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antti ahonen |
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Centralizing Marginal Arts, in Finland
An interview with Anttia Ahonen
Finnish born photographer and performance artist Antti Ahonen identifies himself as a ‘marginal artist.’ Born in Finland’s second largest city, Espoo, in 1977, Ahonen graduated from Artschool Maa, in 2002 where he studied on social and communal arts. Since graduating from art school, the artist has participated in a number of international performance art events including Lá-Bas performance events and Pixelache Festival. Organized by Pixelache University in Helsinki, every year, Pixelache Festival brings together artists, engineers and activists. The theme of this year’s Festival, for example, was “exploring education in the cross-roads of science, technology, art and culture.”
H.T.N. As a performance artist, what is your preferred medium?
A.A. I identify myself mostly as a photographer but I do use other media as well.
H.T.N. Who would you say are the artists that have influenced your work the most?
A.A. When I was a young man who wanted to be a painter, I had many artists whom I used to look up: American modernists like Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock, and the aktionists from Vienna like Herman Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Later when I started to work in the field it became harder to define any particular people. Renval Brothers had a big influence on me when I was studying, and in sound all pioneers from the 60´s.
H.T.N. How would you define marginal arts? What makes them marginal?
A.A. Well marginal arts refer to all art forms that are distant from the centre. Kinds of forms that do not have larger public interest, but do attract a group of enthusiasts. It also means that there is not much money around but a lot of artistic freedom.
I guess it is also a matter of style. Marginal Arts can talk about things that could not be discussed in the centre. Marginal is also the place for different kinds of experimentations, things that are not ready yet, or not even art, but might grow to that by time.
I know Marginal Arts are a problematic term, a bit like alternative music. It does not really mean anything, and some things like video art are very central and marginal at the same time.
H.T.N. How would you describe your work; I know that artists hate this question…but give it try anyway.
A.A. I would say that my work is very pragmatic. My art is basically about four things: thinking, talking people into doing things, moving heavy objects and documenting the process.
Of course, it also depends on the project which I may be working on but most projects include at least two or three of these elements.
The thing is that I usually do not produce sellable art objects; the form which my projects take on is a performance of some sort. The installations I have made have all been temporary; things have been taken apart and used again in something else. ...We use our instruments in the Association for Experimental Electronics installations; in my first gallery exhibition I used my own clothes for the central piece, and still wear most of those today.
H.T.N. As you are discussing the ephemeral aspect of your work, I am thinking about the notion of patronage which is just as ephemeral as your art work. As a curator I am somewhat frustrated with ‘collectors’ whose primary focus is to acquire works for mainly investment purposes. I really think that we need to educate them [collectors] in the virtues and methods of patronage … But this is a whole different topic which we’ll hopefully follow up on another day.
...But, talk about your work with the Association for Experimental Electronics (AEE). Also, for sceptics out there, what makes AEE's work ‘art’?
A.A. Well the Association for Experimental Electronics (AEE) is a group of people who turn electronic waste and old consumer electronics into sound producing devices. We travel around building installations, playing concerts and teaching workshops.
We have been around for 5 years; we have travelled around Europe and seen a variety of venues from basements and industrial wastelands to museums and universities.
Our mission is to sketch out what kind of art forms might live in the post digital age; we do not believe that digital culture, as we know it now, is ecologically sustainable. The cycle of consumer electronics is way too fast... and, there is not endless amount of metals to make them from, oil for energy, or wasteland to dump the ones we do not need anymore.
During these 5 years, we have opened hundreds, maybe thousands of different devices, so we have kind of made an autopsy for western technological culture. It is clear that the qualities of things are declining while devices are getting more complex all the time.
This means that everything new lasts for a shorter time and is significantly more difficult to reuse when broken. So it is obvious that if we keep on this track, we will either run out of natural recourses or drown in useless crap.
So we are studying hard to make something out of this thrash now because we consider it interesting, and to get a head start to the time when it will be all we have left.
What do you say to sceptics, including ‘professional art historians’, who may question the ‘art’fulness of your work?
For the sceptics who do not think this is art: I do not blame you.
This is not an art group in the traditional sense; I am only one in the group who actually comes from art background.
We work in the realm of art because it is a relatively open platform. We can do anything that somehow resemble arts and find audiences and financing. Still I personally hope we can build something that has a life of it’s own even outside the realm of art.
Well maybe the quote from fire inspector might clarify this: “Nobody should be allowed to do this sort of things, but I guess it is OK if it is art”.
H.T.N. Your work as a photographer also concerns the capturing of the ephemeral form of performance art. How do you attempt to translate the four or sometimes five dimensionality of some of what you capture into the two-dimensional form of a photograph?
A.A. Well the performance is a kind of thing you have to approach with an open mind. It can last 10 seconds or 10 hours; it can peak in the beginning, in the middle or in the end. You never know, even the performer might not know.
The key to a good performance picture is anticipation. When I see a performer, what he/she has brought with them and what position he/she takes when starting the performance, I must predict what might happen. Should I climb to the roof? Should I change the lens? Should I take my lunch break? These decisions must be made before anything happens.
The difference between stage photography and performance photography is that taking a good stage picture requires cropping to the point there is only the abstract of the performer. That is what people want to see. Performance, on the other hand, is a kind of interaction between the performer, the space and the audience, so a good performance picture somehow shows this interaction .
H.T.N. Does seriality (showing a series of photos) help to convey the multi-dimensional -- spatial, temporal, and acoustic -- experiences of an art form through photographs?
A.A. Photography is not necessarily the optimal media to document this sort of project. If I had chosen my medium to best suit the project, I would have probably have been something else. But I am a photographer so I document these types of projects as well with still images.
I must say though that these kinds of experiences cannot be documented as a whole with any other media either; maybe written word comes closest.
As for the AEE, our primary aim is to produce temporary experiences at certain times and in certain spaces. The role of documentation is not to reproduce the experience but to show what was done and how. In this sense, yes, seriality is the key ...for me it is very important to show as much of the process as possible.
H.T.N. Seriality was definitely a factor in the “Site Specific Dance” project on which you worked with a group of dancers/choreographers…
A.A. That project came about when I met a girl who had studied environmental dance & we used to talk about our approaches to our respective arts. The concept of environmental dance is very interesting: instead of dancing to the music you hear you try to tune your movements to work with a particular environment.
We both had one thing in common: doubt. She was not sure if this was dance... or even what dance was in the first place. Also, I was not sure if movement of dancing could be reproduced in photographic medium at all. So we decided to make experiment & see what would happen.
H.T.N. Of course, photographing dance performances is as old as the creation of photography itself. However, your collaborative Site-Specific Dance project involved two un-traditional dimensions. First, it was site-specific, and second, it involved you capturing the dancers’ movements as an integral part of the project. As a matter of fact the performance was mediated by your photographs and ‘then’ communicated to the audience. In other words, there was no audience on site to witness this process…until after your photos had been exhibited.
A.A. Site specific means that all performances are made for some particular site and the end result comes out of interaction with the site. It is probably not very often used in dance since it is mostly done on a stage but in visual arts (which is my background) it is very common.
This series includes a different kind of set: some sets are designed to be seen on site (most sites are public) and to be used later as photos. Some sets are designed only for the camera and are created in private spaces. Still others are located in public places for the camera in a way that it is not planned to be seen but just might be seen anyway.
It might be that at some point we will make a performance that is constructed out of the material and experiences we have from these sets, but we have not planned that further yet.
H.T.N. Another one of your particularly interesting projects was the “Turvesauna burning at Happihoune.” Can you explain a bit about the ritual and performance part of this work and your part in it?
A.A. Happihuone was a very interesting place that held exhibitions, concerts, lectures, etc. . It was a temporary structure built in the centre of Helsinki called Töölönlahti which has been a kind of a wasteland for decades. The city has proposed many big plans to create notable l buildings there by the likes of Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto. Yet it has proven too big a project for anybody, so it has remained a kind of wasteland.
One of the attractions in Happihuone centre was turvesauna which was an actual sauna where you could go during the events, and maybe follow it with a swim in Töölönlahti.
Over the past several years, a variety of pseudo shamanistic programs, things related to Finnish folklore and other traditional cultures, were held there. I took a set of photographs when the sauna accidentally burned down during one event. The incident was not an actual performance, but I think that it kind of nicely concluded the Happihuone project.
By the way, Burning Saunas are a central block of Finnish identity. In Finland almost everybody has a sauna and very many of us have burned one down at some point. For example, Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers), one of the most important books for Finnish identity, has a vivid sauna burning scene in it. In contemporary culture, too, everybody remembers when former ski jumping Olympic gold medallist Matti Nykänen’s sauna burned down.
So a burning sauna is a kind of a Finnish icon.
H.T.N. In relation to the public-private discourse, what is your attitude toward art institutions? In other words, your work would take on a very different character, say, in a public museum or a private gallery…
A.A. I have nothing against institutions. Sometimes museums can produce the most interesting things since they have the best resources. Often things are just too ready for my taste. I like kind of emerging phenomenon that are in state which allows them to grow toward a variety of different directions.
For my own work, if it is taken to a gallery or a museum, it would mean that it should have reached a certain form and to have a certain value (financially-speaking in a gallery context and art historically in a museum context).
H.T.N. In this sense, for example, does exhibiting the types of art with which you work or create in a private gallery and their subsequent commodification affect their value? In other words, does ‘centralizing’ ‘marginal arts’ alter their original value of criticality…?
A.A. Art is a difficult medium for criticality to start with. It is very difficult to make any art that could have any impact on the world outside itself. If you have a critical idea, if it is presented thought art, it is considered only as art not as an actual idea.
Exhibiting my work in a gallery would definitely change its value. Now none of the tangible things I am working with have any financial value at all. Exhibiting those in a commercial gallery would make exhibited objects financially valuable (at least in theory) but it would reduce the counter-cultural value that they may have.
In any case, this is a difficult issue for me, since on the one hand I am an artist and I want to make money by making art but on the other hand I want to resign from the whole art system and do meaningful nonprofits work outside it. ...It really depends on the day, which option seems better.
Also, my role as documentarian is a bit problematic in this sense. By documenting the things that happened in the margin I may be drawing them closer to the centre. However, from my pictures people who are not exposed to the margins of art & culture will have a chance to see what is going on in there, and artists who could not afford professional documentation otherwise might get high quality photos of their work that might get them closer to the centre.
All photographs are taken by Antti Ahonen unless otherwise specified.
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