LIVE ART IN FINNISH

ARTICLE 1:

By Maija Hirvanen

We’re brushing our teeth with lake water and English language?
– a bit about new performance and Live Art in Finland

Kunstbanken, Hamar, Norway, 26th October 2007
Finnish performance artists are walking around in small groups at the Oslo airport, Norway. Each of them asks, one at the time, for a train to Hamar, where gallery Kunstbanken is located. There is a festival of Finnish performance over a weekend.

Everyone got to the train. On the second day of the festival, on a brake, someone said: “Look now, this bunch of people, we’re here. We wouldn’t be on the same programme in Finland for sure. We had to get an invitation to Norway to sit in the same room”.

Helsinki, 8th May 2008
True. There’s diversity in Finnish performance and Live Art. Performance makers are doing their work in different places, with different ideologies, ways of organizing the activity and with different goals. The modern and post-modern performance practices are living in parallel realities the same small country, debating too.

Here’s something very shortly about performance and Live Art in Finland today:

The roots of Finnish performance art are said to be in the 1970’s. Performance events and artworks started to emerge on the Finnish art field more actively in the 1980s’ from traditions of fine art, theatre, dance and music. Some of these artists and artists’ groups were Suomussalmi group, Homo $, Roi Vaara and Irma Optimist, just to name a few. Alternative and longer histories could of course be presented. For the second generation Finnish performance makers (there are plenty), one could for instance look through some of the profiles and links on www.performancekunst.no artists’ profiles. About Live Art: the term arrived to Finland mainly from Great Britain, where it was first established. As Live Art Development Agency puts it: "Live Art should not be understood as a description of an artform but as a strategy to ‘include' a diversity of practices and artists that might otherwise find themselves ‘excluded' from all kinds of policy and provision and all kinds of curatorial contexts and critical debates."

So, performance and Live Art have a parallel relation, but are not necessarily the same thing. It seems that where as some of the older generation performance artists have found it important at their time to establish an art genre of performance art, several of the younger generation artists, who call themselves Live Artists or performance makers, find the strategic and dialogical or critical levels of investigating performance as a wider, open phenomena more as their task for life. (More about Live Art a bit later).

One impact to the introduction of the term Live Art in the Finnish context was the launch of a BA course ’Crossing Borders in Performing Arts’ in Turku Arts Academy in 1999. Several Young British Live Artists, such as Joshua Sofaer and Lone Twin and taught on the course and performed in Finland. Also several older generation performance artists, such as Stuart Sherman, Seiji Shimoda, Gary Stevens and the Finnish influence makers Annette Arlander and Roi Vaara visited the course. 2002, ANTI festival started, with a strong emphasis on Live Art. As a summary, the term Live Art started to have had a dialogue with the term performance art in the Finnish context of performance in the beginning of 2000.

The education in Turku was unfortunately ceased after 2003. Nowadays there is a national education for performance and Live Art is at the Helsinki Theatre Academy’s programme in Performance Art and Theory, who educate artists on a MA level. Fine Art Academy in Helsinki arranges courses in performance, and there are singular courses in other schools, such as free art school Maa. However, at the moment there isn’t an education in Finland that would specialize in performance and Live Art already from the elementary level, the BA studies.

Especially during the last 10 years, particularly through the newer artist generations, the performance thinking that considers performance as a wide cultural and humane phenomena has stabilised itself in the Finnish art field. Education has played a significant role in this development. When the first generation of Finnish performance artists started their art making, there wasn’t any education for performance in the country; the starting points were different. According to Annette Arlander, artist and professor of performance studies at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki, “…the situation performance education has been influenced by a three-fold tradition already from the 1980’s: one could end up as a performance artist through fine art education, theatre or dance education or then through street activism, environmental activism or a specific subculture.” (Arlander in an interview, April 2008). Arlander adds that already in the 1980’s these areas were already mixing up and are still in the process of cross influencing.

And after writing this, I’m thinking, of course: for some levels of performance, there aren’t schools, but Live learning.


Paris, 18th May 2008
As said earlier, Live Art and performance are close relatives, but are not necessary the same thing. Stephen di Benetto writes in his article (in the book The Senses in Performance, ed. By Sally Banes and André Lepecki, 2007) ’Contemporary Live Art and Sensorial Perception’ as follows:

”Live Art is a British term used to describe inter-medial performance – that is, performance that uses aesthetic concepts drawn from painting, sculpture, dance, music, theatre, and performative acts that do not subscribe to traditional definitions of medium and genre. Theatre and the visual arts share many compositional and aesthetic approaches to expression. The bridge between the visual arts and theatre can be seen through the genre of live art.”

Later in the text he continues:

”...Live art has evolved into an area of practice that ranges from conventional theatre techniques, dance, and music, at one extreme, to video, film, and time-based installation work at the other.”.

These quotes are taken out of their context, but do describe the starting point that the artists working in the centre of Live Art share. Live Art is its own kind of a hybrid, like a house with transparent windows and several open doors. It means, also in the Finnish cultural context, a specific way to think about and realise performative contemporary art. In addition, in Finland Live Art refers to a certain international (or at least European) consciousness around the questions of performance. Here lies a contradiction too: where as part of the Finnish Live Art makers work with this consciousness, another part has been working only nationally. As such, this is an interesting condition; does something new, a “Finnish Live Art”, develop? What would this be? Artists arranging sauna retreats for limited audiences, beating them up with birch leaves and rolling them in tar afterwards? Artists arranging arty swamp jogs or rowing competitions at thousands of the lakes of Finland? A piece with a lot of mobile phones? Something about Kalevala? The first impression-idea of “Finnish Live Art” kind of falls apart before further thinking, as the nationalist intentions are rarely in the core of new generation artists. Art talks in more diverse ways.

Anyway, fresh, living and sustainable “Finnish Live Art” gets best born in an aware and dialogical relationship with the global kingdom of performance. This especially in a situation of bringing in direct influences from countries like Great-Britain to a small 5,3 million people state with a rare language, a relatively new written culture and with a location in Northern Europe.


Pennsylvania, 14th June 2008
Tourist guides emphasize Finland as the “land of thousand lakes”. The map, shaped as a woman is revealing a lot of water and trees. The Finnish cultural identity is still directed by the forest and the countryside. On one particular level a Finn still might be in her/his best element when looking at the surface of a pure lake in the July evening, surrounded by birch trees, when the work is done. In that moment, one sentence is the key to a whole worldview. In 1970’s most of the Finnish were still farmers. On the other hand, in the age of high tech we have that Nokia and the media artists. Finnish have not, naturally and happily, changed into pure cosmopolitans in a few decade. But where as my own father was born in a sauna, the new city generations orientate better in web galleries than in woods. The Finnish travel, work abroad, marry some foreigners and bring these influences back to the concept of “Finnish culture”. The archaic and rural mentality of us, the tree people, has gotten important companion levels: the urban, the digital, the networked.

So I think Finnish new performance and Live Art is definitely not only from the woods. It’s from the space that located in-between the classical view to the lake and the information transfers in the internet. It’s made of kebab, cheap flights and sisu, a Finnish word for a specific kind of guts.

Helsinki, 21st June 2008
In comparison to the size of the country the whole field of Finnish performance and Live Art is amazingly dynamic and in a process of renewing. From the top of my head, here’s some of the organized activity related with Live Art and performance in Finland:

ANTI festival has been introducing Live Art in Finland too since 2002. ANTI takes place in the middle of Finland, Kuopio, a 6 hours train trip from Helsinki. This has meant introducing international Live Art particularly in the context of a small rural town, a very different context from the capital. ANTI’s audience are mainly consists mostly of the local people and the festivals artists and guests. ANTI’s focus on site-specific art works well with the questions proposed by Live Art.

Kiasma Theatre in Helsinki has over its ten years history presented works of performance artists such as La Ribot, Louis Weaver and HK119. Their URB festival has brought spoken word/live poetry artists to their programme. Kiasma Theatre has played a significant role in the development of Finnish performance especially for the braches of performance arriving from the performing arts and media art. Some of the Finnish Live Artists’ and new performance artists’ work has been continuously premiered and presented at Kiasma Theatre.

The artists association MUU has organized events for performance art for 20 years. They have several actively working performance artists as their members. MUU organizes a performance festival Amorph! once every second year, each with a different curator.

Naturally, the work of individual event organizers, operating in very different styles and goals, is at the core of any performance genre. There are continuous and occasional events at least in Helsinki (Là-bas, Art Contact), Turku (Fluxee, Living Room festival), Vaasa (Platform/Mope), Lahti (Nyrjähdys, PAIR), Tampere (Tampere performance assoc.) and Joensuu, a list luckily too long to go through in full extent here. The events by individual organizers are realised with different emphasis and goals, depending on the people involved and the context.

ARTICLE 2
WHATS LIVE ART IN FINNISH?
By Leena Kela and Suvi Parrilla

-Info line, Leena Kela. How can I help you?
-This is Suvi Parrilla calling. I am bored in my life and I want something exiting and new... something totally different. Do you have anything special to offer?
-Yes Suvi, yes, you’re calling the right place. Would you like to hear more about Finnish live art then?
- eeee...First I would like to ask about this term live art. Could you tell me what does this term actually mean?
-Hmmm...Live Art Archive (http://ahds.ac.uk/ahdscollections/docroot/liveart/liveartsearch.jsp) answers to the question “What is live art?” in this way: live art seeks to investigate existing conventions, evolve new concepts, engage with an experimental practice and draw freely on the widest range of references, influences and disciplines.
-Is there something very special in Finnish live art then?
-Finnish live art scene is developing, growing and gradually getting established. There are organisers for events and festivals all over the country and dozens of artists specialised in live art in their artistic practice.
-Oh really? I didn’t know that. How can I get information about all these artists?
- You are on a right track, just watch "What is Live Art in Finnish?" live art-work DVD special edition.
-And what am I supposed to get from it?
-The idea behind the DVD is to make performance art more accessible and introduce the audience to new artists through video documentation of their work. Works are visual, poetical, humoristic, minimalistic, political, physical, philosophical, actual, everyday, innovative, silent, loud, touching, time-based and natural.
-So what is live art in Finnish then?
-… (hang up the phone)
(An extract from the introduction performance of What’s Live Art in Finnish? Live art-work DVD publication)

As performance artists and performance art organizers, we have been participating on the ongoing discussion about the relationship of live performances and their documentation for a few years now. It seems to be one of the most relevant issues in the beginning of the 21st century, when the digital video cameras form a remarkable part of the audience of the works of performance art. Is the documentation of live performance capable to provide the necessary information for reading/ feeling/ interpreting the artwork? Can it provide any information of the live encounter between audience and the piece of work? How about the time and space continuum in which the work originally took place, could that be transmitted on video?
Being inspired by this questions we ended up making a DVD called What’s Live Art in Finnish? in collaboration with Christopher Hewitt and the Finnish artist’s association MUU. The DVD is published as a part of Hewitt’s DVD publication series live art-work. What’s Live Art in Finnish? Live art-work DVD does not provide straight answers to any of these questions, but gives 18 different examples of recorded performances, which are edited to last maximum 15 minutes and performed in front of the live audience. By making the compilation we wanted to take part on this ongoing discussion as well finding good ways to promote Finnish live art for the wider audience. Over the past few years the Finnish performance and live art scene has become very active, with several annual festivals taking place around the country and regular performance events organized in Helsinki and as well as in Joensuu, Kuopio, Lahti, Pori, Tampere, Turku and Vaasa. Although only presenting a small selection from the large number of artists working with performance art in Finland, the DVD does feature work by both well-established and emerging artists and is intended as an introduction to the dynamic Finnish live art scene. The artists featured on the DVD are Annette Arlander, John Court, Maija Hirvanen, Helinä Hukkataival, Essi Kausalainen, Leena Kela, Antti Laitinen, Hyun-Joo Min, Kukkia Group, Irma Optimist, Mimosa Pale, Suvi Parrilla, Jouni Partanen, Pessi Parviainen, Roi Vaara, Juha Valkeapää, Inari Virmakoski and Willem Wilhelmus.

Finnish live art has a lot to do with meditative stillness, even isolation. It researches the artists’ relationship with culture as part of nature and develops its own art historical politics, aesthetics and disciplines. The urge to refresh the aesthetics and invent new ways of making performances is quite typical for young emerging artists, who are playing strong part in Finnish live art scene today. But still many members of young generation are mirroring their aesthetics with the works of previous generations. The influence of elder and still active artists, as Roi Vaara and Irma Optimist, who have created the foundation with long careers and strong believe on this form of art, is remarkable. Influence of Anglo-American performance and live art is especially visible in young artists’ work and their way of thinking of performance. This is mostly an outcome of good connections from the British live art scene, but also a consequence of the Internet generation navigating the web pages of Anglo-American art world. The works of Finnish performance and live artists are not only either traditional or deconstructing the notion of performance, but they can be highly conceptualized and intellectually sensitive as well.

The cultural background of Finland is formed by the fact that Finland has been one of the latest countries under colonialism in Europe. Finland is a bilingual (Finnish and Swedish) country between Sweden and Russia, and Finnish language has also many loanwords from Russian too. Independency was not achieved until 1917. In that sense Finnish cultural identity is fairly young. The time of national romantics continued in Finland until 1940´s. In a way it is living renaissance already. Globalizing civilization pushes minorities construct their roots over and over again. Population of Finland is only 5,3 million, comparing in most EU countries, Finland is small nation. The mythological and geographical background makes contemporary Finnish artists perform their relationship to nature and cosmic forces. In performances the human body confronts the nature and is looking for harmony with it. For example the performance Wind’s Nest - Witche’s Broom of Annette Arlander is dealing with the relationship between landscape, wind and human being. The wind and the Baltic Sea are the strongest forces on the Island of Harakka, where her studio space is located in Helsinki. According to Arlander, her interests of research could be a summarized as ”Performing landscape – notes on site-specificity in the light of practical experiences with documentation and display”. In the video Arlander is sitting on the rocky seashore with a wind’s nest on her back, which is turned towards the camera. The sea wind blows strong, but nothing exceptional happens, just a woman in the landscape. The documentation is showing her performing this action in the gallery space, sitting her back turned towards the audience and having the original video footage on video projection in front of her. Here the original performance has been made for video and this action is then transformed to live performance, which is again documented and shown on the DVD.

The interpretations of cultural background in Finnish arts are not traditionally urban, but more related on individuals with rural background facing up urbanism, escaping it or trying to learn how to fit in it. This personal and inner conflict is characteristic to Finnish identity over all and is obviously visible in Finnish live art. The performance with the sense of isolation is Jouni Partanen´s heavy sarcophagus casted on iron in his work Breather. This mythological object could be stolen from department of Egyptology of British museum. Or it could have travelled the whole way form Easter Islands to the streets of Lahti in Finland. It persuades people to come to take a closer look and immediately shocks them: “Oh God, somebody is in it!” The artist himself manifests his frustration of the cold distance between people. By offering a concrete distance, few hundred kilos of iron between him and the audience, people start to take contact, everyone in their own way. The work is cleverly connecting our social needs to communicate with the sense of distance and isolation. Who else makes even a dog passing by becoming interested in arts? The documentation of Partanen´s piece reminds of candid camera, hidden and voyeuristic. The choice to do it that way is important and gives space for the durational performance to encounter its audience. Camera is not the dominating viewer of the performance, which would manipulate the other viewers’ way of interpreting the work. The performer is passive, a living sculpture and the audience is actually the performing and active part on the documentation.

In his performance piece Snowman, the photographer and performance artist Antti Laitinen stands half naked in a flour storm and wears a sadomasochistic mask with a carrot nose. Snowman is answering on expectations of Finnish exotics. A tall Scandinavian man is standing inside a showcase in an artificial snowstorm. Through his almost naked body he is having a different attitude towards the cold climate. This is what tourists may want to see here, something what they believe being typical to the Finnish tribe. The transparent showcase isolates performer from the audience. He is being showcased and becomes a living statue like Jouni Partanen. But unlike Partanen, Laitinen is not trying to create a personal contact with the audience. He appears as an image, like a photograph. Performance is nicely and cleanly showcased inside a frame, which might make it easier to watch it for a random audience. Still we get quite a traditional image of performance and body art with bare skin and body paint including a hint of fetishism. The performance is also made for video, but in this case it is performed live in Kiasma as a part of ARS ’06 exhibition. To present same piece of work in different medias is representative of Laitinen’s artistic practise.

A woman (Mimosa Pale) stands in the middle of the main road in a tiny Finnish countryside town called Ristijärvi. She has shopping bags in her hands. People driving by are noticing that she is not a local resident. She is a visitor and drivers get annoyed of her unusual appearance, which blocks their way. She starts to build a wall out of yoghurt boxes directly in the middle of the lane. Drivers have to give way to her. The act of intentional disturbance becomes obvious when the yoghurt wall grows bigger. She forces the locals to change their daily routines, their day-to-day itinerary through the town. Drivers have to slow down, change the lane and even pass her by through the parking place. When the wall is ready, she quickly runs behind the supermarket, jumps into her Lada car and speeds as fast as possible through the yoghurt wall. The site-specificity of the work appears especially in its comment on driving habits, since speeding and drunk driving are big problems among the Finnish drivers. Driving around the town centre is one of the most popular forms of social interaction among young people in Finnish countryside. Every year many drivers and their passengers get killed in traffic accidents and the big headlines in newspapers shout out their last moments before the catastrophe. In her performance Limit Pale drives through the yoghurt wall and doesn’t hurt anyone, but visually and physically demonstrates the disaster the car crash can cause. We can’t know if this caused any effects on people’s habits of speeding through their town centre, but definitely the street carried the traces of the crash until rain swept them out.

In durational performances the value of the documentation is in its capability to show more than one would otherwise manage to see. In John Court’s performance Marking Space, which lasts 6 hours, audience comes and goes and sees some fragments of the ongoing performance process, but on DVD it is speeded up so, that we can witness the whole process in 10 minutes. The video shows, that there is not a single viewer, who watches through the whole performance in which Court is marking the white paper on the floor with his ongoing body movement and 2000 pencil leads. The paper documents the movement with the trace from the leads, but it doesn’t show the quality of the movement and the presence of the audience in the space in which the work is located. If one does not have time to really sit down and follow the whole performance, the documentation provides the missed information. It can fulfil the viewer’s experience. As with some other performances the camera can show more details that wouldn’t otherwise be visible for every member of the audience. Camera can take a closer look than most of the audience members are able to, since they are standing in different points of the performance space. In her objects based performance Life is but a dream Inari Virmakoski uses various materials, which also consist of small objects and elements. By taking close ups the camera can create a feeling of those materials and show how the materials work in relation to the body of the performer, as when she peels an orange. Here the vocabulary of the performance is in the objects. On documentation we are able to interpret it, since we are the necessary information is provided to us and we get even more information than in a live situation.

The only group on DVD among the solo artists is Kukkia (Karolina Kucia, Tero Nauha and Dwi Setianto). First we could not believe our eyes when watching almost completely dark documentation combined with birdsong and few flickering shadows of performers with extremely big heads. Hardly anything was visible. And this was intentional, since Kukkia is examining the relationship between the performers and their audience. Audience is becoming an active participant and at the same time losing their role as watchers of the performance. They have to experience it with other senses. How is it then possible to document this sensory experience, where the feeling of the performance space, its sounds, smells and the feeling of the other people around you are as essential as the fact that one can not see enough to figure out what is going on? Can we reach the experiences of the people participating in the performance in a complete darkness? Or is that experience reachable in any conditions? Is it an experience, which is even more personal than the regular viewing of the performance, since the experience is physical and mental at the same time? Participants have to use all their senses in order to cope with the piece. How about us behind the TV screen, are we activated or rather left out?

The study of the relationship between performer and audience is one of the big issues of Finnish performance and live art today. Different artists seek new ways to redefine their conception of their audience. Activated spectatorship, participating in the process of performance making and the body of the participant has been relevant parts of performance art since the Happening. So how does today’s perception differ from those of early days? Today we easily expect the possibility to influence and openly react in our interpretation processes. We are aware that we as an audience create the meaning of the work of art. We are active and Internet and other interactive media have made it natural to us. But still it is difficult to make performances, which call for physical participation that doesn’t feel uncomfortable in front of other people. Wonder how the participant feels in Hyun-Joo Min’s extremely intimate interactive performance Nail? Min is exploring the limits of the performer and audience relation by very carefully washing the hands of one member of the audience and finally when she is ready, cutting the nails of the participant and eating them. It is the most intimate action that one can imagine, eating other person’s body parts. Still Min does not hurt her participator. She takes care of her.

Mark: So what are you going to do to me?
Juha: In a minute you will hear, just choose one of those objects first. What is your name?
Mark: My name is Mark. What will happen now?

A participant is sitting in a chair. He is curious, maybe even bit nervous. He is asking questions, while the artist Juha Valkeapää is preparing him for the performance. Valkeapää puts blind folders on the participant and the performance begins. The man starts to listen to the sounds of his chosen object and the sounds that Valkeapää produces with his voice. Slowly insecurity and nervousness disappears and the man opens up for the new experience. The performance Some Colour? is personal, inspired by the name of the participant, his appearance and the object he choose. On the video we can see his and other participants’ reactions, read them through their body language and facial expressions. The participants are performing their experiences to us. We can see what touches or astonish them, how they react on changes in sounds and in different positions as Valkeapää is walking around them, coming closer and going farther.

One of the touching things in live art is the human presence. Not only the presence of an artist, but the exchange of realities between art and its audience. The documentation itself cannot provide that presence, but as a channel of information and knowledge it has a definite value. Today the documentation technology is easily available, so why not to take advantage of it and share the works with wider audiences and again seduce the viewer back from the front of the screen to watch live art in live.

ARTICLE 3.
Life as Swiss Cheese. On Gaps, Holocaust and Minimalism
by Annika Tudeer

I am reading a novel, Abahn, Sabana, David by Marguerite Duras. I try to understand. Perhaps not so much the abstract and sparse text about a man and a woman who arrive at the house of the Jew, ordered there to kill him by ”Gringo”, but I attempt to grasp something about the era it was written in - 1970. I try to get a feeling of that turbulent time after 1968, when the remaining structures and the deafening silence following the Second World War were dealt with. It seems as if postwar got its face in 1968. The biggest gap ever in our western history: holocaust and 42 million dead was finally formulated.

In contemporary novels written in the 60’s and the 70’s the war is very much present in the narrative. Often references to the war are in passing as if it was yesterday, because it is an experience shared first or secondhand by the characters. Well, when you think: 1975 for instance, is thirty years after the war, - only a generation past so the connection is still very fresh.

I feel at home in that rather bleak, resolute and oddly vibrant cultural landscape that I experience from texts, photos and films from the late 1960’s, early 70’s. It is partly the brutal immediacy in how they deal with the present that is so appealing. The tension is forced up to maximum between the here and the now. In a desperate now, there is no looking back, nor looking ahead. No time for nostalgia or optimism tainted with sentimentality. But – I have to admit, I am appealed also partly because of the nostalgia, that does not fit the era very well. Looking at that time with hindsight forty years later we know that we are also dealing with a time that stretches inbetween two eras; the old and the ”new” world.

I have this hunch and a by no means proved hypothesis that many of the radical movements in art, film and performing arts like new wave, minimalism and conceptualism from the 1950s onwards are influenced by holocaust and the enormous gap holocaust left us. Well, the western world’s history and future was drastically altered and partly obliterated. Adornos statement that it is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz was (of course) proved wrong as soon as the words left his pen. Writers like Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs and Primo Levi are among the most famous who have made poetry of the horrors of holocaust. Where Adorno writes that silence is the only appropriate response to Auschwitz, (and by no means meaning forgetting), Primo Levi said that: we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of man.

In a recent book Susan Gubar claims that the memory of holocaust is dying today, partly because there has been a domination of well meaning reverence towards the survivors and their stories. E.g. only those who have been there have the right to talk about holocaust. But I wonder; in one way the memory is dying. On the other hand new perspectives are brought in concerning the collective memory of holocaust, and one is how holocaust affected our society as a whole. This seems to be a touchy subject because of the reluctance towards admitting that the Jews (and other minorities) were and are wholeheartedly part of our society. There is no us and them –really. Society consists of all people and subcultures, and when they are destroyed the society as a whole suffers the loss. In this case a horrible, senseless loss.

In short altered the stupid nazis and their stupid allies radically the future for the whole western culture and western societies. If the Jewish population in Europe, their children and their children to come would not have been slaughtered we would for instance have many many more creative minds around. The loss in so called cultural capital was immense. It is cynical to use the language of economy in this context, but it is one way of expressing the wrath towards the loss and point to how interlinked different cultures where and how this affects me; a non-Jewish, Finnish, born in the 1960’s, very little personally affected by the war. The world would certainly look different today. Perhaps not better, but different. The atrocious conflict in Palestine would not have existed to this extent, and the situation would look very different in the Middle East.

I rage that I am deprived of my cultural heritage by the nazis. My artistic sensibilities and practices like all other western artists are informed and influenced by this gap, by the void and by death. We are working alongside the ghosts of the murdered and the art they never could fulfil. In order to create art after Auschwitz a sensibility dealing with gaps has been formed on a more or less concious level. The question has been how to deal with that gap of gaps, abysmal abyss and gaping nightmare. This is how I perceive the ethical and aesthetical necessity of creating conceptual and minimalistic performances today, where the carefully nurtured and placed gaps, pauses and repetitive gestures are the places where the actual performance is born. It is the necessity and even duty in our cultural heritage after the war to deal with gaps.

But the question is still remaining; can one really exist within a humanity that has executed atrocities to that extent. The answer is obviously yes. For the ones born after the war (any war and era of persecution, by the way), for those who are truly innocent except for guilty by association they (that is; we) bear the responsibility to. Not only remember, but to try a little harder for all unborn, and for all disfigured, disgraced, dismembered, terrorised and killed that are part of our shared past. Our main responsibility is simply to try a little harder to address and incorporate the silence and the silenced in the work that we are involved in.

2. In the gap
In the 1970´s 80´s Pina Bausch lined up her dancers in processions in her powerful works in an endless and repetitive symbol for queuing: for bread, to gas chambers etc. I see Bausch oeuvre from that time as a symbolic way of dealing with the German post war trauma by repeating fragmented actions thus creating a caleidoscope consisting of violence, sacrifice and arbitrariness. Walls fall down, water is thrown in faces, smiles turn into cries; you are never secure in that universe, nothing is stable and the threat comes from within as much as from without. The violence in Bausch earlier work is mostly acted out between men and women, however I think that that is a device to make the idea of psychopathological violence explicit because of the high emotional charge. Violence is claustrophobic and killing.

Of course, gaps and fissures do not create meaning by themselves. It is only in relation to the missing object that they become meaningful. I watch Finnish photographer Jouko Lehtolas photos of toilets and street corners where junkies have died. If I would not know about the story behind the motif, I would wonder why he photographed exactly those toilets and street corners. Knowing why I attempt to detect traces of death, of tragedy, or at least of something in the pictures. Knowing why I fill in the gaps he left for me to fill in. But, those places have no meaning without the knowledge of the context, they do not “give” me anything apart from being photos.

In contrast to the photos of real places I visit the most stunning experimental memorial; the Holocaust memorial in Berlin where absence creates the intense thought provoking experience. By most subtle means you experience immense loss. You loose track of time and place, you are shut in into a labyrinth, and people disappear in front of your very eyes through the rows of dark slabs. There is a boy running and when you look again for him, he is gone; up in smoke. People have picnic on the ground, but what happens when you pass them, is that they disappear in the play of perspective and you go into yourself and become silent and thoughtful. There are no rules of behaviour nor any information. The memorial draws on the collective memory and awakens emotions and thoughts. Besides, catastrophes subverts order and normal rules.

The memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000 square meter (4.7 acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38m (7.8') long, 0.95m (3' 1.5") wide and vary in height from 0.2m to 4.8m (8" to 15'9"). According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason). (source: wikipedia.)

3. Return to the Gap

The performance is created in the pause. In the stillness, in the inbetweens. When you want to look for what a performance is about - look at the gaps, the stillness, the pauses. When you watch intently following the performance you will see what you see there and then, being drawn into the drama of the staged action. It is only afterwards when you look at the work again through your memory; forgetting sections and actions, highlighting small things that the gaps and pauses enables you to actually see the work of art for what it is.

A performance is not only text and movement, but is as much about the gap, the pause. It is after; the jetees that have flown past you, the blood that has drenched the naked body or the performer who draws her breath in order to continue her monolouge. That is, - when nothing happens, when the performance is born in the viewer. That is when the audience is allowed to participate and communicate with the performance.

And it is in that place, in that inbetween that the performance is completed. And it is from that gap, - from where I write and from where I think about a performance. That gap is not only a metaphor but it is as much of a place like any square in any city, or any open glade in any forest. It is the void, the inbetween, the limbo, and it is the place, the non-place, where discoveries are born. When I write about a performance I take the gap and stretch it like chewing gum inbetween the text. Then I retire to the gap in order to be able to see the shadows, the subtexts, the structures. In order to grasp a meaning and understand. And where I finally make my nest in order to rest in the sound of pauses.


Bibliography:
Maurice Blanchot: Kastrofens skrift, Daidalos 2008

Marguerite Duras: Abahn, Sabana, David, Wahlström &Widstrand 2007

Karen Russell, Sara Leushke, Natasha Sweeting, Jennifer Rosser
The Poetry of the Holocaust, http://cghs.dadeschools.net/ib_holocaust2001/Ghettoes/education_culture/poetry_of_the_holocaust.htm

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

ARTICLE 4:
The Body is Loud - about looking at performance images
by Maija Hirvanen

Image Petri Summanen,performance by Maija Hirvanen


1. Cleaning; thoughts about being looked at

Performance makers discuss:

”What do you do when you’re exited?”
”I clean like hell. Often the whole house, and the whole stage.”
”I lie on the floor, in a half coma, for a couple of hours.”
”I talk nonstop and then get a cramp or two.”
”I keep making the performance until the last minute. And of course the awareness of performance coming up soon is working on an unconscious level.”
”I call my lover and my mother.”
”Well, nothing special.”

What is common to these moments preceding a performance is the moment they are preparing for. The moment, on which the adrenaline levels rise up, heartbeat increases: the performance starts. Others find the influence of the preparation mild, others sink into a state similar to a fever; before the performance, the face gets white, blood escapes from the limbs, oooh, dizzy...Even the performance is well rehearsed, even one has experience over performing.

The experience of being looked at is always significant. Sometimes it’s earth is shaking, and sometimes calm. This depends on the state of mind, and the personal temperament, but also on the surrounding circumstances and the audience. Performer registers the viewers: one watches carefully, smiles, one looks very serious, one has a judging gaze and someone is yawning half of the time. The viewers are watching each other too, influencing each others reactions. The same bodily image is funny for someone and deadly serious for someone else.

So the professional performer is not exited because she/he thinks the performance might go wrong. What is terrifying is the look the audience gives towards the performer. The same look is also the essential initiator of the performance, its resource and inspiration. Without a look, there isn’t a performance. This look is different from its manifestation in the everyday. It places the performer under a specific observation: she/he becomes judged as an art piece, a thinker, a body, an image. But do we remember well enough in that situation of judging, that what is under our gaze is still a live person too?
If I try to look at a performance as if I was looking at a painting or a movie, something is wrong. For a performance image looks back with live eyes. This is definitely enough, both for the viewer and the performer, sometimes even too much.

About looking: looking has always a physical dimension; when we look we actively use several small muscles of the eye. How these muscles are activated depends on the intention of our looking. Art theoretician and the performer’s relative watch with very different eyes – and there are differences in art theoreticians and relatives. Focusing the eyes demands different coordination than using the peripheral sight. The peripheral sight keeps the whole field of vision open, it tries to capture as wide as possible image of the environment. The focused sight makes choices. Gazes are read and interpreted, just like any other information, through learned codes. The maps of meaning these gazes sweep are created by personal, collective and cultural bodies. The skill of looking is not a gift of nature, a volitional sense or a tool for intelligence. Looking has to be practiced and learned and learning never ends.

So how watch a performance image? The act of performance is bound to being voluntarily looked at. Being under a gaze, in performance, is the grid of activities and a comment of existence. What is looked at, is another person, who senses the gazed directed upon her/him. Or?


2. The specificity of performance image; one looks like one touches and other details

Whereas photography or sculpture draws their image with light or metal, the performance image is born with the human body. When performing, the performer is closer to being a non-human object or reflection than in a mundane situation, but on the other hand more humane than anywhere else.

According to Peggy Phelan,

“In performance, the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of “presence”. But in the plenitude of its apparent visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and represents something else – dance, movement, sound, character, “art”. (Unmarked – the politics of performance, Phelan, 1993, 150).

Thinking this way, the performing body can be considered as a special material, a media, a tool.

In Anthony Howell’s thinking, despite the performance artist don’t consider themselves as actors, they do reflect a self or a position of a persona, though bodily language and clothing. They are constructing a performance self.

”The performance self not only projects as appearance, it also projects a gaze, and it is also gazed upon. (The Analysis of Performance Art, Howell, 1999, 16).

What does this ephemeral performance self represent and how does it operate? One of the functions of a performance is to draw visible those sometimes random-feeling connections that appear in between the performance self and ideologies. Personally, I place my body to be looked at so that it (I) can become something else than itself and this way, work as an adapter in between the flesh and the immaterial.

Performance as an image is always a living image, and not in a way images are alive in cinema. In cinema, we don’t face other bodies but light. Performance image is an organic image, something that gets formed with the aid of cells and muscles, on the moment of its own actualization. The body cannot be stopped. Breathing and the blood circulation work, even when we’re standing still. The body is a process and so are the images made with bodies.

The living image, the organic image consists of the living body. The bodies can be looked at in so many ways. The way we look the process of organization of the bones, tissues and minds in sports is not the same we look at art performance. Although these two might have similarities. The art performance can be inspired by the ways of looking at sports or the artist might have placed, with a careful analysis, a pattern from sport into a different context, the context of an art performance. But when any pattern of looking is placed in the context of art, the situation returns to a specific way of looking at bodies, a specific intention of looking at a body. It is also important to make a note on what kind of art or art performance is in question. We tend to adapt formulas based on the conventions of looking and the use these formulas in wrong contexts, without being able to see beyond the limits of one’s own gaze. And then:

”We see and hear like we touch.”
Emmanuel Levinas

Senses are usually named as sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. There is also a sense that maps the space inside the body, proprioception. The senses are connected to each other, they are a system, and performance is based on this system. If we see and hear like we touch, like Levinas has written, shouldn’t I practice the skill of touching and the thinking in touching, in order to see better? So I have done. When I look at a person, I also look at a special set of nerve cells. The net of nerve cells in each individual is unique, two similar combinations of connections in to bodily systems don’t exist.

The specificity of living image, and the power of performance, lies therefore in the connection of the look and the touch. In performance, the distance to the performer is such that on the principle, I could touch her/him. What stops me from touching are the manners, the social order, not distance.

The skill of touch expands from its master beyond touching itself. If I can expand the skills of my touch, I can also look more widely. A question arises: what kind of touching or looking do I want to convey? Look at the other like you would like yourself to be looked at? Always aim at honesty in looking? Accidents happen? Just do it?

And yes, the living image looks back. This situation has besides a special aesthetic, habits and traditions, also special ethics. How do I look at another person? An everyday question, a mundane, practical question. This question is present also in performance. About the layers of the situation of looking at performance: once again: I look at the person as an art object, material for art, a conveyer. These layers make me observe the meanings, techniques, ideologies transmitted by the work. I look at the body as something else than the individual. On another layer, the performance image offers a chance to experience and observe the ethical questions attached to my relationship with other people. How does this looking influence the other? Do I see further than myself? Do I learn from the situation of looking? Eventually, my looking tells more about myself than the performance.

I end up watching performance images, living images, to expand my seeing and to re-find the limits of my taste and understanding. These limits are constantly on the move. If they’re not, I better think I’m stuck. As the most important thing, I look at living images to practice how to be a human.


3. The effects of the ephemeral deeds; sweat and...

Once again: we look at bodies and the bodies look back. In the case of performance this process is corporeal and literal. As a performance artist my task is to participate the bodily discourses by using my muscles, bones and guts to form information. Out of this information, performances, writings and images are born.

To make a performance I copy the images of the world from inside and produce new image from this inside information, the guts. I copy the guts of the world and rap them into the momentary skins of galleries, theatres, street corners and open fields. For the viewer: one is allowed (and encouraged) to look inside the pockets of performance. The things and meanings in them change and mutate. And there aren’t keys, in those pockets, at least to the performance itself.

It has been considered important that performance takes place in the NOW, in the present moment, on the moment of the experience. The situation that never will repeat as the same is in the core of the living image. The romanticism of ephemeral guides the performance. The danger in NOW-romantics is that the observation of the disappearing nature of the NOW-moment can turn into hankering. Then, the NOW-moment creates an untouchable, mythical, nostalgic curtain around performance, an entity that turns inwards, grieving its own disappearance already before it happens. The NOW-fetish, when emphasized too strongly, drives performative thinking towards an autistic state of helplessness, towards a safe zone frightened of technology and the future, the safe zone of Here and Now. An illusion builds up: as if Here and Now would be a license for existential escapism (in its individual, communal and art genre –related levels).

So: performance image happens also outside the moment of its appearing, in memory and in omens. It happens in things it produces whilst appearing: in sweat, the circulation of carbon dioxide, the words written down and said, in the meetings of people, the nights out.

ARTICLE 5:

Writing of Live Art in Finland
by Pilvi Porkola

When I was a kid we had a painting on the wall in our living room. The painting portrayed a woman with high heels on her feet and a mink coat on her shoulders, painted in a very expressive way. She had a geometric haircut and she was looking at the painting in the gallery with a nasty face. Behind her you see a diminishing painter. The painting was titled “Critic”.
The painting was done by one of my stepfather’s friends. I can tell you it was really scary.

There are not much writings about Live Art in the Finnish media. We have a magazine specialized on theatre, Teatteri. It focuses on the whole huge field of theatre, mostly mainstream. We also have the art magazine Taide (“Art”), which tries to cover the area of fine art. In addition, we have some web magazines focusing on culture, sometimes on Live Art as well. Still Live Art stays in many ways in an invisible marginal in media.

Performance artist and critic Pekka Luhta has been writing ambitiously for years about performance art to different magazines but that’s almost all. It’s quite weird we have so few writings of Live Art, because the Live Art field in Finland is very diverse and lively. There are lot of groups and individuals working in the field and many happenings and festivals going on during a year.
You can’t avoid thinking of the meaning of media as it plays a part in building an image of the Live Art field. Does Live Art exist if there are no writings of Live Art?

There is a huge need to have more space and attention for live art and other marginal art in Finland. For this need I founded a new independent magazine last year with my colleagues. The magazine is called ESITYS (“Performance”). We have an idea to create a new forum for conversations, talks and experiences of art in Finnish. We have had two issues for so far, the third is coming out at next autumn. The first issue was titled “Performance and politics” and the second “Why performances exist?” The third issue will be about body and experiences of a spectator in a performance. Next year we have an aim to publish four issues.

The main form of writing about art and performances in media is the criticism. The criticism not only defines the place of a single performance and an artist but also defines the whole genre of live art.
Of course there are many kinds of writers and professionals working in this field. Still concepts of writing follow description, interpretation and judgement. The judgement is based on taste, aesthetics and content. For my opinion, the judgement is also based very much on writers’ emotions.
If the criticism is based on taste, the interesting question is how to define “taste” in a post-modern era? Is taste something you can share? Or something you should share? Why one’s taste is more privileged than others?

I think the painting I described above represents a stereotype of how artists understood and felt about critics and criticism in 80’s. The critic is someone who has power over you, someone who can define how your art is and what is your position in an art field. If I’m thinking of a relationship between critics and artists nowadays I notice nothing much has changed. The image of a critic may be not so expressive any more (minks are out!) but you can’t avoid a consequences of criticism.

There is no theoretical background for criticism argues Martta Heikkilä, lecturer of aesthetics at University of Helsinki in her article Puheena taide (“talking on art”). Of course we have a historical tradition for it from David Hume and Immanuel Kant to these days. Hume and Kant among others were interested of question could we have standards for the taste. Hume argued we can train and practise our taste with help of critics.
And how to justify your taste? Is it based what you have learned in your education? Or is it something you have noticed in practice? Is the idea of “good”, “beautiful” or “cool” something you can “testify”?
Heikkilä underlines the criticism is always a deal between personal and public, the critic writes as much about herself than about “an object”. When there is no theoretical background for the criticism there are neither rules. That makes writing of the criticism impossible but also very challenging, argues Heikkilä.

To write about performances is always a political act, claims dramaturgy Juha-Pekka Hotinen in his book Tekstuaalista häirintää (“Textual Harassment”). Hotinen is not blaming critics of that, he is happy the politics are done any way. Still he demands critics to be more aware and open with their motivations and interests of writing. Also Hotinen wonders why artists are not arguing more in public. A question of taste and aesthetics are left to be defined outside the piece of the art itself.

Who needs criticism? When I asked this from my colleague, she said that there was a particular discussion of criticism in Finnish fine art field in 90’s. She said that artists wanted to get criticized, that they didn’t want get abandoned by the field criticism. I can understand everyone likes to be noticed of their work. You like to hear comments and experiences of what you have done; you like to take part in discussions. But do you, as a professional, really like someone to tell you whether you are good or bad, accepted or not, part of this art field or not (and which part)? Do you really want to be defined by someone you may be haven’t met but who has power over you?

Of course the criticism is part of a democratic system, like Minna Tawast, a chief editor of Tanssi (“Dance”) –magazine stated in the Seminar on Finnish Theatre Reviewing Today this week. If you let your performance be public, it can be criticized publicly as well. Although there is no other area in society than art with such a tradition for open, ongoing system of criticism, Tawast professed.

We should have more collegial criticism and more artists writing about art, argued theatre director Atro Kahiluoto in Teatteri -magazine few years back. “We expect critics to be outsiders with a distance but is that correct?” he wrote “Is the main point to understand a phenomenon?” Kahiluoto referred to the field of anthropology, where researchers try to advance as far as possible the phenomenon they study. He argues the criticism nowadays creates a space where performances are seen to be compared with each other, they are like in a competition. Kahiluoto thinks the point of criticism is to open art to its audience, to build a bridge between different groups in a society.

Performance art is a big challenge to writing of criticisms, argues Pekka Luhta in Kritiikin uutiset (“News of Criticism”). We are creating a big story of performance art by writing about it and we are doing that with a sense of history, other writings and our own prejudice. Performance art is on the move all the time, looking for new perspectives and borderlines. It asks and needs the same kind of adjustable attitude with a sense of subtleties from a writer as well. Luhta is encouraging artists to write more about art. Also he suggests people to write criticisms as a group. When a text is written by many people it will get more dimensions, Luhta believes.

In Seminar of Finnish Theatre Reviewing Today critics were quite sceptic of peer review and artists writing about art. Artists as writers are often seen “friends” as writers. However, artists are not a solid group of “friends” but individualists working with different kind of aims and politics. To be the performance artist and the writer is a special position to write about art. I can’t see reason why critics and artists as writers are somehow in counter side of each other. I can’t see why antitheses are building here when a target of creating discussion of art is shared. Rather I see diverse positions of writing as a productive way to come together to communicate.

“It is a common misconception that the term criticism derives from the verb “criticise” with the implication that all “criticism” is, uh, criticism”, wrote British critic Andrew Haydon during a workshop of Mobile Lab for Theatre and Communication. Haydon argued to making of judgements is an essential part of writing criticism. “From the initial description - through the choices of elements in the performance that are highlighted and overlooked, the vocabulary and register deployed to describe them, to any attendant analysis, interpretation and contextualisation - at each step, a critic’s judgement is on display “ Haydon claims.

However, I like to argue we should separate criticism and information. Of course there are no “pure” information itself. Information is always based on values, decisions and different kind of interests of knowledge. Still I see the institution of criticism as a particular place of using power and making cultural politics.
Perhaps this phenomenon is more obvious in a small country like Finland where we don’t have so many forums to have discussions. It’s often said this will change in an era of internet and web-magazines. Yet I can’t see these discussions of art in internet are as dominant as contributions in papers. Let’s see what happens.

When we started ESITYS magazine we were thinking about criticism a lot. What kind of role it will have in our magazine? Can we change the convention of criticism? At last we decided not to publish criticisms at all. Instead of that we like to find and support other ways of writing about live art. The main sites of writing about performances are called Experiences, talks and documents. So, contributions are not based on valuing but praxis and an open discourse. It doesn’t mean we are denying a meaning of criticism. We are not living outside of the society, where criticism is still doing well. But we like to show the criticism is not necessary in art journalism. There definitely must be other choices as well. The question is, are we ready for them?

I know many critics who are very ambitious on their work and do love art. I’m not denouncing anyone in particular. Also I’m not judging any media particularly. But I like to focus this phenomenon of writing of criticism as a main form of writing and its tradition. Do we still need minks on our shoulders, the hierarchical system of defining art? And if we don’t have minks on our shoulders, does it mean they destroy everything?

It’s hard to imagine, how the painting titled “Critic” should be painted today. Is the critic wearing armour and the artist orchestrating an army of tin soldiers? Should we follow an idea of opposite position of critics? Could the piece of art titled “Critic” be a lively installation, a huge shining mobile perhaps? I don’t know. The frames are ready, but the painting is missing.


We do need professional spectators, maybe more than ever. We do need people to write about live art. I don’t think criticism should be taken as granted. I think we should actively support other forms of writing and talking about art instead of leaning on ready forms of criticism. I can’t see any reason to support any kind of hierarchies in art either. We have enough hierarchies. It’s time to deconstruct, it is time to change.


viitteet.
Heikkilä, Martta: Puheena taide, http://www.mustekala.info/node/626
Hotinen, Juha-Pekka: Tekstuaalista häirintää, Like 2002
Kahiluoto, Atro: Kollegiaalisen kritiikin merkityksestä, Teatteri-lehti 7/06
Luhta, Pekka: Esitystaiteen ja performanssin haasteista kritiikille, Kritiikin uutiset 1/08
Porkola-Hevelke-Haydon: Critical condition? http://www.q-teatteri.fi/baltic_circle/dramagora/

Seminar of Finnish Theatre Reviewing Today, 13.5.2008 Baltic Circle, Helsinki
http://www.q-teatteri.fi/baltic_circle/dramagora/

ESITYS is published by Reality Research Center
www.todellisuus.fi/esitys

EDITOR of mini-magazine: Anne-Marte Eidseth Rygh