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Standing on the Edge of FictionA Small Study of Artist Jani LeinonenFirst of all, it is very important to state that the private person Jani Leinonen and the artist Jani Leinonen have very little in common. The just happen to share the same name. Artist Jani Leinonen is very well planned and written character, who plays a role that is scripted like a role in a movie or a theater play. The only exception being the fact that artist Leinonen performs, instead of a theater stage, in a gallery, media, museum, or any other context where the viewer has difficulties to realize that the role work is fully fictional. Often the art works of Jani Leinonen are just a side product. Often an exhibition in gallery is just a stage for the play.It is easy also to think that artist Leinonen reveals his whole private life in publicity. On a closer look also artists Leinonenīs private life is fully fictional. Leinonen creates a celebrity myth by sending reporters manipulated images of himself with Hollywood stars and hires look-a-likes in his openings. He hires actors to play himself in lectures at schools. This is perhaps the most most important and confusing part of his artistic strategies. Jani Leinonen plays with the systems of commodity exchange and celebrity. He aims at revealing the hidden codes behind seemingly neutral images and displays. He immerses himself in these processes instead of simply criticising them. What is displayed, though, are not goods but an artistic allegorisation that appropriates these marketing strategies only in order to unhinge their underlying assumptions about value and appropriateness. When considering the core of artist Jani Leinonenīs work, it has to be noted that art is not only a painting on a wall. Leinonenīs art is the environment, the context, everything that happens around art, discussions, scandals, scoops, interviews and stories in newspapers. Leinonenīs art a manifestations of certain place, context, ideologies, conversations, politics and society, not a detached aesthetic object on a white wall of a museum Often artist Leinonenīs own statements just add confusion to the idea of who Jani Leinonen is and where are the boundaries of his art and reality. Often he denies his own claims, mocks himself behind pseudonyms and purposefully creates conflicts that at first seem to make his job more difficult but in the end raise him on an oddly high pedestal. However, if you stop for a moment to think about the various layers, you can find a thin red line that combines all these seeming random and absurd acts. Artist Leinonen stands against the privileging of any image through spiritual, scientific, artistic, or other legitimizing myths. Leinonen sees all objects as equal, and thereby horizontalizes the plane of phenomena. All images become potentially usable and reusable. Herein lies an epistemology of anarchy, according to which tuning argues that if science, religion, art or any other social institution precludes certainty beyond the realm of the private, then it is best to endow consciousness with as many categories of interpretation as possible. The tyranny of paradigms may have some useful consequences (such as greater efficiency within the paradigm), but the repressive costs to the individual (excluding other modes of thinking and reducing the possibility of invention) are too high. Rather than being led by sequences of signs, one should instead drift through them, choosing the interpretation best suited to the social conditions of a given situation. Matti Vatanen Free Lance Curator / Art Historian << Back to Press |
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