In the book “The Aviator” (Ðвиађор, 2016), the author Eugene Vodolazkin tells a fantastical story about a man who has spent 70 years in a frozen state and wakes up in 1999. He becomes a media celebrity who gets cornered at press conferences: So what do you remember about the day of the October Revolution? “There was, if I’m not confusing things, sleet falling. More precisely, first there was rain and it changed to wet snow,” says the protagonist pensively…
History is written later, but those who live it might not remember what was happening around them as a logical narrative. What do we remember about the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak and the state of emergency? “It was quite a cold spring,” we might say…
Yes, the time frame has been too short to say definitively where the corona crisis will land in the eyes of future art historians. At the same time, it has been long enough for us to have lost the sense of the prevailing atmosphere during the state of emergency, the suspense that seemed to persuade us that everything would not return to how it had been.
But it did, didn’t it? Now, after the end of the state of emergency in Estonia, we seem to have returned to life as it was before. Then again, no one knows for sure whether the pandemic in Estonia has ended or just become dormant for the time being. Be that as it may, I will try to summarise some points of reference worth recalling later, when the time is ripe for drawing conclusions.
Fear
The emergency caused by the corona pandemic created a great deal of uncertainty, insecurity and fear. Fear, above all, about your health and that of your loved ones, of course; doubts as to whether the medical system would be able to overcome the pandemic; unease about economic insecurity, but also anxiety over the threat of political radicalisation and censorship, which situations like that can easily create.
In tense situations, it is the most vulnerable members of society that tend to be the first to be affected. Unfortunately, this includes many freelance artists and the more exposed art institutions that depend on their own revenues. The problem of the precarity of freelance artists and intellectuals, which has been debated at various levels for years, was now ignited with an even brighter flame.
At the end of April 2020, my colleague Kadi-Ell Tähiste and I analysed the information we received from artists and others working in the field who responded to a questionnaire we had developed with various art institutions. The picture was bleak: a large share of the respondents had lost more than half or all of their previous income.1
Some were even experiencing difficulties buying basic necessities, and what made the situation scary was that, at that time in April, no one knew how long it would last and when normal incomes might be restored. Once again, it became clear how important it is for the state to establish some kind of security for freelancers and project-based workers.
But this should also make art institutions think – obviously our art houses themselves are not exactly rolling in money, but they should still think about whether to find ways to provide more security for artists and how, for example, by offering them social guarantees, longer-term scholarships or various types of income that do not disappear as soon as another emergency situation like this occurs, right?
Of course, there were also those who continued to drink wine on the terraces of their summer homes against the backdrop of a sunset, posting the somewhat aggressive-sounding hashtag #staythefuckhome on social media. It’s great to be at home when your home is nice and cosy, spacious and filled with love, but it is much more complicated when the home is unsafe or just suffocatingly small.
Margit Mutso, for example, has written about the relevance of urban planning and architecture when it comes to quarantines, highlighting the growing importance of such details as parks, green spaces, separate rooms and balconies during the corona period.2 It will be interesting to see the effect the corona crisis has had on Estonian architecture – will houses designed in the future make allowances for situations where the inhabitants will not be able to go outside for some time? (I have already heard rumours about a construction boom in country houses emerging as a result of the pandemic.)
International efforts under attack
I work at the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), which is mainly concerned with establishing international relations in the field of art. Naturally, the corona crisis caused international relations to collapse almost completely. Many art projects involving international names were either cancelled or postponed. Internationalisation has been a priority in the Estonia art scene for many years now, so it is no surprise that the drying up of air traffic affected us heavily.
Still, it seemed that most of the institutions in Estonia are so small and at the same time so multifunctional that it would be relatively easy to shift the focus to some in-house tasks until the crisis blows over. At the same time, the crisis forced us and other similar institutions abroad to reboot and rethink the fundamentals of working in a different world, and to ask what new forms of international work might be possible.
At the individual level, it happened in many places that nomadic artists and curators who considered themselves global citizens and flew from one project to the next had to choose a place to settle. During the quarantine, curator Irene Campolmi was “stuck” at her parents’ home in Tuscany, where she began writing a quarantine blog for Idoart in English. It is somewhat astonishing to see a curator, who has probably lived alone for years, been overworked and playing by the rules of the international art world, write about shopping for food for the whole family as a remarkable experience or about how much better she looks when she can sleep eight hours every night. Perhaps the new normal could also mean slowing down on a larger scale – so that spending time with the family and sleeping normally would no longer be so extraordinary?
The tendency to reduce flying and overproduction and to focus more on developing regional and local art life have, in fact, been in the air in the art world for some years. However, these trends do not seem to have yielded any results so far. Merike Estna, who flew back from her residency in Mexico on practically the last emergency flight before the crisis, said in an interview with Maria Arusoo that she believes in the possibility of a local art world and sees many advantages to it. “It’s a different matter how easy it is to make the shift, having already established working relationships and friendships around the world.”3 Exactly – how do you do it?
Just before the state of emergency, on a flight to Berlin, I spoke with Marge Monko, who recalled, thinking of the example of her Finnish colleagues, that before the arrival of budget airlines, it was not at all customary to fly artists abroad for the openings of their exhibitions. Of course, there have been sustainably minded art producers more recently, who try to fly in as few people as possible and look towards “slower transport” options. On the other hand, new biennials are established all the time around the world to draw an international spotlight on the region; new events and works are produced constantly, and overworking is the norm among international art professionals – a topic that, like favourite airlines, fuels a lot of small talk.
Airi Triisberg has discussed the need for decolonisation in art discourse.4 How to teach or talk about (art) theory without limiting yourself solely to references to Western (male) geniuses? Maybe if we could decolonise our thinking, so that we wouldn’t always feel the need to look “up” to New York and Berlin, but could draw inspiration and thoughts from our own region, cultures more similar to Estonia, a new kind of locality would be possible? The downside here is the fact that we are also living in an era of rising populist nationalism, when preferring local can all too easily turn into something much more repulsive.
Online platforms
During the state of emergency, art institutions rapidly developed their online presence. Probably the most notable example is Tallinn Art Hall, which came up with a well-thought-out web platform in four languages (Estonian, Estonian Sign Language, Russian and English).5 Kumu did a good job of sharing content-rich virtual tours online,6 but did not offer much to non-Estonian-speaking audiences, while Tartu Art Museum shared virtual tours with English subtitles. The annual graduates exhibition of the Estonian Academy of Arts, “TASE”, also came out with a dedicated website.7
What is the takeaway from this rapid development of virtual platforms? As always, there was a lot of naive excitement as the internet brimmed with artworks, films, virtual tours, and finds from archives or collections. This elation was partly justified. Tallinn Art Hall’s virtual exhibition “Endless Story” with works by Mihkel Ilus and Paul Kuimet (7. II–31. X 2020), which was physically open for just a few weeks, is said to have had quite a large number of online visitors during the state of emergency. Although I understand that the unexpected closure of a long-prepared exhibition may have come as a bleak disappointment for the artists, the interest attracted by the new online platform may have given them even more attention than they would have otherwise received.
This, however, suggests that, even if the exhibition platform changes from physical to virtual, the need for communicating it to a wider audience does not disappear. Perhaps it is even increased in the context of the endless temptations of the internet, as opposed to the familiar, well-established logic of exhibition venues, which the viewers already know how to find in the urban space?
Second, how accessible and democratic is the virtual space really? It is clear that in some ways the internet increases the number of visitors to exhibitions, for example, by sidestepping such physical restriction as state borders or limited accessibility for people with disabilities. At the same time, the internet age poses its own threats: not everyone has sufficiently powerful technology at home. Older people, who may not be the most frequent internet users but are quite frequent consumers of culture, may now be deprived of suitable opportunities with exhibitions moving to virtual platforms.
Switching from the user’s perspective to that of the provider, moving a physical exhibition to the web is an expensive process that is far from affordable to all. And although I know there were institutions that offered fair compensation to artists for their work in cyberspace, the boom of online exhibitions and various statements made suggest that artists were underpaid for online projects even more than usual. So, it is nice to have art online, but to say that it means access for all and paves the way for greater democracy is quite short-sighted.
To make things worse, the state of emergency aggravated internet fatigue. For a while, Zoom meetings may have seemed a completely adequate option to continue using after the emergency, but now I have heard from several sources (and experienced personally) an enormous tiredness with Zoom and similar online forms of communication. There is a great hunger for physical experience. Even though art, as opposed to theatre, for example, seems fairly easy to consume online, the pandemic made it more evident than ever before that viewing art is a highly physical experience and a social activity.
One of the most paradoxical responses to the present fascination with virtual art, but perhaps also the most congenial response for me personally, came from post-internet artists, the duo New Scenario, who in fact decided to shut down their long-running website during the pandemic. In an interview with AQNB, they explained their decision: “The art world simply replicated their IRL [in-real-life – K. K.] models in the digital realm. Art Basel viewing rooms [online], really? It felt like some kind of mindless, abrupt ‘gentrification’ was happening, and we wanted to shield our precious platform from being a cheap template for a business model.”8
The pandemic in visual culture
How might the coronavirus pandemic have affected art itself, our visual perception and thinking? The themes of closeness and intimacy have recently been popular in international contemporary art anyway, sometimes even to the extreme, so that you can no longer find a curatorial text that does not promise to create a community and offer intimacy. Fear of an infectious disease forced people around the world to keep their distance from others, including close relatives.
What does this practice mean in a world already full of individualism and lacking in closeness, be it due to the competitiveness of society or new technologies? How do we overcome the fear of intimacy and other people, which the state instilled in us for several months and which currently shows no sign of easing around the world? In a curatorial exhibition inspired by the emergency situation, “On Monday It Was Still Snowy” (Esmaspäeval oli meil siin veel lumine), Peeter Talvistu showed the work “From My Family Album II” (2013) by Diana Tamane, where the depiction of human touch created a completely unfamiliar, almost shockingly uncomfortable feeling in the context of the corona crisis.
It is also interesting how post-internet art, which may have seemed a somewhat outdated sci-fi fantasy a few years ago, is now unexpectedly relevant from a new perspective. For the “Archive Courier” section of the CCA newsletter, we recently uploaded again the SKATKA video work “State of Cloud” (Pilveriik, 2014), which begins with a virtual song festival where Estonian national colours proudly fly while a huge video screen is pulled across the festival stage. If the first time around this felt like an ironic gesture at Estonia’s identity-building as an e-state, then now in a situation where our national flag seems to have been “hijacked” by the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE), an incumbent coalition member, and a virtual song festival has in fact become reality, I am honestly overwhelmed by Mikk Madisson and Rainar Aasranna’s prophetic insight!
The endless Zoom meetings also made me think about new ways of self-perception through the screen. How is interpersonal communication affected by us getting used to looking at a moving image of ourselves when talking to others? How much does this fuel narcissism, which already seems to go hand in hand with the age of social networks? Netti Nüganen’s video “i’m rules” (2019), now again available through the CCA’s “Archive Courier”, is based on conversations that Nüganen had with her sister over the internet while studying at the SNDO Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam. In the video, Netti transforms the home atmosphere into a theatre stage where she changes costumes and characters, constantly aware of the presence of the camera. During the state of emergency, video calls were used by colleagues otherwise working in the same office and families living in the same city, who also staged their lives for each other.
A third way?
Something I greatly missed during the state of emergency in spring was art in the public space, which could be a wonderful “third way” between gallery shows and online exhibitions. People were desperate to find things to do outdoors, to get out of the house for a while; they explored hiking trails and parks. But the public space in Estonia generally does not provide artistic experiences. And that’s a shame! Art still seems to be an elitist exchange put on display in the so-called white cube, while the makers of art were among the first to suffer as a result of the uncertainty caused by the enforced emergency situation.
Still firmly in the grip of the coronavirus outbreak this spring, manifestos appeared in the world press announcing that the pandemic would radically change the art world. To be sure, the emergency situation did force us to slow down, put things on pause, so that we had to do without circa three daily exhibition openings or public artist talks, which used to be the rule in Estonia’s small art scene. But it’s hard to believe that the slowing could continue any further – according to a pessimistic scenario, everything will resume at an even faster pace in late autumn, as so many events are waiting in line. So, what did the coronavirus change?
Was the change tangible at all, something you can put your finger on? Like quoting “The Aviator” above, we might recall the diary entry for 14 July 1789 made by the last king of France, Louis XVI, which simply read: “Nothing.”
Of course, this famous entry symbolised the monarch’s inability to perceive reality. But perhaps it was a perfectly adequate response – how was he to know on that very day that the revolution, which had just begun in Paris, would change his life and, according to our present historical narrative, our world? In a similar way, before drawing conclusions and writing the corona crisis into history, I would like to take a deep breath and end by stating simply: “Nothing happened this spring.”
1 Kaarin Kivirähk, Kadi-Ell Tähiste, Eriolukord on pannud suure osa kunstivaldkonnas tegutsejaid raskesse olukorda. – Newsletter of the Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia 4. V 2020 (https://cca.ee/ajakiri/eriolukord-on-pannud-suure-osa-kunstivaldkonnas-tegutsejaid-raskesse-olukorda/).
2 Margit Mutso, Covid-19 õppetunnid eluruumide kavandamiseks. – Sirp 8. V 2020.
3 Maria Arusoo, Kunst sinu ümber. Maalikunsti uuendaja Merike Estna. – Postimees 17. IV 2020.
4 See e.g. Airi Triisberg, Millest räägivad inimsäilmed muuseumide kogudes? [Interview with Minna Henriksson.] – Sirp 1. II 2019.
5 See e.g. Jason Farago, Now Virtual and in Video, Museum Websites Shake Off the Dust. – The New York Times 23. IV 2020.
6 Erle Loonurm, Kadi Polli: “The web is no substitute for real-life art experience and the materiality of an artwork.” – KUNST.EE 2020, No 2, pp 111–117.
7 Rahel Aerin Eslas, Uuele tasemele. – Sirp 20. VII 2020.
8 Steph Kretowicz, Watching in horror: New Scenario talk chaos, collapse & COVID-19 in this time after post-internet to launch their t-shirt collaboration with AQNB. – AQNB 9. VII 2020.
Kaarin Kivirähk is an art critic working as a project manager in charge of communications at the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art.