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20230505

Information overload (2023) Claire Bishop criticises the aestheticization of research in the context of contemporary art. The article establishes a trajectory for how the artists research we are witnessing today has been defined and portrays its present impasse. I like how youtube searches and wikipedia browsing become defined as “search” and “research” is constituted as something which changes our understanding and perception. I agree with their critique but also question if artistic research displays, which the article dissects, have ever been produced to be made sense of to begin with.

When studying for my first artist degree at the TAMK polytechnic in Tampere, we were taught to fake research. Our teachers knew that we would be outmatched in resources, so they provided us skills in making appearances. Site-specific art was taught primarily as a search of site related historical nick-nacks, which were then casually referenced to establish a historical backdrop for contemporary actions. In Bishops terms it was done to make the art appear “serious”. In practice this was done, to convince funders (city officials) that art has a place in society. This is still a necessary strategy.

Because I approached research as a rhetoric technique for establishing a sense of certainty, it took me years to begin believing that artists honestly engage in it. I still believe that in the Finnish academic context research is deployed for appearances. But I know that these appearances matter for our economy. Growth in Finland depends on portraying Finns as designers not labourers, so that we can imagine a place in global markets. I’m very pleased to how Bishop ends the article.

The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped in a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world. Such artists show that interpretative syntheses need not be incompatible with a decentered subject and that an unforgettable story-image can also be a subversive counterhistory, packing all the more punch because imaginatively and artfully delivered.

Bishops article is contrasted by Pamela Paul’s A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up (2023), which is cry for hard sciences to return with hard facts. Similarly When Does Artistic Research Become Fake News? Forensic Architecture Keeps Dodging The Question (2023) Emily Watlington works to re-establish an ethos of objectivity in research.

Both efforts miss the point about post-truth… Which is that there is no truth. This results into a lack of meaning in some but Clair Bishop offers validating comfort for both in one sentence: “The self becomes a glue that enables the debris of the past to stick together, at least temporarily.”

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20230424

I’m not an advocate of genius artistry nor a spokesperson for the artist trade. Having worked in different roles with them, as an assistant, an art writer and a producer, I’ve grown allergic to much of what constitutes an artist. Last minute changes to exhibition layouts as power grabs, pettifogging material or textual decisions for asserting authorship in collaborative processes, claiming commons as a resource and whimsical scheduling & budgeting irritate me.

But through having been active in the Kiasma_strike campaign I’ve been introduced to an aspect of artist-rational, which yields unparalleled power: Collective desire. On the rare occasion when artists exercise will collectively they outmatch any state of affair. For example, I now understand artistry and capital as the only domains which can meet as equals at an intersection of power, will and curiosity. Having consulted many of the over 220 artists on strike in different roles, I’ve witnessed them joining forces out of sheer curiosity and a multifaceted desire to push boundaries.

In the strike artists have gone all in for their beliefs and this gesture granted them similar type of power, creative movability and reach which capital has. In practice the collective power of artists outmatches capital power, because it originates from nothing. It is an expression of will and cannot be traded, inherited and interestingly it cannot be relied upon. Nonreliability makes it a fiersom asset for negotiations. It does what it wants, it resists efforts to be led because it can choose not to exist on a whim. Artistry is inherently disloyal to the established and bites the hand which feeds it, because it remains curious to what happens if it does. It truly tests the reality which contains it.

Being involved with the strike has refreshed my belief in the transformative power of art. Demanding something ridiculous yields real life results. Most of what we should demand from ourselves and the world is ridiculous.

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20230125

Visited Oodi Maija-sali for the SOLA Post-Festival Club. Came late, left early but enjoyed a cinematic performance by Minerva Juolahti. They stood in front of the audience in a dark room with their back leaning against a huge black stage curtain and held a mirror which redirected a projector light beam towards the audience. An odd drone was heard and the mirror trembled a bit as they held it. The reflection which they reprojected onto the floor in front of them shivered like a tongue trying to keep still. The projector showed a slow film of intersecting squares, which corresponded with the shape and size of the mirror. One of these beams remained in place, constantly directed at the mirror. The black curtain folds bent the moving white rectangles, allowing gradients to form on the curtain velvet, which made them appear as floating metal sheets.

This scene lasted for quite a while. The floating metal sheets passed the screen and only the beam directed at the mirror was left. Juolahti then turned the mirror and directed its beam to a disco ball which re-reprojected the projection so that the entire room and everyone in the space was touched by miniscule square rays of light. The projection square then began moving upwards disappearing outside of the screen. As it rose Juolahti followed its movement with the mirror they held and as it went over their reach, they lowered the mirror and suddenly a hairly drone whipped across the room. The sound was revealed emanating from the mirror sheet. The shivers of the reprojections had been produced by a solid transducer attached to its back, which revealed the drone and the reflection being of the same.

I would have loved to listen to the gig with a light to sound device. Ilpo Numminen played the Oodi-modular and presented it as an “instrument” which was a delight. The gig explored feedback loops and krell-like patches. Looking forwards to visiting SOLA on Friday too for gigs by Tomutonttu and Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen. (The gigs where last May)

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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.