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20230109

Nearly finished with Assembling a Black Counter Culture (2022) DeForrest Brown. The book reads as a cross between a blog, a music review magazine and a Marxist analysis of Black American culture. It meets all the criteria of a proper winter holiday read: Nerdy details on synths, snippets of interviews and gossip of notable techno musicians bundled with leftist rants. Brown wants to make it clear that techno is Black which I’m fine with but their mission is so defined that some argumentations cut corners. For example they put a lot of effort in proving that originally acid (in music) had nothing to do with drugs and blame the emerging techno-scene in the UK for building the associative link between drugs and techno. They conveniently leave out that funk, which is framed as a partial foundation of Detroit techno, was a psychedelic movement. Their effort to sever the techno-is-for-drugs link is just in the sense that the US War on Drugs targeted the Black communities disproportionately. There is also a strong judgemental tone to the manner they present the goa-trance-scene, which pains my heart as I came to techno largely trough Texas Faggott and a like. Not for the drugs but for the fun (perhaps trance deployed humour as a substitute for soul? Silverio for the win!).

Brown uses Detroit as a lense for portraying the US from the perspective of Black cultural development. Post jim crow era folk moving from the South to work in Detroit assembly lines, emerging as consumerist middle classes and helping to make Motown to what it was and then being disregarded by industrial capital. The ruins of these developments were later reclaimed for techno, which is presented as soulful emancipation, a process of de-hierarchicalizing the record label industry and distributing production. This story was first passed to me by Jori Hulkkonen during a 2011 Kotimaan teknokatsaus vol. 3 interview (starting from 16:41). The exact bit was cut out from the final interview but Hulkkonen also built a globalist connection between post-industrial youth learning to program to employ themselves (and later to surpass the burden of their [working]class) in Kemi and the Detroit landscape where the Belleville Three developed their sound. The repurposing of abandoned factories as stages for raves was also discussed, which links to East-Berlin too.

Brown mentions Basic Channel (and Hard Wax) but does not explore for example Maurizio or Mark Ernestus’ involvement with Ngadda, which I’d love to have had their take on. Browns Marxist analysis of Black workers and Black cultural expressions is excellent and techno serves as a perfect route for exploring workers transformation from labourers to information-workers. I particularly enjoyed their critique of Kraftwerk’s robotique aesthetics, which celebrate the absence of soul in creative expression and how they contrast this to the Black experience, where artistic expressions cling to soul to combat the robotique reality of everyday and the past of slavery. My peer-group of the white christian punk, electronica, trance and self-educating diy mayham, where youth seeks to destroy patriarchal society by destroying themselves as workers doing drugs, general antagonism and/or criminal records is not celebrated by Brown.

Art is the infrastructure of the imagination #ॐ. It’s not categorically good but something to build thinking on.

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20221008

We wrote an appeal Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz’s membership of Kiasma Support Foundation must be revoked (2022) to the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma with artist Terike Haapoja. I’m thankful for having the opportunity to work with them. The appeal is direct in its confrontation with the institution. For me it represents a step in a series of inevitable actions, which the 2021 article for No-Niin and it’s later 2022 translation for Tiedonantaja call for. I’m particularly proud that we issued a very clear demand and named people who are responsible for the current state of affairs. Our writing is in accordance to how Aruna D’Souza advices art-writers to engage with institutions, for example not to be afraid to “name names”. The text also includes a short pedagogical snippet informing audiences of “artwashing” and “soft power” (in Finnish), which are cute and could work in a textbook.

Kiasma’s Director Leevi Haapala describes Zabludowicz’s role on the board of the support foundation as unproblematic, for instance, appealing to the organization’s safer-space policy. When someone who represents art organizations being boycotted and who funds the covering up of human-rights violations holds a seat at the heart of a state institution, we have to ask: for whom is the organization keeping the space safe?

The safer-space policy cannot mean that the museum is excused from concern for human-rights violations or for apartheid, nor can it in any way support them. […] We challenge Kiasma – the organization arranging [Ars22 Gathering] discussions – to extend its safer-space policy to its own institutional structures, too. The first step in this would be to revoke Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz’s membership of the Board. Otherwise Kiasma will endanger its credibility as a platform for discussions of social responsibility, and will be complicit in the artwashing of a political activity that endangers human lives.

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20221003

Money isn’t power but the lack of it is a symptom for the lack of it. Having worked as an assistant for many artists, I know that wethey often make drastic decisions at the very last minute. In my role as an assistant preparing exhibitions, I grew accustomed to this and would expect Outi Heiskanen to alter exhibition designs right as the museum doors opened. I served as a shield and muscle. As the museum directors met guests at the gate, we swapped the placement of art in the halls. We did this more then once.

I assumed they did this to feel alive: Being relieved of stress feels great and creatives are addicted to it. Perhaps we are afraid that art does not feel like anything and fill this void with adrenalin. A drastic last minute change is also an artists power-grab. Because our societal impact is low, we take the power which is left for us to grab. Exactly when others are most dependent on us: At the very last minute, at the opening while people are attempting to make sense of what they see.

I  think that the emerging-passing generalistshamanist, soft religious and cult aesthetic trend which artists (myself included) are inspired by, is an effort to reclaim power. Artist are becoming fantasy shamans or diy-alchemists, not necessarily to submit themselves to an another domain of reasoning but to re-establish the artist mythos of past (which never existed): We are trying to become vessels for spiritual affairs because articulated forms of power elude us.

This is not a bad thing but it is symptomatic and possibly works against our efforts to self-organize. Cult’s seldom have more then one leader. Also such aesthetics remain very sensitive to appropriation.

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20220728

Institutional critique has successfully problematized for whom are the spaces of art accessible and safe for and ultimately for whom is art. What is the class of people who enjoy stuff on display? Utilizing this approach to environmental matters and questionging what is nature, yields interesting result. For example: For whom is a spring for and is “drinking water” a desirable category?

Change is natural and as long as there is production, there will be new material. There are always new creatures which benefit from change and even participate in bringing it about. This approach is a branch of the ecosocialist concept of second nature by Bookchin (quoted below) which deems human activity natural by aligning it with other evolutionary processes. As an addition I insist that all manifestations of intellect (or rationales) are equal and maintain that animals form institutions (and that institutions are animals). A horse stable needs all intellects to become.

If one goes beyond that notion of nature as being more than just that which exists, we are talking about the biosphere. And when we talk about the biosphere we are talking about its evolution. Otherwise the word “nature” becomes so big, so promiscuous as it were, so “universal” as to become almost vacuous. It becomes the being that is nothing.

So we are talking, when we speak of a natural world, or when we speak of the biosphere, we’re talking about evolution. And it is always evolving.

When we no longer rank materials on the basis of how natural or man-made they are, it is revealed that human labour is the only constant which we can identify causing harm. Instead of evaluating the environmental impacts of what we define as “waste” (by analysing how materials we produce, such as plastics, change other than humans), we should approach labour itself as the waste. It extracts to sustain human values. All work is preservative, it seeks to halt change, to combats erosion. #ॐ

I now think that all environmental concerns are aesthetic: Nature will always find a way – But when they begin a process of adaptation, they change into something I cannot classify. The terror I feel facing climate change is revealed as a tremor at foundations of the ivory tower I’ve constructed: The position from where I’ve safely classified and framed my relations to others from.

Seems that non human life adapts to change and when it does it super exceeds my understanding of what is natural. It might be that survival is ugly. The (climate) change I’m involved with is a change in values, a change in what is deemed beauty. I can see desperation being normalized and crying emerging as art.

There is an odd bitter (or class-aware, which is which in this turmoil?) tone to the question “what is nature” and “for whom is nature”.  For example, there are currently numerous Safe the Baltic Sea -campaigns, with celebrity enforcements and support from business patrons. They want the people to keep the “sea clean”. When a business patron speaks of saving the sea… I’m left to ask for whom and what is sea.

I don’t have access to the sea they roam nor the clean they speak of. These are synthetized hyperobjects of sorts. The modesty etiquette these folk enforce, taints me like an oil spill. I’m not motivated by the cleanliness the patrons and their celebrity friends are calling – Particularly when their lifestyles and merchant ship are the root of the cause. Their campaigns are waste.

We can return to campaigns, after the fruits of all labour have been distributed fairly. I think this is a continuation of an Ore.e Ref. slogan from way back: “Let’s make de-growth fun!”

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20220511

There are were a few statues depicting Lenin in public spaces in Finland. I don’t care much for them, they look boring but I get a melancholic vibe in their presence. They feel like puzzles or glitches which echo desires from a past, in a language I don’t understand. They feel displaced and lonely.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, there has been an urgent push to remove all references to Lenin and our ties to Soviet Union from public spaces. Turku is having had their minuscule Lenin bust, situated at the corner of a silent street removed and Kotka is planning did the same. Helsinki has a park called Lenin’s park which might will be renamed. There might be others too.

Right-wing conservative politicians in Turku argue that their statue is was due to removal because it “depicts an undemocratic and tragic phase in history, which does not manifest the developing cities strategy or the humane values of contemporary Turku city” (A loose translation of a statement by Turku major Minna Arve). Their critique does not extend to statues depicting different Russian tsars or Swedish kings. They want Lenin removed because it reminds them of communism.

In a recent debate regarding the renaming of a miniscule Leninpuisto (Lenin Park) in Helsinki 25 city council politicians reiterated that the renaming is a necessity because of Lenin’s “monstrous deeds” and claim that their efforts to rename the park is a feminist project, aiming to designate more public sites after historically significant women. This lie over the motivation is a disgrace to Otto Meri, the National Coalition Party member behind the recent renaming initiative. I’m not motivated to campaign against their effort because there are real political concerns which demand attention.

Their argumentation manifest the spite which past right-wing generations felt over the achievements of organized labour movement.  I see present day right-wing conservatives rallying against communism engaging in hauntological work. Their traumatic project aims to claim and taint “lost futures” as defined by Mark Fisher (introduced in a short 2021 article by Nicholas Diaz). More pressingly, the project is an attempt to evade discussing present day political relations and ties with Russia. Debating the removal of a statue is a convenient way to evade guilt over the fact that we –as the west we were– enabled Putin’s regime to emerge.

This evasion is useful for the present day Finnish politicians, who have leaned on Putin’s Russia and benefited economically from its exploitative and corrupted regime. For example Turku Energy was invested in the Fennovoima/Rosatom nuclear initiative and remained onboard in the project despite the Russian invasion of Crimea. Similarly National Coalition Party politicians have been acceptive to Russian oligarch investments (and a lot Finnish companies still operate in Russia), past Social Democratic Party leaders have worked for Nord Stream II lobbies and Centre Party leaders have taken positions in Russian banks and institutions.

The manner which the statues of a past communist figurehead is discussed, portrays them as been erected by an invading force. They were not. We did it because wanted to. It felt like a good idea at the time. Similarly, we have not been coerced into working with Putin – We took him as an opportunity and this backfired. Our wilful ignorance regarding the concerns Russian human right organisations, opposition activists and citizen voiced through the years is a reason why Russia started its attack against Ukraine.

Removing a Lenin statue is much easier than removing the stench of failed business deals. The attention they are receiving is a symptom of diminishing political agency. People feel powerless, that they cannot change the current system. They are taking revenge on an image of past communist leader, because this is easier then figuring out why establishing liberal economical ties with the Russia state failed in developing a democratic society.  Lenin has a few theories as to why… #☭

Edit: I resigned from the army reserve because the manner in which politicians use the war as a device for revising the legacy of socially progressive movements demands a response. They are building a Finland which does not exist for me. I’m working to leave this barren plain with my space comrades and no longer maintain a fantasy that defending these borders with guns aims for democracy.

Populist claim that present day Russia and its attack against Ukraine is derived from socialism, communism and is practically a project of the Soviet Union. People who make these claims very dangerously ignore that the 1917 Russian revolution was organized against an expansive imperialist state. The revolution was fuelled by a desire to end the many wars which the Russian Empire was engaged in at the time and an attempt to designate class (not ethnicity) as a foundation for nations.

Not unlike today’s Russia, the Russian Empire grounded its expansive campaigns on an ideal of a national destiny (partially defined by the church) and ethnically characterized patriotism, set to dominate the cultural diversity of the continent. If we want to learn anything from the revolution and it’s failure, it is that any appeals for a historic destiny of a nation and ethnically defined nation state projects, should be constrained by open democratic processes, public debates and legislative robustness which defaults to protect the weaker.

Democracy is threatened because ruthless politicians use emerging crises for short term political gain, and are eager to maintain a constant state of exception. Finland, for example, joined NATO without any public debates or a vote. Officials in charge at the time, even declared that entering a public debate in the matter, would open our ranks to Russian influence: We are told to comply and differing opinions were demonized. A historic destiny narrative of Finns as “neighbours to the bear” is being used to issue conservative restraints on cultural development. The state is buying automated biblically named weapons systems from Israel to protect its borders, while pressing cuts to social support and culture. Without a democratic culture and commons to share, we don’t have anything to fight for. They are protecting borders and don’t care about the quality of the content inside.

Working against wars is presented as a weakness and the strength I have is needed for peace-work. Under these conditions everyone should resign from the army. It is only a requirement portal for NATO, which conscripts are set to serve for free. It took a lot to arrive at this conclusion because my time in the army was a very rewarding experience, which helped me to understand Finns better. I don’t regret it but we deserve better.