On the face of it, Jaanus Samma’s solo show meets the viewer as a two-way screen between woolly, pastoral handicrafts and urban street culture. The cosy texture of the sweaters, the mohair and the sheep wool warm the coarse graffiti of the ghetto on the chest. There are no little pictures of the sun knitted into mittens here. The homespun love of knitwear and the scribblings from cold stone walls regard each other fixedly, like aliens on each other’s planet, warily. The general aesthetic of this encounter is cool enough to keep a snowball from breaking out in a sweat. It unfolds in a chic sweater boutique: hidden neon lighting, black and white interior, carefully arranged glass display cases, a fitting room and mirrors, couches, paper patterns, sensible prices, smooth service. The only place where different cultures can unproblematically meet in a consumer society – the shop.

This meeting in a shop has been organised by “parents” – in the background there is a project manager, co-workers, designers, sponsors, media communication, and of course, the artist with an idea about something that exists in society that needs to be articulated, brought out more clearly. This is a produced encounter, an institutionally sanctioned event, a set of problems, highlighted by the art world and art criticism, that has been elevated to a state of maturity for exhibition. The production information has found itself a place in an exhibition hall/boutique as an extensive, designed mural. In other words, the producers are no longer quietly hidden away in the workshop. They are here and are symbolically active on the sales side, too.

But a shop is more than meets the eye. This encounter in the shop has come at a price. Until recently, knitting sweaters was a handicraft that belonged to ethnographic culture. Sweaters used to have an author, albeit usually unknown. Graffiti also essentially has an author, likewise usually unknown. And until relatively recently, graffiti belonged exclusively to the street. Away from the institutions, both faceless figures operated without posing the notorious question of the absence, or death, of the author, despite their anonymity. The lack of information among ethnographers, art critics and the police has likewise never given reason to doubt the existence of the author. It has rather helped to personify social processes as mythical figures. Stereotypical representations appear in case files: cultural mastermind, criminal mastermind. Taarka, Anu Raud, Banksy, Edward von Lõngus, you name it. With love and care, the former are cultivated and the latter criminalised.

But the shop is still more than meets the eye. It is difficult to look at Jaanus Samma’s show without a set of normative and stereotypical judgements about culture because, embarrassingly enough, it is these prejudices that are on the receiving end here. The stereotypical representations are changing; outlaws are being commodified. I see no reason to object if someone defines both sweater knitting and graffiti as a kind of folk culture handicraft. And throws open the door for the institutionalisation and industrialisation of both. Think about it: folk culture curricula, graffiti festivals, workshops and DIY handbooks, paper patterns and templates have for decades now been paving the way for a meeting in the factories of the culture industry. As a result of “positive inclusion”, both have dropped into the accelerator of mass production and mass education. Original contexts are lost. Democratisation and liberalisation have long since handed sweaters over to cheap Chinese machine knitting, and graffiti for discussion in the departments of folk universities. The culture industry is efficiently cannibalising what once quietly sought a place on the fringes of the cultural realm. The crime scene that once provided law enforcement operatives material for surveillance work is now an art scene for critics and curators. And what once drove the ethnographer on an expedition now lies on their coffee table in the form of a paper pattern. The industry wins, the joint bloodstream of galleries, boutiques and biennales gets a boost.

Jaanus Samma is an ethnographer. His tropics are the stone cities of Estonia, Scandinavia and the rest of Europe; his travel journals are the graffiti collected from the urban space. Mostly an arsenal of sexually explicit or sexualising, lowbrow obscenities, which are not worth the trouble of cultivating, unless you plan a move towards the repertoire of gangsta rap. Perhaps the above example of the fact that verbal aggression, exploitation and sexual stigmatisation can be commercialised into a billion-dollar business has provided Samma with an impulse for testing the digestive tract of modern art and the refined milieu of fashion boutiques with this kind of communicative manner.

The writing on the wall becomes writing on a sweater and the sweater becomes a commodity in a gallery. Once the deal is done, the writing – now riding on the back of the sweater wearer – finds its way back to the city space, but of course, is now forging a career in a different social circle, closer to the city centre, to the front pages of newspapers and to the definition of art. Détournement – it is precisely this term (meaning rerouting, hijacking) that the situationists used to refer to as their principal method of criticising capitalism, the turning of the mainstream media repertoire against itself, the presentation of slogans and rhetoric in a cancelling context, from a dislocating angle. The more recent culture jamming and appropriation art have continued the same line and attempted to jam the machine of the culture industry with different tactics of recontextualisation. Instead of its own repertoire, Jaanus Samma offers the machine its leftovers. At a time when street culture is largely incorporated as part of official aesthetics and dance curricula, as part of the exhibition and festival industry, there is still something left out in the cold on the streets. Samma is not so much interested in what this something is, but rather in the structural violence that accompanies such segregation. He is interested in the discriminating lines of force hidden underneath a mask of tolerance.

Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin have, in different ways, written about a certain minimum threshold of writing, those remaining below which will not make it into the annals, history or official culture. Foucault speaks of a radical confinement, which with this very same ritual gesture alone conjures up madness, its forms of manifestation, and the official rules for treating it. Hospitals, clinics, and of course, the prison. Bakhtin gives this shutting out the name “carnival” – a short, agreed period of time in the official way of life when all cultural values are turned on their head, fools become kings, their word gains currency and it is obscene. The time of carnival itself is shut out from society; the knowledge of its temporariness and of an imminent return to norms hangs over it. The same spirit – loyalty to an agreed time and place – dominates legalised graffiti festivals, often organised by property departments of city governments. Jaanus Samma attacks this collaborationist discipline without the willingness, even the least little bit, to clean up the language used by those who are not authorised to authoritatively voice cultural officialise. This lack of authority only serves to intensify the irreverent need for indecent enforcement. “Cunt me in!” says the writing on the sweet little sweater as it heads out to circulate the beau monde. The carnival begins.

Johannes Saar is an art historian and critic; he is a doctoral student in media studies at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Tartu.

Exhibition view at Tallinn Art Hall Gallery,
photo by Anu Vahtra
Courtesy of the artist