visuals
perjantai 6. toukokuuta 2016
maanantai 25. huhtikuuta 2016
Two heads for the pigeons
Two Heads for the Pigeons
Two heads for the pigeons, was (or IS for all that I know) a piece, a
work, an effort I took to complete while my stay in a month long
residency in the Polymer culture factory in Tallin Estonia. The place
itself is an old soviet toy factory, now occupied by various assortments
of artist studios and residencies. The main building was surrounded by
other industrial buildings, some abandoned and some transformed into
small businesses and the alike. Car repair shops, used part dealerships,
some more hipsterish design firm, a biker gang hideout, a nightclub and
the usual stuff to see around this kind of environment. All of this
spoke directly my aesthetic appreciation for decaying landscape of the
industrial era. However cheesy that might sound. The work itself was not
designed to be decidedly macabre but rose from other avenues from
thought entirely.
As is customary for my work flow, I had spent two weeks just wandering
around, gathering firewood for heating my studio space and bouncing of
ideas from other artist inmates of the establishments. I had originally
considered some entirely different line of work but having found an
entrance to this one particular utterly abandoned hall of what ones was a
ceramics factory or some other establishment which had left behind the
ruins of brick built furnaces and chimneys. The room must have at some
point had more than just one floor as there was no clear plane on which
to walk on and the ground elevation at some point rose to several
meters. Literally every spot was covered in old junk either from the
original time the place had been in use or something people had just
dumped there to get rid of. One particular spot in the room rose higher
than the rest and on top of it was the remains of a brick wall framed
by steel bars that held it flimsily together. It faced south where
despite of all the dirt on them the wall sized windows filtered the
sunlight in, giving the whole scene an unmistakable aura of an altar.
There were pigeon droppings everywhere literally by the tons, granting
another hint that it had been abandoned for more than a while.
There it was. A space filled with most of the materials I could ever
need and a specific spot on the same space just waiting to be
discovered. All just left for the pigeons that inhabited the space in
great numbers. The altar like setting of the one standing wall on an
elevated surface had triggered an ongoing fascination in me for
religious and ritual practices around the world. While I’m not a
religious man myself I certainly have an appreciation for all manners of
human attempts to connect to our environment or to discern the nature
of our existence. The theme of burial rites seemed more than appropriate
for this dead building and the birds gave the final clue. There has
been in use in several cultures in history the practice that has been
dubbed sky burial. Most notably the Native Americans and some Buddhist
lineages set their dead on high pedestals on elevated ground for the
larger birds to feed. All of this would presumably have had the notion
of setting something back into the circulation of nature. So in the end,
the idea became something simple as that.
The actual process of the work took about week and a half. The heads
were made out of clay that later was fired at a local ceramics workshop
at which I was lucky enough to have some acquaintances working at. The
main skeleton of the figures I put together mostly out of waste
materials from the room or surrounding areas. After which they were
wrapped in cloth, also found there, soaked in plaster, which allowed me
to work on some finer detail. The heads were hollow and I had left some
cavities in the main bodies for the final touch. Several kilos of
birdseeds were bought and the figures were filled with them. There it
was. I named it Two heads for the Pigeons, the main effort having been
sculpting the heads and the main audience to be were the birds. No
opening ceremonies were held for the work to be exhibited. Rather I
chose to put up some posters and form an online info group to guide
people there. Hoping that in this way the experience would have been
more intimate this way. I have not really seen or heard about the piece
for a while now and for all I know it’s still there, slowly being buried
under rubble and pigeon droppings.
The Kiln 2012
The Kiln
The Kiln in its entireity is prettymuch exactly what the title suggests and in this instance its
a kiln specifically designed to fire up ceramics in a largely experimental enviroment. The project was a part of Avamaa 2012 – Building MoKSville symposium held at the estonian village of Mooste.
The following description of Avamaa is taken from the official webpage of the event.
AVAMAA is a unique symposium for art and ideas hosted every summer by MoKS, an artist run organization and residency center in the rural village of Mooste Estonia. AVAMAA encourages creative interventions in the local context and the exchange of ideas through the platform of a living workshop. AVAMAA roughly translates as ‘open land’. The central idea for AVAMAA 2012 is to create a temporary “village” or camp we call Moksville, out of affordable recyclable and locally sourced materials.
The central idea of the syposium was for the artist to contstuct their own part of the village out of the goven materials. A precept from which I admittedly deviated a bit and chose to construct my frunace out of found waste material instead. The village ended up having a restaurant, a diy windpowerplant, a pingpong table/movie theater, pagoda, sleeping tents and ofcourse my construction: the fully working ceramics kiln made of scrap materials in which we managed to fire up claywork made by the local children and other workshop attendants.
The final idea had dawned to me briefly before the deadline of proposals to this symposium as I was writing another application for another exhibition. The unrealized piece would have consisted of creating a stylized stoneage statuette out of waste materials. I had allso had some experience on working with fire on a previous collaborative effort in Skoki, Poland, in the form of designing and executing a fully functionin Ugristyle saunatent from yet again improvised materials.
From these elements it was no long mental trip to deciding I wanted to experiment on building a functioning ceramic kiln. I had no previous experiment on working with clay or constructin other such devices so the process itself served itself as a fundamental learning and discovering experience for this kind of work. I had some schetces of more typical forms of moder kilns which I adapted into the framework visualizing the outcome but largely it went by on the lines of This seems about right-type of thinking. The end result was a success. And after I had stood by the thing for 12 hours keeping up the fire with some unholy amout of wood which I had gathered during the week we had our clayworks fully fired and people attending could take home their pieces as souveniers.
One added personal bonus of this endeavor was that it sparked an ongoing passion for me towards clay as a material, which I continued from then on to use in other pieces to come.
The Kiln in its entireity is prettymuch exactly what the title suggests and in this instance its
a kiln specifically designed to fire up ceramics in a largely experimental enviroment. The project was a part of Avamaa 2012 – Building MoKSville symposium held at the estonian village of Mooste.
The following description of Avamaa is taken from the official webpage of the event.
AVAMAA is a unique symposium for art and ideas hosted every summer by MoKS, an artist run organization and residency center in the rural village of Mooste Estonia. AVAMAA encourages creative interventions in the local context and the exchange of ideas through the platform of a living workshop. AVAMAA roughly translates as ‘open land’. The central idea for AVAMAA 2012 is to create a temporary “village” or camp we call Moksville, out of affordable recyclable and locally sourced materials.
The central idea of the syposium was for the artist to contstuct their own part of the village out of the goven materials. A precept from which I admittedly deviated a bit and chose to construct my frunace out of found waste material instead. The village ended up having a restaurant, a diy windpowerplant, a pingpong table/movie theater, pagoda, sleeping tents and ofcourse my construction: the fully working ceramics kiln made of scrap materials in which we managed to fire up claywork made by the local children and other workshop attendants.
The final idea had dawned to me briefly before the deadline of proposals to this symposium as I was writing another application for another exhibition. The unrealized piece would have consisted of creating a stylized stoneage statuette out of waste materials. I had allso had some experience on working with fire on a previous collaborative effort in Skoki, Poland, in the form of designing and executing a fully functionin Ugristyle saunatent from yet again improvised materials.
From these elements it was no long mental trip to deciding I wanted to experiment on building a functioning ceramic kiln. I had no previous experiment on working with clay or constructin other such devices so the process itself served itself as a fundamental learning and discovering experience for this kind of work. I had some schetces of more typical forms of moder kilns which I adapted into the framework visualizing the outcome but largely it went by on the lines of This seems about right-type of thinking. The end result was a success. And after I had stood by the thing for 12 hours keeping up the fire with some unholy amout of wood which I had gathered during the week we had our clayworks fully fired and people attending could take home their pieces as souveniers.
One added personal bonus of this endeavor was that it sparked an ongoing passion for me towards clay as a material, which I continued from then on to use in other pieces to come.
Axes 2015
I am not interested in theories. I
am interested in Ideas.
I’ve been sitting here in front of
a blank virtual sheet of paper for a while now. There’s quite a few pieces of
roughly modeled rock downstairs, ready to be further processed into axes and
other pseudo stone-age paraphilia. I do have thoughts about them, even deep
ones. But they escape my fingers, which just end up resting restlessly on the
keyboard. I suppose writing pointless
crap like this is illustrating one way I employ, to evoke some creative forces
buried in me. The point is, one has to keep whatever concept emerges into the
white emptiness in the text as a whole.
Exercise. Exorcise. Possess.
Voodoo cults arouse in ones mind
images of pinned dolls, skulls, bones and people loosing themselves in weird
states of trance. This is a mostly fictive narrative perpetuated by the
entertainment industry, but still it has its roots in reality. The pinned dolls
would be the westernized image of the figurines present at various voodoo
rituals. Those figurines do not only represent the gods worshipped, they are
considered to have the essence of the divinity in their form. The statues are
alive. They are living gods. Such way of asserting essential values to
inanimate objects has been dubbed Fetishism by the European scientist.
A quick virtual shuffling through
the pages of Wikipedia reveals to us several strains to be explored under the
umbrella term fetishism. All of them however hold at the core of them the idea
that an object in itself carries, or holds inside it, some meaning or is an
abstract concept materialized and is to be revered as something past the
material sphere we inhabit. Of course
one cannot avoid attaching sexual connotations to the term fetishism, and
indeed sexual fetishism would be one avenue to explore within our thematic
framework, but I refrain from walking down that path, mostly to avoid being
viewed as a pervert under the scrutiny of my peers.
Another fascinating train of
thought sets of when I pass through the pages dealing with a concept dubbed
commodity fetishism by the mammoth Karl Marx himself, in his book Capital:
Critique of political economy. Skipping over some of the parts that are so dry
they make ones eyes cry for lotion, I could, by shifting sentences out of their
original contexts, summarize that under capitalistic systems the means of
exchange aka money and goods are seen as having far more value that the labor
spent to produce them would suggest. This is achieved through branding and
image marketing that pretty much define the state of our culture today.
Being a stand up participant in our
beloved western hegemony I however chose not to take into consideration the
obvious subversive nature of Marx’s writings (well, more precisely quotes from
his writings). Instead I’m formulating an idea more useful for the struggling contemporary
artist. One that runs along the lines of Karl’s writings with an aim to
replicate the process of fetishizing the commodity, or in this case a piece of
art or an artifact, in order to extract as much imagined value from it to be
used in case of an exchange involving more conventional forms of currency.
So, a long story keeps on getting
longer. I am producing at this moment a
ceremonial versions of stone tools inspired by what I imagine the Cro-Magnon
using 50,000 years ago. Which again links me back to the subject of
animistic religions, if I so wish to proceed in the course of my ranting. I aim for the finalized object to convey a
sense of meaning and value way beyond my subjective evaluation about the worth
of my labor used to produce it. I also wish to make it clear here, that it is the creation of an Object that I am
interested in, rather than producing an image or a sketch of an abstract
concept. I believe art in itself is profoundly linked to this process of fetishisation and it should be understood
and celebrated as such, rather than reaching towards the desolate spheres we
have dubbed objectivity and reality.
Another point of interest for me is what happens before an object is
fetishized. How is an object born?
Rock as such to me is an endless borderless mass of grey, sometimes
taking on shades of pink and green. Rock is solid. Rock is silent and
nondescript substance.
What then happens
when this abstract or primordial sense of matter is transformed into a tangible
object. For this part I choose to loosely study or appropriate the concepts of
individuation and reification, borrowed straight from the wondrous simulation
of a dictionary, the Wikipedia.
The term Individuation would refer
to the process in which “a
thing is identified as distinguished from other things”, or from an abstraction
to an object in this case. Individuation can also refer to the way in which we
ourselves become the I. In short I am stating that the process through which an
object is born, is the process of our minds actively producing it from all the
fuzz of chaos that surrounds us. Even more shortly put, noticing something is
creating it as an object. I also suspect that the act of separating and
defining objects from the Fuzz is in the end a key factor in our own Becoming.
Reification, is basically another
way if saying what has been said above. It is a Marxian concept to be shunned
upon, but holds in it self some level of poetical weight that I’d wish to use
for my own purposes during the process of celebrating the fetishisation of art.
Also, I figure it would piss of some of the more self righteous leftist
creatures inhibiting our cultural spheres.
Guillotine 2013
A prototype for a machine guillotine. 2013. Helsinki
I cannot
be entirely sure where the idea for a motorized quillotine originally
came from and allthough at the time of it's conception I had been
occupied for a while with thoughts about politics in general, I can
assure that it wasn't a desire to chop of heads that gave seed to this
monstrosity.
Firstly, I
had been interested in mechanics and motion for a while when I started
to think about constructing some form of a kinetic sculpture. Having
been working with fire before a motorized instrument running on nothing
less grandiose than a steam engine would have been the ultimate
achievement in my mind at the time. Coming to grips with reality however
forced me to scale down a bit but I never let go of the part about the
mechanics with a motor as an option.
Now, it's
quite hard to justify building such a conceptually hellish device that I
did. A fact which in hindsight served as the driving force behind the
project for me at the time. It was yet again not the actual outcome,
which I endeavored to be complete as functional as possible with the
resources at hand, but the process of making the thing that served me as
an artist. During the manufactoring period I got to meditate on
thoughts about the history of western democracy in light of the current
global political turmoils of the world. Namely, the quillotine served to
me as a symbol fro the french revolution and the rise of modern
political movements and their gruesome origins. It'd be easy to dismiss
all warring factions around the world as barbaric by nature but I would
suggest that it's more productive in the long run that in someways we
all have blood on our hands.
On a
lighter note, I did enjoy coaxing a reaction out of the audience in our
final exhibition. And I did enjoy the conversations that rose out of it
which would be in my opinion be the point of this kind of artworks post
their completion. It is fascinating how surprisingly strongly we react
to such symbols that remind us of how brutal our human existance can
sometimes be. And while I in these conversations insisted on the
symbolic nature of this very real object and its sibling work Improvised
Weaponry for the Ongoing Struggle for Our Daily Bread, it took quite
abit of convincing on my part to assure people that I personally am
practically a pacifist.
The
technical side of this project was yet again a bit of an adventure for
me. I had very little experience in working with mechanics and due to my
budget an early decision had to be made to construct the whole thing
mostly out of recycled parts. All the wood parts were painstakingly dug
up from construction yard trash piles. A discarded bicycle was
dismantled so I could use it's gears for the mechanics and some
additional cogs and chains were aquired from a recycling centre. After
what was a very painstaking process of endless trial and error I got the
machine to actually run with a power drill as it's powersource. However
for the exhibition purpouses we had to make a collective decision to
leave it as a stationary piece just for the safety of our audience. You
could run the machine by rotating an atteched bicycle pedal and it ran
fine but the continuous use of power tools that ran with 240 volts
straight from the wall seemed for some people to be a bit risky. Go
figure.
Tilaa:
Blogitekstit (Atom)