I’m a member of team Responding to E-Mails since 2005. The only reason I get shit done is because I’ve responded enough to have been elevated to a plain where the default is to respond. I remember looking at awe as Outi Heiskanen responded to phone calls in any situation. She felt that it was a duty and was tormented when missing a call. I currently have two emails I’ve neglected to respond to and I bear the same guilt. The plains I’m working to reach next are team Citing and team Commenting on Blogs.
20191108
Knowledge-speculation During Climate Crises - ”When You Say We Belong To The Light We Belong To The Thunder” at EKKM (2019) Jussi Koitela.
[A]ddressing the climate crisis and crises caused by human agency and western thought, there is a need for exhibition methodology which handles much more complex and intersectional approaches than the current representational and politically reductive modes of presenting artworks, research, or critical discourses. In many cases, these models reduce the meanings of artworks and artistic research (which contain complex processes of experimentation and exploration, references to multidisciplinary theoretical conversations, and multivocal political debates) to discourses which highlight the most straightforward, and populistic aspects of the works.
What becomes evident after experiencing the exhibition is that it’s crucial for contemporary art institutions to support and foster long-term projects of curators, institutions, artistic researchers, and practitioners which manage to create new forms of knowledges regarding complex urgencies such as contemporary colonialism, climate chaos, and nationalism.
He seems very impressed by the exhibition curated by Heidi Ballet and hopes that it will serve as a point-of-departure for future exhibition making processes. I wish I’d share his optimism. I fear the process of “exhibiting” is categorically self-affirming. Exhibition architecture, so very rarely, allows people to discover themselves forming disruptive assemblies. They emphasize professional-flâneuring, which echoes work or more accurately faking working (which is faking knowing whats what). Exhibitions allow people to discard disruptive inputs. With “disruptive” I don’t mean violent.. More like, disruptive as in discovering how to be a parent. Every learning experience is disruptive and I think learning by doing is most effective (workshops are key).
We had our first exhibition building and sound-session with Johannes yesterday. We also visited Oksasenkatu 11 for the MEMExhibition by HYPERREAALIYAH. The artist has written an intriguing paranoia-inducing text kuinka lakkasin olemasta ja opin rakastamaan meemejä* (2018). We discussed how (or if) browsing internet has taught us to desensitized ourselves. Shared an anecdote from Outi Heiskanen, who recalled playing with severed horse testicles in her youth (her father was a vet). The balls bounced like we presently know plastics to behave.
Visited Timo Bredenbergs Without Friction exhibition at Muu gallery. I enjoyed his video, it felt like a an archeological excavation of present day financial capitalism executed from the future. We were presented with broken 3d renderings of New York City landmarks, important for the recent history of global economics. The architectural views were followed with text snippets, which felt like a future archeologist field notes and glimpses of shaky virtual hands, which attempted to interface with the information. The hand gestures echoed signs stock traders used in the past to signify transactions. I think the archeology of hand gestures in itself would be a really interesting exploration.
Digital Frictions: Where Code Meets Concrete (2019) Shannon Mattern. The article uses a still of Bredenbergs video as an illustration and explores the frictionlessness nature of economic-cities. As a reply for the text we could argue that creating patterns and shapes which refuse to align with contemporary spaces (both digital and tangible) is important, because odd designs cause friction, which is need for developing energy.
Every engine needs friction. I guess an analogy for accelerationisms would be “to purposely oil a machine until it looses friction”.
As an exercise for exploring friction: The hands of partisipants could be oiled (with olive oil) and they would be guided to touch each others hands, so that the frictionlessness, would cause the participants to loose awareness of the other persons touch.
20170905
Author Jari Ehrnrooth has written a hostile and offensive text: “Pahuuden kieltäminen ei auta” (Denying evil doesn’t help) and got it published through YLE, our national broadcasting company. The text is using the Turku attacks to target muslims and other religious groups. He claims that the attack in Turku was executed using “Isis-style knife handling” and that “islam is still an authoritarian and expansive world religion, which strictest forms include appalling amounts of mental submission, physical violence and murder”. He continues to speculate about a “righteous terrorist-mother, kissing her little-jihadist, who is send to the daycare center on a be-a-hero-for-a-day event wearing a fake-bomb-vest around his chest – As is happening in Gaza”.
I send a complaint to YLE which is responsible for publishing the text. Ehrnrooth holds the title of adjunct professor in the universities of Turku and Helsinki (he signed his text highlighting the title). I wrote to Thomas Wilhelmsson the chancellor of Hki Uni. and Professor of Cultural History Marjo Kaartinen in Turku, asking them to distance their universities and departments from Ehrnrooth. I got a sympathetic reply but I was explained that adjunct professor is a only a title and that the person is not employed by the university. The message also underlined the autonomy and right to freedom of speech of their researches. This was a weak argument. There is no “free speech” in relations others are targeted based on their religion. #ॐ
Send my Dude mixer back to Brno. Included a short letter explaining the problem and a postscriptum: “Ps. My favourite Czech performance artist is Jiří Kovanda. I’ve worked for an old Finnish lady Outi Heiskanen who had performed with a Czech group called Crusaders’ School of Pure Humour Without Joke in the 70ties. I own a hobby-anvil made from a tram-rail (made in and bought from Prague) and an axe manufactured in “Czechoslovakia”. I’ve visited Brno once, only passed through. Here is a video of me making macho-coffee in Prague 2009.”
20170719
“Does ‘art audience’ today really only mean people who have an (economic) interest in the art world?” asks Elvia Wilk on Spike magazine. I concur with her thinking but have to argue that she didn’t dig deep enough. Reaching vanilla-art-audiences is common for projects which reject institutional protection and work against status quo (Unfortunately result from such encounters are seldom fruitful). The text makes an interesting observation on how artist deploy non-artist friends as resources: “[…] if you hang out around art people long enough eventually you develop a taste for semi-mutually-exploitative collaboration.”. These processes are evident in the practice of artists like Outi Heiskanen and particularly her involvement with the Record Singers group and the “Bellinin akatemia”. Both group were dependent on non-artist collaborators.
Pietari shared a neat text: “Debt, neoliberalism and crisis: interview with Maurizio Lazzarato on the indebted condition” by Magnus Paulsen Hansen and Mathieu Charbonneau. In the article Maurizio Lazzarato discusses how the 2007–2008 crisis has influenced creditors and how tax-havens force debt to the working class:
“The power of debt in neoliberalism represents a highly efficient mechanism of control and capture, more efficient than the modes of resistance put in place by the workers’ movement. While the latter still focuses on dynamics located within the productive space, power is now exerted on a broader social scale. Hence, there is an asymmetry between capital and the forms of resistance.” “In reality, there is no crisis from the point of view of creditors as they are currently operating a second great appropriation by virtue of capturing the welfare state’s social wealth. […] the principle of redistribution has been preserved, but the direction of redistribution has been inverted.”
20160704
I became a sole trader in 2011 when I was working regularly for Outi Heiskanen. She didn’t want to be defined as “an employer” in her tax reports (which is very costly in Finland) and at the time becoming an entrepreneur felt like fun idea… I was active in building exhibitions for various parties and involved in serious art transportation ventures. We even talked about buying a van with a friend. Becoming an entrepreneur was a serious joke. The status has enabled me to discuss economics more convincingly. As an entrepreneur I’m a subject in economics and my critique of capitalism is more founded and more personal. Becoming an entrepreneur was an accelerationist effort, which culminated my involvement with Ore.e Refineries.
Sending bills is still fun but every year I regret not setting up a co-operative instead. Today my grief is related to sole trader taxation regulations when billing cities and municipalities.
As a sole trader I’m responsible for organizing my own pension. If earn more than 8000€ a year as an entrepreneur, I’m legally obligated to join a pension trust and to pay around 100€ a month in pension insurance premiums. The minimum “YEL-insurance” I’d have to pay a year is 1200€, which is too much for me (and many other sole traders working in the culture sector). This is why I don’t send more than 8000€ worth of bills a year. There are various very simple and legal tricks to do this. During the fall I negotiate that I can send my bill the next year and for bigger gigs I setup an temporary employer statuses with the organizations that hire me. For the past four years I’ve only send out bills for small 200-400€ odd jobs.
As a result I haven’t payed any pension fees. This is not because I wouldn’t want to… It’s just too expensive and as a part of my income comes from artist grants I dream that I’ll personally get an artist pension for myself (If I manage to survive as an artist for the next 33 years).
The government needs new forms of income, so that it can afford for the baby boom generation’s pensions. There are various aggressive schemes at work which skim funds for pensions from every possible monetary transaction. Legislation for small scale business is quite unfair. “By law, entrepreneurs under the age of 53 are required to pay 23.7 percent of their earnings in pension insurance, while salaried workers contribute just over five percent.” YLE explains in a 2015 article.
I wrote about the Record Singers group for an Artsi-museum related book. The writing fee was decent but as the museum is run by the municipality there is a cunning scheme in legislation, which the government will use to deduct a “pension” from my writer’s fee (More on the scheme in Finnish). This is saddening. I made the text almost for free. I don’t regret making it. I did a good job.
I’m not bitter about anything but I think that the baby boomers generation should have spend their salaries more smartly. Additional funds for pensions should be harvested by disallowing (and re-distributing) pensions that are over 2 800€/month (Statistics on pensions in Finland found here). I hate the feeling that a petitioner makes more money than I do and that young forced-entrepreneurs are paying for their second cars, their trips to Thailand and the renovation of their summer houses (which remain empty most of the year and none from my generation will be able to visit as we can’t afford the gas money).