technical formats, the works provide an advantage in the development of a direct connection with the initial material, freedom from the dictatorship of the TV format, and courage to experiment with the means of narration.

Faced with the need to put together an almost separate exhibition for the Kunsthalle Gallery, we noticed a topic, which, regardless of the school (“Tartu Semiotics”) or choice of media (documentarians), occupied a central position in the relationship with urban environment.  Moreover, at rather different levels: ownership, home, public space, tourism. The real estate and construction boom that gained momentum after the stock market crisis of 1997, the privatization of public services, and the drastic reduction in public space created a situation in which the problems of urbanism could no longer be ignored. 

Tõnis Kenkmaa documents the bicycle campaign organized in Tallinn Freedom Square by the members of the Prussakov Association that created a lot of media noise; Lea Tui depicts the illegal dacha culture on Estonian Railway territories near Tartu; in her performance, Eva Labotkin contrasts personal private space with the environment of a shopping center’s public space; Dimitri Gerassimov presents a photo reportage of selective reactions to last year’s gay parade; and Andrus Lauringson transforms the image a casino’s illuminated advertising, with its corrupt connotations, into an infantile primer for the next generation of gambling addicts. An interesting exception in this package is Eleonore de Montesquiou, a French artist who has ended up in Estonia in connection with the real estate restituted to her parents. The first two works she completed in Estonia examine the connections between the concept of home and the changes taking place in the course of ownership reform.

In Estonian art, beyond the problems of public space, the impulse to be socially critical, which is intrinsic to contemporary art, often fades in a criticism of the idiotic stereotypes of yellow journalism. The majority of it tends to be a bit boring, schematic, and poster-like.  Just as there were just a few interesting acts that were critical of the media in the 90s, there are also few of them today. One exception in this context is the artist duo Johnson & Johnson, who through several works has systematically dealt with the mechanisms of the semantic creation of yellow press. The work entitled You Need It Every Day consists of the daily headlines borrowed from the SL/Õhtuleht, which imprinted as badges achieve an independent status that is alienated from actual events. This gives these texts a strange, somewhat poetic or absurd connotation and personalized means of circulation.  Subsequently, Johnson & Johnson hijack the exterior appearance of the SL/Õhtuleht, replace the content with a text of social criticism by Hakim Bey and try to publish it as an insert in the actual SL/Õhtuleht. Finally, they take an especially irrelevant news item from their favorite publication and reconstruct the pseudo-events described therein for a documentary film. 

One of the most interesting and topical phenomena of the turn of the decade are the soundart projects that developed from the junctures of alternative electronic music and contemporary art—the “Metabor” series of events and the Festival of Non-Existent Bands, the audio projects by John Grzinich at the Mooste Guest Studio, and the MKDK site-specific jam sessions. Music is often related to process and performance, thus such projects may be complicated to represent within an exhibition format. At the exhibition, we display two works, which are both use of ready-made audio. Raakel Sild, who has a Music Academy background, composed his work Norma using sounds recorded in this factory, from which only a foreman, who has worked on the production line for years, could differentiate the stamped letters by hearing only— every letter created by the plotter creates a unique sound.  In his audio installations, Raul Keller has worked with sounds that are site-specific. In his works individual motifs in the sound-scape are recorded, amplified and projected back to their original environment. In the 24-hour composition installed in front of the Kunsthalle Gallery, the artist uses ordinary background noises he has collected around Freedom Square, near to the exhibition site. 

Pop continues to be inevitable in young art—so inevitable that to justify its existence it does not have to rely on exessive art historical interpretations like the neo- and trans-pop in the 90s. The images of young pop artists originate where pop images always do—from mass media and beauty contests, from merchandising and display windows. Since the public, and the pop artists themselves, have not been interested for some time in the confrontation between high and low, they don’t make an issue of the fact that they steal images from pop culture.  For Merike Estna, Eva Labotkin, Maarit Murka and Alvar Reisner, pop is just the most communicative idiom that is convenient and simple to use in order to create rapid connections with the pictorial world surrounding us.  This is the mainstream of contemporary art in the best meaning of the word. Somewhat exception in this context is Tõnis Saadoja, who often unites visual persuasiveness of pop with perfectionist painting techniques and analytical approach that is characteristic of conceptualism. By providing the viewer with visual “candy”, he immediately deconstructs his icons, thereby spoiling the direct experience of enjoyment.

If the pop imagery and presentation strategies are based on visual opulence, a series of young artists work in the mode of downhearted laconism. Undoubtedly, this has common elements with historical minimalism, although primarily at an esthetic level. As opposed to minimalism, these works have a cool poetical character. Substantively, the works of Dénes Farkas, Tarmo Salin, Taavi Piibemann, Kristiina Järvelaid and Andres Lõo speak of different things, but they all create breaks in the pictorial world that continuously surrounds us. For instance, Dénes Farkas’s photo series depicts the social control space that has almost exclusively been reduced to a schematic paper mock-up; in his unnamed photo diptych, Taavi Piibemann contrasts an empty white advertising billboard, which seems almost metaphysical in the cityscape, with a total excision from the visual world of a blind person; Tarmo Salin’s plasticine-covered objects comprise a slightly virtual environment that is estranged from any human relationships.  

Undoubtedly, these blocks do not sum up the entire exhibition, however hopefully a degree of structuring allows one to better relate to the it. Many artists and works, which we consider interesting in this context, were not included for purely technical reasons.

We do not try to reflect the new art proportionally—clearly the emphasis is on conceptual and social tendencies. At the same time, however, the exhibition is sufficiently broad-based that questions can be posed regarding the current state of Estonian contemporary art. It seems to us that young Estonian art is more diverse, organic, technically mature, and intelligent than the 90s generation was in the “same age class”. Or what do you think?

 Anders Härm & Hanno Soans