Pirkko Siitari


Borrow, Change and Steal

A short text written by hand on a scruffy piece of cardboard, frame in old gilded frames: "POR FAVOR AYUDAME ME ROBARON TODO NON TENGO MÀS DINERO GRACIAS - PLEASE HELP ME I WAS ROBED I HAVE NOT MONEY THANK YOU". The metal plaque on the frame says: "Barcelona".

Artist Jani Leinonen bought signs from beggars around the world and framed them in antique frames. The signs have been collected in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States among other places. The series is called "I Want to Get Rid of Class Distinction but All I Think and Do Is a Result of Class Distinction".

The Tracking Traces... exhibition has two subthemes Smudge and Bar Code, which examine the interactive relationship between visual culture and contemporary art. These themes function as platforms to contemporary art that recycles images and their meanings. Popular culture, advertisements and other images have left their trace on art. The strategy of borrowing or appropriation is very clearly and in differing ways visible in the works of the three artists I have selected. We could summarise appropriation as the use of mundane and existing visual subject matter, objects, forms and styles as a starting point to new works. The borrowed elements receive new meanings in the final work.[i] <#_edn1>

Leinonen's readymade works function as a reminder of increasing global migration and enormous poverty, which afflicts an escalating number of people for various reasons. The issue of beggars has only recently become topical in Finland as the Roma people from Romania have emerged on Finnish streets during the past few years. So far beggars have been a rare sight in cities, and the phenomenon has caused a heated debate on the conditions of the beggars and whether we should help them.

Jani Leinonen often borrows and re-edits commercial and product images in his works. In 2008 Leinonen painted a series of works where the pristine Elovena girl from a Finnish brand of oatmeal was given roles characteristic to our time: she was a terrorist, demonstrator, prostitute and Muslim. This familiar commercial figure and Finnish icon was transferred to current political and social contexts. Leinonen on his relationship to the market: "I use the market's own detournement[ii] <#_edn2> and appropriation -like strategies to reveal the media's and markets' unspoken assumptions on right and wrong, suitable and unsuitable, and good and evil."

The beggars' signs highlight the complicated relationships of the market and art, and the ethical questions intertwined in them. Leinonen's ironically tinted purchase of signs points to the injustice but does not try to put it right. When Leinonen makes art of the beggars' signs, he imitates the mechanisms of the free market economy: he takes control of primary production, processes the product and sells it with profit. The production process also reminds us of modern capitalism's practices of outsourcing labour. Leinonen proves that art is a permanent part of economy's structures: a work of art is a product like any other. From an art historic point of view the beggars' signs are a part of the old tradition of appropriation, to which the artist himself refers. In this tradition, mundane elements, objects and images that are external to art have been brought into the context of art. Leinonen's signs were exhibited for the first time in the Populism exhibition in Frankfurt in 2005 and a part of the money was returned to charity.

"The money earned in the Populism exhibition went to a local charity organisation. I wanted to make art real through the money, too, but I only wanted to create an illusion of helping. [...] Consumerism is born when companies compete with each other to stand out, and thus 'helping' as well as 'rebellion' become an effective way to market this distinction. The value of more and more products is based on exclusivity and originality - especially if the product is claimed to resist the evil main stream. As soon as the others start to use the same strategies, a circle of commercial armament race is ready, and anyone who lingers is main steam. This armament race increases marketing and consuming. Therefore helping and resisting uniformity has for a long time been a marketing strategy for many companies, especially the 'alternative' ones. Instead of really urging people to be anti-market or alternative, they create effective markets for the anti-market consumers and keep offering new products that very quickly become 'mainstream'. Companies often have an interest to help as long as it increases their sales." [iii] <#_edn3>

Leinonen has taken advantage of the logic and practices of the free market economy in his art - brands, media and networks - and enlarged the concept of being an artist. The artist is not only a maker of concrete objects, but also a creator of concepts, situations and events. For example, Leinonen realised the Art Tuning Shop, where members of the audience brought him artworks and he modified them for a fee. In 2006 he turned an empty supermarket into the Art Super Market Pikasso, where you could pick works by different artists, load them in your shopping cart and pay at the checkout counter on your way out.

"All cute filth"

Artist Riiko Sakkinen claims he makes realistic art - shows the free world as it is: "I don't propose a change. The function of art is to make visible those things that people don't want to notice or don't want to talk about. My job is to show all that cute filth, but it is up to the politicians and urban guerrillas to change the world." [iv] <#_edn4>

The origins of Sakkinen's drawings and installations are in product catalogues and advertisements. Many of the figures in his works come from the shelves of the super market or from TV commercials. They receive new meanings from the texts the artist attaches to them. Observations on intercultural conflicts, market economy, nationalism, globalisation and current political questions have been dressed up in cartoon or advert -like costumes.

On first sight Sakkinen's works look like colourful and happy consumerism. Only a deeper reading reveals the darker side of the spectacle. Sakkinen knows how to crystallise his point and how to hit the sore spots without adopting a preaching attitude, all veiled up in lightness. "Stop No More African Immigrants If They Are Not Top Football Players", "Eat More and Get More. More Choco. More $. More Freedom." "I Love Mexican Food But I Hate Mexicans", "Cold Cola War" are examples of the texts in Sakkinen's works.

Background study is often necessary in Sakkinen's way of working. For example, for his exhibition in Berlin in the summer 2008, Sakkinen modernised the slogans of the 1968 Paris demonstrations. "Comrade, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere" translated into: "Consumer, applaud, the spectacle is everywhere" or the original "Be Realistic And Demand The Impossible" slogan's modern-day version was: "Be Realistic And Demand More Cheeseburger".

Sakkinen describes his own work thus: "I read everything from politics to sport and from the economy pages to the prostitutes' ads in the newspapers. While buying my groceries I examine every bag of sweets and box of cerials. When I have chosen a theme for a work or even an entire exhibition, my main tools are Wikipedia, Google and Urban Dictionary."

Many contemporary artists have chosen a visible and active role in relation to the everyday life and the surrounding world. Sakkinen on the relationship between art and everyday life: "My art is about the everyday life from special offers to terrorist attacks and from prostitution to fast food. My dogma is that art should not be about art - or artists - or refer to it. Modernism was and is criminal."[v] <#_edn5>

Serious laughter

Jani Leinonen's work Koulrofobia is an installation "drawn" directly on the wall with an electric cord, in which a clown hangs at the end of the rope. In the attached text the clown tells a doctor about his loneliness, the difficulty of finding a meaning for his life. The doctor encourages his patient to go and see Ronald the Clown who is currently in town. That would certainly cheer him up. "But Doctor, I am Ronald the Clown," answers the patient.

The clown is a comically tragic figure. It wears gaudy clothes, shoes that are too big and has a painted face. The clown's task is to make people laugh by being clumsy or playfully silly. And yet there is always a teardrop in the corner of this funny character's eye. It reminds us of the mask itself as well as of the sorrow hidden behind it and thus makes the role of a clown ambiguous. The clown often performs for children, but it also has darker roles. For example, in the film It, 1990, based on Stephen King's novel of the same title, a demon hides in the figure of the clown.

According to the author, Wikipedia knows a definition for coulrophobia, meaning an intense fear of clowns. It mainly occurs in children, but young people and adults may suffer from it, too. It is caused by a scary encounter with a masked figure in childhood. This fear also occurs in people in power. The clown can break taboos and take up hidden issues. Leinonen sees Ronald more as a fool:

"Ronald is a fool. The fool balances on a knife's edge in his profession. He is the only one who can use comedy as a means to say things the King doesn't tolarate. Fools were often hanged when their humour crossed the King's limit. Everyone knows that the clown's laughter is fake. It contains something really mean, sad and angry. The audience doesn't want to see the clown's real nature. Lately I have been developing the backgrounds and everyday lives of comical, very funny and thin characters. Elovena was the first. In New York I was absorbed in Cap'n Cruch and Kellogg's Cornelius. Now I'm working on Ronald." [vi] <#_edn6>

Tracing the Self

In Zhao Shaoruo's series In the Name of Mao, 1994, the artist takes images of Mao Zedong and replaces Mao's face with his own. Apart from the faces, the photographs are in their original form: Mao giving a speech in one and dropping a vote in the ballot box in another. The photographs of Mao were known all over China, and they became national icons of the worshipped leader. Art historian Li Xanting says these photographs were called "the excellent portraits of Chairman Mao".[vii] <#_edn7>

The work in question began rather innocently and is connected to artists' activity in Beijing, which started already around the time of Mao's death. Zhao Shaoruo describes his work and the era: "Someone might even cut out the head of Mao Zedong's photograph and replace it with his own image, but that doesn't mean he wants to be Mao. I'm sure some people see this as art, but not all. Naturally they also express the thoughts and mental state of the main stream of the youth today." [viii] <#_edn8>

The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) has written about the novels of the French author François Rabelais (1494-1553) and about the carnival laughter in the medieval and Renaissance cultures. The encounter of the high and the low as well as mocking the rulers have been central topics of laughter alongside the bodily functions in folk culture. The laughter is popularly carnevalistic and shows the delightful temporality of everything. Popular laughter dissolves hierarchies and is directed at everyone - including the ones laughing. The ruler's position is temporal, and a person of lowly origins can rise to the throne, institutions that are considered eternal can easily be gone tomorrow.[ix] <#_edn9>

Seen from this viewpoint, Zhao Shaoruo's works on Mao are located in a long tradition of usurping the crown and dismantling icons. In Rabelais' novels the mockery is directed as much at one's self as the keepers of power. Likewise fooling around with Mao's images sets oneself up as the object of ridicule.

Art historian Li Xianting recognises the ironic side of Zhao's images. He sees the warlord of old Chinese films in the works, which have turned into self-portraits. The swapping of heads is seen as humour and satire. "The replacing heads' was already in use during the Cultural Revolution. Those were the times of such great political struggle and manoeuvring, that when the official news-agency of China printed a group-portrait of China's leaders, the heads of the ones already out of the game came to be replaced with some scissoring and gluing with the head of the replacements. It could thus be claimed that Zhao Shaoruo borrows to his work the long anti-satirical tradition of 'head-changing'..." [x] <#_edn10>

Zhao has continued using the method of replacing heads in his later works. In the Name of the Market, 1996 is a work created in Finland. Its starting point is a photograph of Carl Gustaf Mannerheim (1857-1951) on his expedition to China in 1906-08. In his series of images In the Name of Mannerheim (1997), Zhao has retouched copies of Mannerheim's photographs. Characteristically he has replaced the face of everyone in the photograph with his own. These works meant a fictive voyage to his roots for Zhao, living in Finland. Through them he has been able to look at his own culture with foreign eyes, from a distance. On the other hand, we can also interpret the series as a visualisation of the western racist claim that all Others look alike, be they black Africans or Chinese.

The methods Zhao uses in his works, like Leinonen and Sakkinen, are linked to playing with image appropriation and sign changing, but in Zhao's case they are connected to another culture and era. Zhao's works on Mao were audacious in China in the 1990s and he was forced to expatriate because of them. For Zhao the questions on identity are recurring, and he has not forgotten Mao: in his latest work he creates a hybrid of himself and Mao.

Diving deeper

The strategies of borrowing used by Leinonen, Sakkinen and Zhao link them to the old tradition of art described with concepts like collage, plagiarism, detournament, appropriation, citation, intertextuality and readymade. Even though it is not possible for us to claim that one definition equals another - with their different emphases, nuances and eras - we can, however, declare that they are connected to the same phenomenon: art is a part of visual culture and the reality we are currently living in. Art connects to its time, reflects it and creates it.

The Situationists International claimed in the 1960s that social reality consists of visual spectacles: the images produce reality and reality turns into images. The leading figure of the movement, Guy Debord, described it thus: "In modern capitalist society, life is presented as an enormous accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." However, Debord did not mean the flow of images as such, but argued that the spectacle is rather an interpersonal social relationship mediated by the images. [xi] <#_edn11> Later in the 1980s, post-modern theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) alleged that reality is hyperreal, there is no original reality behind images or signs but the signs always refer to other signs; for example images refer to other images.





[i] <#_ednref1> Examples of artists using appropriation: Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) introduced the idea of readymade art in 1917 by bringing a urinal to the context of art. He also quoted an existing work by copying the Mona Lisa into his work L.H.O.O.Q. Pop art, which emerged in the 1960s, found its topics in the popular culture, for example in comics, advertisements, packaging, films etc. Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97) started to paint works that originated in comics and commercial images in the early 1960s. Alongside his other works, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) made serial images of well-known products, famous people and the idols of popular culture, such as Mao and Marilyn Monroe. Appropriation was the strategy of the post-modern art of the 1970s and 1980s. Richard Prince re-photographed the Marlboro cigarette advertisements for this work Cowboy (1980) while Sherrie Levine, tired of the modernist canon of photography, re-shot works by famous photographers like Walker Evans and signed them under her own name. Contemporary artists quote art and non-artistic elements more and more frequently: for example Cory Arcangel uses old video games and computer programmes in his work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriation_(art)

[ii] <#_ednref2> The Situationists International in 1950s, '60s and '70s combined art and anti-capitalist criticism and aimed at a revolution. This avant-garde movement wanted to dissolve the boundaries between the artist and the public as well as between art and life. Their central method was the detournament technique. According to Marko Pyhtilä, detournament means deceit, seduction, throwing something off its tracks. "It meant re-using the existing aesthetic elements and was based on the loss of the original meanings of those elements and on creating a new significant whole. It was a political form of plagiarism and collage, creative "dialectics". Marko Pyhtilä, Kansainväliset situationistit, spektaakkelin kritiikki, Like Kustannus Oy, 2005, p. 21 and 60.

[iii] <#_ednref3> Jani Leinonen's interview Jan 8 2009. PS.

[iv] <#_ednref4> Riiko Sakkinen's interview Jan 5 2009. PS.

[v] <#_ednref5> Ibid.

[vi] <#_ednref6> Jani Leinonen's interview Jan 8 2009.

[vii] <#_ednref7> Li Xianting, "The Genre of Image-based Art in Contemporary China." In Ristipaineessa/Cross Pressures. Valokuva ja videotaidetta Pekingistä. Ed. Pirkko Siitari. Helsinki 2001, 15-16.

[viii] <#_ednref8> Zhao Shaoruo,"The Loafers of Beijing - Artists' Life in China." In Ristipaineessa/Cross Pressures. Valokuva ja videotaidetta Pekingistä. Ed. Pirkko Siitari. Finnish Museum of Photography and Oulu Museum of Art: Helsinki, 2001, 91.

[ix] <#_ednref9> Mikhail Bakhtin, Tvorsestvo Fransua Rable i Noarodnaja Kultura Srednevekova i Renessansa, 1965.

[x] <#_ednref10> Li Xianting "The Genre of Image-based Art in Contemporary China." In Ristipaineessa/Cross Pressures. Valokuva ja videotaidetta Pekingistä. Ed. Pirkko Siitari. Helsinki 2001, 15-16; 24: (translation from Chinese Anu Niemi).

[xi] <#_ednref11> Guy Debord, La Sociétè du Spectacle, 1967, §1 and §4.




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