keskiviikko 26. marraskuuta 2014
z
Look
at on badge x on forehead of a negative face and calculate slowly to
38,
then close your eyes and wait restfully.
Count Grishka in
reflection.
i
Invisible pictures of non-existent things
Introduction
Many different
events… …I can’t even remember it all, but let’s start when I
was traveling with my "circulatio" project on the iron
rails from Helsinki to St. Petersburg… by train that is. The year
was 1993. St. Petersburg was drawing me to itself. It had something
to tell me.
For almost two
years that great, dark city of white nights flowed past me and around
me, and I collected those things which moved me. I was working ion
something that I named a “meta matka" (meta = meta-terms such as metamorphosis, metaphysics, metal and matka in Russian language: mother, womb, queen bee, in Finnish language : journey).”
I returned to Finland, perhaps knowing that everything was just beginning. I met him—Grishka. A book opened, many books opened, and that specter from the meanderings of history was upon me. Grishka, Grishka… …and I tried my best.
Let's go see; I
will show you! First I will abridge everything here at the beginning;
I’ll squeeze a planet into a mustard-seed-sized prologue.
Grishka, count,
patron, publisher, composer, was born in St. Petersburg, lived a
relatively short live... and died. A certain notable line was
extinguished, disappeared, and the whole story of Grishka
disappeared. Grishka, heir to an enormous fortune, was the central
figure of all kinds of intrigues and the target of much abuse, but he
was a soft person. A circle developed around him. He wanted to
promote projects, convey experiences, serve and support, so many made
the pilgrimage to his presence, a colorful crowd indeed. There was
the nobility, the thirsty, authors great and small, charmed
luminaries and ghostly figures.
The general
grandeur and atmosphere of ridicule directed at Grishka together wove
a grotesque golden fabric. He was ridiculed by those who were closest
to him and those who saw it all from afar.
The state of
Grishka’s health varied; his sickness, St. Vitus' dance, sent him
into convulsions, giving a ready choreography for the ridicule. On
the banks of the Neva, in Grishka’s Polystrovo palace, which the
Petersburgians called “the Roadhouse,” events and time flowed
past.
I found Grishka’s
compositions, seven in all, all short romances. A few musical artists
have come along with me on my journey for a moment, brought that
music to life from their dormant state as notes on paper.
R.I.P. Kalevi Kiviniemi (30.6.1958 - 3.4.2024)
Grishka’s
marriage, like a the sting of a bee. The woman, Lyubov Ivanovna,
dropped onto the stage of events with a colorful history as her
train. She awoke Grishka to a new life and made his close circle
grind their teeth. “Hussy. The gold-digger already warmed the bed
of the last Tsar," they whispered. But the wedding happened
anyway, and they left for Europe on the honeymoon. A great entourage
traveled with them, and more became attached along the way.
In Paris Grishka
met Alexander Dumas. The great author got along well in Grishka’s
hotel, where there was not just one suite available but a whole
floor. In one of his works Dumas called Grishka’s party a
"caravan," and joined it himself, traveling in this fashion
to Russia as Grishka’s guest in 1858. “He is like the Count of
Monte Cristo," Dumas wrote, and he also wrote about Lyubov
Ivanovna’ s eyes, and their effect…
Literature,
authors… Grishka published a literary journal. These days I see it
as a long, well-ordered row in the Helsinki Slavic Library, but back
then the vicissitudes of publishing it were one constant confused
tangle.
But everything
ended in due time, even the confusion. Spring came, the ice melted
and Grishka’s life ended. He died at the age of 38, and a decade
later, during the time of Stalin, his grave was destroyed, like the
family’s whole library, archives, and their memory.
But that opened
up to me, and it happened after I returned from Russia, from my "meta matka." I started to delve into an event a few generations
back that had been whispered about in my family circles. A certain
famous nobleman named Alexander from St. Petersburg, honored as a
scholar in his time and glazed with a patina of honorary titles,
visited a certain palace in Karelia, then a part of Finland. Later a
maidservant in the palace, Maria, had a boy child, a bastard, whose
invisible father's name seemed to be known by all: the courtier from
St. Petersburg. They knew his whole name too; he was Grishka’s
father. Grishka thus gained a secret half-brother, my grandfather’s
father.
In Helsinki, at
the corner of Alexander Street and Maria Street, stands the House of
Nobility. On one coat of arms a heart, a lion and other assorted
articles. The symbol of Grishka’s knighthood in a handsome hall.
The strange decoration and dust-trap of an extinct line. Outside the
bastard, the names of his parents recorded on the street signs:
Alexander and Maria.
But Grishka… it
is clear as day that his character is the primary prototype for
Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, but what a cover of darkness over it
all, murky and hard! Great names are like canned food. Why open them
when they are so well preserved? Opening means oxygen and its
effects.
Well, I opened the canister and we became acquainted, the great author and I, both just the right size. We conversed for years on end, now that he had time; the living never do.
Well, I opened the canister and we became acquainted, the great author and I, both just the right size. We conversed for years on end, now that he had time; the living never do.
But let us leave
prototypes as they are; we can’t get stuck in them. One has to
understand the whole, refrain from lifting anything more onto the
table, move forward.
Everything that
comes by must be noticed, like the cow that showed up at different
times on my journey, always with some kind of idiot. The servant, the
silent hero.
How many cases,
affinities showed up. Railroad, blood circulation, years, all kinds
of events formed a clear picture. The buildings of St. Petersburg,
the passage of time. Always the same things again and again. Fallen
from heaven, but risen from the trampled ground.
The forlorn
figure of the tattered knight rested on the street, and only a little
way off the broken-hearted man asked me to dance with him.
My grandfather,
Topias, the son of a Karelian bastard, the spouse of an orphan, the
father of evacuees. His unique character, his adventures… how many
waves and how many of us on this stage in this idiotic yellow light?
Topias and the Indians, the Indians and the idiots. Our white and my
black-and-white, my picture in the surface of the pool the cripple
Ilya painted.
When I saw the
Poljustrovo palace area for the first time, which functioned as the
main stage for Grishka’s social life, it was like a plowed field;
the Soviet Union had come and gone, and Russia returned.
I talked with my
friend Lyuba Hermann in Torgu, Estonia, about these histories. She stuttered the
latter half of Grishka's two-part surname. “Is it Nesnotov?” she
asked. “Pesterov?” “Besborokko?.... Oh, Bezborodko!” but that
means beardless, she blurted out, “the one who doesn’t have a
beard is Bezborodko!”
But he who no longer has a beard, nor head, nor a place in really anyone’s memory, his light of the shadow is here.
beginning of the story
here
http://idiotibidem.blogspot.fi/
G's reflection:
Mox Mäkelä's work history
contact:
mox.makela(at)gmail.com
Articles / documents
Long Audio Play Movie "STRANGE"
Translation from Finnish to English Lola Rogers
Tytti
Rantanen
Mox
Mäkelä:
A Visit to Bragtrash Culture
Mox
Mäkelä's
newest piece, the full-length “audio
movie” Strange,
debuted in autumn of 2018 on both sides of the Gulf of Finland--at
Helsinki's Orion Cinema in September and at Tallinn's Kultuurikatel
in October. The piece is crystallization of the artist's work in both
form and content, a multi-media treatise that doesn't shrink from the
satirical and is just a morsel broader, and a comprehensive whole
that has been building for years.
[end
caption]
Mox
Mäkelä (born
1958) has been active as an artist more or less continuously for 40
years. Stand outs in the catalogue of her work include the
comprehensive artwork Diamox
and
Aikamox, created in the latter half
of the 1980's for Helsinki's Vanha gallery (1986-88), mox
cafe, which took over the Kestinlehto
photo cafe in 1987, and her ambitious project Meta Matka
(1994-1995). Her 1992 collaboration with the Finnish State Railways,
Circulatio,
brought art installations to trains and railway stations.
So
her newest work, Vieras (Strange),
didn't pop up out of nowhere. It's a continuation of work begun back
in 1995 with a piece titled idiot
ibidem, in which she traced the
connections between her Karelian ancestors and Dostoyevsky's 1869
novel The Idiot
with the greatest of artistic freedom. To be more exact, Strange
is part of Vieraanvaraisuus
(Hospitality), a sub-project or side project of idiot
ibidem begun in 2015. But idiot
ibidem is not Mäkelä's
only long-term, elaborately realized, unified work (or what the
artist calls a “theme”). Ampiaisen tori
(The Wasp Market, begun in 2011) is a project that serves as the home
for individual short films such as the gem of a distillation of the
absurdity of greed titled Ailan kalat
(Aila's Fish) from 2011, and Paimenen ranta
(The Shepherd's Shore, 2006) is an arena for unambiguous
eco-criticism.
Mox
Mäkelä's art
and work are profuse and mycelial. Her themes intertwine and examine
the same phenomena--ownership, the degeneration beneath the surface
of civilization, environmental destruction—and turn them over again
and again in new constructions and combinations. The short films and
theme-related texts are cultivated on blogs established for each
theme. Mäkelä's
art encourages you to examine it in its entirety (or as an entirety)
more than as separate, clearly defined pieces. This aspect of her
work is indisputably challenging when it comes to the art market,
which emphasizes well-defined events and exclusive art products.
But
what's special about Mäkelä's
art is that she has spent the last fifteen years consistently
exploring eco-critical themes that have only become visible in the
mass media's reality over the past couple of years. The installation
Mermaid's Vomit
(2010) depicted the message in a bottle of a new era--the plastic
trash that washes up on the shore where she lives. In her most recent
experimental short films, hysterical overconsumption combines with
species extinction and other dystopian themes that are fast becoming
all too real. But Mäkelä doesn't
use the kind of buzzwords familiar from post-anthropocene biennale
catalogues; she crafts her own vocabulary. Her works slip in and out
of different media, from video to installations, from films to
literary audio works.
Strange:
How Power is Maintained
Mox
Mäkelä has
described Strange as an "audio movie". It's an apt
description: the images and sound in the piece are separate elements,
or only loosely connected to each other. The visual follows the
narrative, sometimes lagging behind it or freely associating on the
text. The piece's volume reinforces the cranked-up Slavic decadence
of the story. The running time is filled with collage and layering;
the sea laps within the frame; an extravagant number of dancers
appear in a Christmas display window.
The
soundtrack consists of a radio theater-style audio play in which
Riša, the main character, stumbles upon
a peculiar party and causes bewilderment
and eventually complete upheaval. A shrew and a lion serve as
narrators, and while the characters Riša
meets feel mostly like caricatured treatises on various attitudes,
it's possible to sketch a sort of absurdist fable from Strange,
an animal fairy tale about the human race. Different characters in
turn take various stances toward the world and the desire to own
it—“You’ve got to watch what you’re
doing when you’re at the edge of the
chess board!" Riša plays the role of
"the idiot", but is nevertheless the only "normal"
character, with a reserved cautiousness that stands in particular
contrast to the businessman Pjatar "Patja" Summarum Sossu's
pomposity and arrogance.
Although
there are strong narrative elements such as coincidence, forward
momentum, and picaresque encounters in Strange,
its telos,
or goal, can remain a riddle upon first seeing and hearing the piece.
In the end the violence of the system and Riša's
radical indefinability fill a story space that takes shape stealthily
amid the chitchat. And as this is happening,
Strange is
in the meantime a thorough examination of the ways of talking, and
shopping, that serve to maintain power.
In
the Tradition of Gogol: Audio-Visual
Skaz
Mäkelä
didn't want lock her work into overly-determined
interpretations when it debuted at the Orion. She says that new
levels of the piece didn't open up even to her until it was complete.
I myself left the debut with the sense that the work is the spiritual
and poetic descendent of the Russian classics, especially the works
of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), but that is only one person's
impression. I was led to the idea by the way that Strange
is just as much a work of literature as it is an audio-visual piece.
It seems to require different mechanisms of reception and
interpretation than a conventional film, or even a conventional "art"
film does. Contemporary art film has its conformities, and Strange
comes from someplace outside of them.
Its
Gogolian qualities can also be seen in the trickiness of the
dialogue. As Pjater puts it, "It pays to beat around the bush."
Mäkelä's
narrative is, in fact, pure skaz.
The concept of skaz was originated
by Boris Eichenbaum, one of the central figures of Russian formalism,
in his article "The Structure of Gogol's The Overcoat",
from 19181.
Skaz refers to the sprawling style and
mannerisms in narration
that are so foregrounded that the plot becomes secondary, a mere
backdrop to wordplay and droll wit. In Eichenbaum's categorization,
Strange
represents "derivative" skaz,
whose humor does not revert to a "string of jokes" but
instead builds on a more holistic, "mimetic-articulatory system
of gestures.2"
In
skaz, "sentences aren't chosen
through logic" but rather "according to principles of
expression" by which pronunciation and body language are raised
to a quite exceptional salience and meaningfulness. The acoustical
properties of a word can, in fact, surpass its actual concrete or
logical meaning3.
In Strange,
possessions are not just possessions, they become "bragtrash".
Pjatar says, "I’ve done it all. I've
hit all the giddy heights, fought all the gritty fights, bought all
the glitty lights,” sculpting sound to the point of the
nonsensical. Pjatar Summarum Sossu and his woman friend Logistilla
Summarum--not to mention the shady old man Pilli Pascal--also share a
penchant for whimsical name garbling with Akaky
Akakievich Bashmachkin, the antihero of
Gogol’s The Overcoat.
Mäkelä's
linguistically marked mode of expression flows from the words to the
images, resulting in audio-visual skaz--even
the pictures ramble. The unpredictability and intricacy of Strange
is an enriching addition to Finnish experimental media arts. When, at
the end of the piece, the shrew and the lion state that they are
endangered fictions hunted by a safari of entertainment monsters and
that, for fiction is their "only
possible nature under the circumstances", it adds to Mäkelä's
barbed and clever satirical message about (art) politics. Greed leads
to greed, and we haven't necessarily come very far since Gogol's
stooped clerk in his overcoat and the commercial exploitation of dead
souls.
1 Boris Eichenbaum, The Structure of Gogol's The Overcoat (Как
сделана "Шинель"
Гоголя, 1918) from the
book Venäläinen
formalismi Antologia. edited
by Pekka Pesonen and
Timo Suni. SKS, Helsinki 2001, 109–131.
2 ibid. 110
3 ibid 112
Antti Alanen:
Antti Alanen - Film Diary, Mox Mäkelä : Vieras / Strange
o o o
Baltic Film Blog:
The Collage Film: Objects Reclining in Time in Mox Mäkelä’s Strange
o o o
KAVI, National Audiovisual Institut :
Mox Mäkelä - Vieras
o o o
Av-Arkki :
Meet the Artist: Mox Mäkelä
o o o
Mustekala :
Article / Kari Yli-Annala
o o o
Tate Film:
15.5.2019
o o o
o o o
contact:
mox.makela(at)gmail.com
film room
The earlier microfilm version from "idiot ibidem" -theme
St. Petersburg 1994
"idiot ibidem in gallery",
Exhibition in Suomenlinna, Helsinki, Finland 2003
"A Kind Of"
The film version of "Kind of a sequel"
The film version of "Kind of a sequel"
(The epilogue of "Invisible pictures of non-exixtent things"),
stage application like a lecture for one actress,
"Kummia Kuvia"
-seminar, Pori, Finland 2006
between things...
links and a side themes...
links and a side themes...
Trailer of Audio Play Movie "Strange"
The sketch without name
Long Audio Play Movie STRANGE
Watch full movie for free on Elonet > STRANGE
x
"idiot ibidem" theme
"idiot ibidem" gallery version, Suomenlinna, Helsinki, Finland 2003
by mox mäkelä
Sound versions :
Finnish sound composition from the script
"Invisible pictures of non-existent things"
("Näkymättömiä kuvia olemattomista asioista")
Yle Radio 1
Finland
Premiere : Part 1. 29.10.2005, part 2. 30.10.2005
Script and direction: Mox Mäkelä
Sound: Mox Mäkelä ja Kai Rantala
Producer: Radio Yle 1 / Hannu Karisto
Grishka: Ilkka Heiskanen
Grishka's spokesman: Tommi Korpela
Ivan Painov (immortal character, 1st version): Pauli Poranen
Serp Ivanovich Molotin (immortal character, 2nd version, Soviet era): Pauli Poranen
Yeah Greathead (immortal character, 3rd version): Pauli Poranen
mox the Recorder: mox
Guide: Liisi Tandefelt
Kartoshka: Tarja Keinänen
Witness: Jukka Voutilainen
Guard: Jukka Voutilainen
Fairy: Marjo Leinonen
Subheadings reader: Paavo Pentikäinen
Music and sound:
Timo Väänänen, electric kantele: "Riposti"
Australian Aborginal Music, "Gapu: Celebration"
Leon Minkus: "Don Quijote", "Variation: Kitri" ja "Dream of Don Quijote"
Hannu Syrjälahti: "Keväisessä metsässä", Ritva Koistinen, kantele
Ritva Koistinen (+Laatikainen, Hukari), kantele: "Rajakarjalainen kehtolaulu"
Nicholas Lens: "Tegite specula" ja "Ave ignis"
Grishka's composition: "Pesnja", Ritva Koistinen, kantele (mox's sound archiv)
Kraftwerk: "Ohm sweet ohm"
Mussorgsky: "Pictures an exhibition", part: The old castle
Timo Väänänen, electric kantele: "Riposti Remix"
Kraftwerk: "Radioactivity", version 1975
Arvo Pärt: "Pari intervallo", Ritva Koistinen kantele
Sibelius: "Impromptu for string"
Henri Hertz: "composition for piano"
Marjo Leinonen: "Let's Go Crazy"
Leon Kontski: "Reveil du lion"
Other sounds: mox's sound archive
Jukka Mikkola: Musical reflections and free interpretations from the radio composition "Invisible pictures of non-existent things"
Radio Yle 1, Avaruusromua 30.10.2005
Works and music included in the presentation:
KAIJA SAARIAHO: Windows (Maa)
THOMAS WILBRANDT: The Old Castle / Mussorgsky (Pictures at an Exhibition)
WILLIAM ORBIT: Piece in the Old Style 1 / Górecki (Pieces in a Modern Style)
BRIAN ENO: Markgraph (The Shutov Assembly)
CIACINTO SCELSI: Quattro Pezzi per Orchestra, osa 1 (Giacinto Scelsi)
KRAFTWERK: Ohm Sweet Ohm (Radio-Activity)
POLYTEKNIKKOJEN KUORO/OLLI KORTEKANGAS: En olekaan kuollut
TOMITA: The Old Castle / Mussorgsky (Pictures at an Exhibition)
MIKA VAINIO: Monneista viimeinen (Kantamoinen)
MARTTI POKELA: Suo (Sonata for Kantele)
SOCIAL INTERIORS: The World Behind You (The World Behind You)
ARVO PÄRT: For Arinushka (Music at the Edge -kokoelma)
EDWARD ARTEMIEV: Stalker - Train (Solaris - The Mirror - Stalker)
NEMESIS: Kaiku Part 1 (Kaiku)
"Meta Matka"
Russian theme before "idiot ibidem"
by mox mäkelä:
Russian theme before "idiot ibidem"
by mox mäkelä:
"Meta Matka"
short film, The Finnish TV Broadcasting with Tarja Stranden 1995
short film, The Finnish TV Broadcasting with Tarja Stranden 1995
Includes a "Meta Matka" theme''s action "Iron journey to gold" (the parts of a co-operation with Smolny choir: concert in St. Petersburg and in Helsinki, conducted Stanislav Legkov)
"Meta Matka"
exhibition
Helsinki Art museum, Tamminiemi 1994
And after Idiot, Ibidem... :
"a kind of sequel for Invisible pictures of non-existent things"
The seminar lecture action with three-role stage work for one actress (Maria Heiskanen), Seminar "Kummia kuvia, Pori, Finland 2006
script
"Invisible
pictures
of non-existent things"
["Näkymättömiä
kuvia
olemattomista
asioista"]
Finnish to english translated
by Owen Witesman
Translation was produced with the generous support of FILI-Finnish
Literature Information Centre.
A trailer of film
A kind of
by Mox Mäkelä 2015
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