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Teemu Maki interviewed by Anna Kharkina, 20.4.2004
Your videos were not made in Petersburg but they are about the city. Is it for the first time that you decided to make works about a particular place? Do you have, for example, something like "Helsinki essays and poems"?
My "Leningrad Essays and Poems" are not about the city, and I have not
made works about a place before either. It could be possible, as it
is possible to paint portraits that are meaningful without any
accompanying info about the model for the audience. That's how the
model, be it then a person, a landscape, a still-life or a city, is
really a stepping stone for the artist in his/her attempt at reaching
something generally relevant, not just personal or local. However, the
"stepping stone" term is not a dismissive label in this case: it is
very difficult to make generally interesting art or philosophy if one
does not use some kind of conduit to the personal, individual, local,
particular.
My "Leningrad Essays and Poems" are the second SERIAL work I have made.
I have made many multipartite works, for example consisting of 150
drawings, but those have been undivided entities whose elements belong
together as tightly as pages of a novel and may not thus be sold or
exhibited separately. However, structurally a multipartite differs from
a novel and from a TV-series because the elements of a multipartite are
not in a chronological or causal order. The parts of a multipartite are
not chapters of a story, instead they are meant to be different
aspects of, a common subject matter - a group of simultaneous
perspectives to a knot of common themes. Serial work may have all the
other characteristics of the multipartite work, but unlike the
multipartite, the serial can be split, individual parts of it are
thought to be autonomous enough to stand on their own.
In the title, "Leningrad Essays and Poems", the most important words
are ESSAYS and POEMS. They express my intention of combining the
straightforwardly philosophical approach of an essay with the
beyond-the-words-reaching leap of a poem. It is worth noticing that
both of these approaches avoid the conventions of the prose novel and
feature films, which almost always cling to the fictitious narrative.
Both the novel and the feature film form also tend to strive after the
effect of the audience identifying themselves with a fictitious
character in the artwork, in other words, it is an attempt to forget
oneself and one's problems - it is escapism. I strive after the
opposite: I want the audience to remain and become conscious. I also
simultaneously want to encourage the audience to think also with freely
associating images and emotions, that is the poetic aspect. This I feel
is better than the surrogate activity that storytelling excitement
offers.
If you could sum it up - what is your message of Petersburg. Why,
for example, you call it Leningrad? Is it mostly a political message or
is there something else you want to tell? Has Petersburg changed you,
and if yes, in what way?
I want to call the city Leningrad, not St. Petersburg, because there
are many good things about Lenin and in ideas he represents, but there
is nothing good in Peter the Great and tzarism in general. I am an
atheist and a socialist.
The main thing that interests me in this city is its controversiality,
which is already expressed, unintentionally, in its name. Peter the
Great's idea about rejecting the Russian tradition and starting from
scratch by building a new capital according to the western model of
Amsterdam, using mainly Italian and French architects, was already a
strange national act of self-denial. Of course it also cost hundreds of
thousands of lives. Yet, even though the city is built on human bones
and is completely artificial, all the Russians who don't hate it love
it and are proud of it.
The Russian tradition is very aware of this paradox. Pushkin's "Iron
Horseman" is built on this paradox of hating the oppressive structures
while simultaneously proudly submitting to them and identifying with
them.
This controversiality is expressed again in the renaming of the city,
again unintentionally. It was named after Lenin, but it was then
dismissed, not only by Stalin, and the capital was relocated, in a way
Lenin and the good part of his ideas were abandoned, quite physically,
left in his city.
This controversiality is expressed then again in my relationship with
the city and with things attached to it. I am a socialist, but I think
it is an insult to call the Soviet Union and its structures socialistic in
any way. Yet for all the oppression and misery the Soviet system caused
in Russia and in East-Europe, it actually brought about the welfare
state model in the West-Europe and Nordic countries. How? The western
capital was afraid of the Red ideas spreading and gave in, again and
again, to the demands of the workers and leftist intellectuals in the
west. This development gradually gave birth to the welfare state, with
its combination of extensive equality in the fields of education, law,
health-care, social-security and freedom of speech and action.
Your last videos, comparing with the old one, "Good Friday", which
you chose to show together with new ones, are more romantic. It seems
that you have calmed down, haven't you? Do you miss the irony and pathos of the
time of "Good Friday"?
Do you have the energy to make the same work today? Or you have already found
the answers to the questions that made you furious several year ago?
Then - what are these answers and what were the questions?
You use the word "romantic" in a weird way, I think. What is a romantic
thinking? If it means having doubts about rationality's ability to
solve everything, and if it means striving after extremes of emotion
and vision, yes, I'm a romantic. But I do not feel much affinity with
Caspar David Friedrich, and I do not feel close to Hollywood romance. I
feel close to Samuel Beckett, Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille -
and do not forget that I'm a socialist. I'm just not a Marxist
determinist, my socialism is not an all-encompassing liturgy that would
explain and solve everything. But that does not make me a romantic, I
think. Relativist and existentialist instead.
GOOD FRIDAY is not outdated for me. I stand behind it. I'm more
conscious of the things I put into it, but I would still make it in a
similar manner. I have not abandoned that kind of working method - I
have just got more variety now. The recent Leningrad videos you are
referring to just happen to be outwardly more calm. But if you are able
to read them properly, you'll see that the vision is NOT a bit sweeter
than in GOOD FRIDAY.
You use various media for realizing your ideas: you paint, write
poems, perform, etc. When do you feel that you need video to express
what you want to express? What does video as an art-medium give you?
Video is a medium that, for example, makes it possible to use snippets of
everyday reality in an artwork as such, BUT in a very distancing way.
This distancing is valuable, it gives room for thought, it is a way of
stepping back and taking a proper look at things. Video is also good,
because it makes it easy to combine various materials in a work: moving
images, still images, documentary footage and fictitious footage,
music, sound, speech. It is a very flexible medium in this sense.
Everything is available for the video-maker, it's a kind of
gesamtkunstwerk for the poor but visionary.
Sometimes art historians say that there is no time in painting
but video deals with the time problem. Can you agree with such an opinion?
That's a stupid thought. They have to think again. Firstly, limitation
of means is never a real obstacle in art. If you choose to make pencil
drawings, there is no point in complaining about the lack of color. If
you choose to compose a piano sonata, there is no point in complaining
about the lack of lyrics in it. Likewise, paintings do not move, they are
still-images, but that is not a defect in them, it's just a quality in
them.
Another point: Time does exist in painting. I can paint a picture where
there is a starving man and a rich man and the whole chain of
exploitation. You can look at the picture and know what has happened
before in its world, what took things to the situation that the
painting shows. You can also speculate about what will happen
afterwards. So, there is the temporal dimension, it does exist not only
in Duschamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase", but in all figurative
paintings. What painting usually does avoid, on purpose, is the
linearity of a feature film. A painting depicts reality as a web of
simultaneous tensions, not as determined narrative ruled by causality.
This is a very good thing about painting. And it's precisely that
linear thing that is a grave problem in film. I have tried to get
around it by making videos that are more like essays and poems, not
stories.
As it seems to me, your videos are much closer to the theater than to
the film, for example. It is when you read your own poems or Beckett's
text - they sound like complete pieces of a theater play. You do not care
about the "Beauty" of an image but think about dramatic effect.
And if some pieces can exist as a performance - what is the point in making
a video from them, and not just a video-documentation of a performance?
I cannot generalize like that, partly because I have made many kinds of
video works, partly because the scope of film history and the scope of
theater history is even larger.
About video pieces that are like performances for the camera. The
reasons for making them for the camera instead of live audience are:
1. Bigger audience.
2. Endless time-span for the work to slowly reach all its potential
audience.
3. The possibility of experiencing a work again and again, like reading a
poem again and again.
4.The distancing effect. Instead of being blinded by the first
impression, which often happens in a live situation, one can take a
more careful look at what is really going on (in the work).
5.Less room for narcissism. In a live situation, we are often paying more
attention to the persona of the performer than to the work itself.
While watching video it's easier to concentrate on the work and ideas.
...and if the actual aim is to make a performance-related video work,
it's better to record it just with the camera, and leave the audience
out of it, to have nothing there to disturb the shoot. Also, if the
live audience would be there, while the video was being made, the video
would be partly about the audience reaction. And that is a distraction,
unless the audience reaction is a part of the work's subject matter.
Is there anything I forgot to ask you about what you find important for the Leningrad series?
You forgot to ask whether I will continue the series. I will.
20.4.2004
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