Aleksandr Borovski (RU):
I have chosen Anu Tuominen as the winner of the Ars Fennica 2003 prize. This decision was not an easy one, as the standard of nominees this year seems to be especially high.
As for my reasons for giving Anu Tuominen the first place, I would like to formulate them in the following way. I regard Anu Tuominen as an artist who is absolutely free of all the clichés of form and meaning construction, which have become widespread in contemporary art recently. In this epoch of total deconstruction, games and parodying of contexts she creates unusually and even frighteningly profound, serious art aimed at achieving a certain syncretism, the unity in the ”nature of things”, and not at deconstruction. I realize that some might see too much pathos in this statement, but I will prove my claim.
On the surface of it, Anu Tuominen works within a long-standing tradition of breaking traditional statutes and media stereotypes of art with the use of found objects, which, as a rule, are everyday items; she appropriates trash: base objects from different levels (in an analogy with the famous High and Low exhibition at the New York’s MOMA), or, as philosophers put it, she valorizes the profane. This tradition goes back to DADA and the revived Fluxus tradition. The profane here is the objects and materials of the kitchen and of ”feminine” everyday life in general: pottery, thread, buttons, postcards, books, etc. and archaic everyday rites associated with the domain of the House – sewing, cooking, taking care of children, maintaining communication between the members of the family (sending postcards etc.). It also includes trash, the refuse generated by these activities.
I must say that the feeling of handicraft, or, to be more exact, of something homemade, was my first impression, and one that had a rather leveling-down effect: it looked like some raw, homemade version of Fluxus… Then an idea struck me, that this accent on leveling-down is not accidental, that it is intended, programmed.
Maybe she is concentrating on the gender themes that are is still in fashion today? No, that is perhaps the topmost and not the most important stratum. And then the profound depth of the artist’s intentions was revealed to me. Yes, Anu Tuominen authorizes the everyday, the trite, the profane. Yet, the author is initially, as Ortega y Gasset recalled the word, an ”auctor”, someone who expands things. And this is the main thing, to my mind. Anu Tuominen works with the sign, with what it denotes, its denotate, with the process of signification proper, with the sign as an element of communication. And she treats all these aspects expansively. As an author. As an auctor.
Besides being an organic part of the internal world of the artist, the material of the House and everyday life has the most stable and persistent sign content in all cultures, and that is why Anu Tuominen works with it. She works with this stability, destroying persistent associations and balances, revealing the profound, ontological, basic associations through paradoxical and provocative moves.
Here is an obvious example of her work with the persistence (”sluggishness”, as Nietzsche put it) of associations between the sign and its denotate (i.e. the object which is substituted or represented by the sign). The sign as a copy or reproduction is the simplest case of such an association. Anu Tuominen takes a simple postcard with a photograph of an interior or landscape. And then she replaces the reflecting surface depicted there (a mirror in the room or a water surface in a landscape) with a real mirror surface. That is, she inserts a piece of a real mirror into a postcard with a ”mirror”. It is a very simple move, but it immediately disrupts persistent associations. What represents what? Does the sign replace what is denoted, or vice versa? What is communication when the postcard has a message to convey? And what is the message? What is being offered to the addressee of the postcard? Is he or she to look at the view, which was important to the sender? Or is he or she to look at his or her own self in the mirror?
And here is a more extended example of work with the material of signification. We see a set of paints in round cavities. The circles of color represent and imply the process of painting a picture, of mixing pure colors. There are analogues of these circles of color nearby. But they are crocheted, made with a crochet hook and threads of different colors. So the mixing of primary and secondary colors has already been completed here in the paradoxical, ”objectified form”. The persistence of the scholarly, routine approach to painting as a technical method is overcome…
The metamorphoses of color creation are particularly exciting for the artist. A traditional kitchen utensil is lying on a flat surface. It is a wooden masher. On one side of the masher there are colored balls of thread (crocheting in general is Anu Tuominen's favorite technique, it is even a medium for her), on the other side we observe the same balls, but here they have been crushed into flat circles of color. Once, when I was at elementary school, I was shocked by the understandability of a simple scheme: the circulation of water in nature. Here we have a no less striking image of the circulation of color in nature.
The sign is not always immediately bound to the phenomenon it represents: a certain convention, a treaty on values defining their correlation, is worked out by society. Thus soap represents (and not just metaphorically, but also technically) the notion of cleanness, sterility, the processes of purification, of removing dirt etc. Anu Tuominen uses trivial plastic soapboxes, but she does not put soap in them, she puts seashore pebbles there, their round streamlined form being literally created by a millennium of water working in the surf. The persistent, ”sluggish” metaphor (representation, bond) is replaced by a different one, which is paradoxically fresh and unexpected. This results in the emergence of a striking, powerful image of organic purity…
It is difficult to find analogies to Anu Tuominen’s new metaphors, to her search for new fundamental associations between the phenomenon and its sign. Only J. Beuys comes to my mind, or rather one of his multiples: a lemon and an electric lamp of striking yellow color. The saturated color, the ”charge” of the lemon seems to be a source of energy. Perhaps, only Beuys in his works of this sort and with his astounding talent for finding associations between phenomena, which are more convincing and fundamental than merely physical ones, can be regarded as Anu Tuominen’s predecessor…
The paradoxicality of Anu Tuominen as an artist lies in the fact that she is an indisputable master of conceptual pragmatic play, and this is the only possible option for a person who works with signs and modes of objects and phenomena, reconstructing systems of bonds that have a long history. That is why she is so much inclined to systematization, to the creation of visual alphabets… The objectification of her intentions in media that are warm and gentle to the touch (crocheting, appropriation of household utensils and rites) is not accidental – she gives vent to her emotionality in this way.
It is symbolic for her to articulate a colored photograph as an amateur shot, there is no special composition, just a fragment of country life – a clearing in the forest, a farmer near a firewood barn. And all of that appears against the background of classic Finnish autumn with its yellow, green, bright-red colors… An everyday object looks quite natural in this environment: it is a clothes line with plastic pegs for drying linen. But the pegs are of various colors. They represent spreads of color, a paradoxical analogue to the natural spectrum. It is difficult to make out whether this chromatic scale is a sign of natural color variety, or whether the natural, ”accidental” colors of autumn represent, signify, symbolize certain ontological regularities of systematicness… I believe this is an image of Anu Tuominen’s art with its paradoxical relationship between conceptuality and lyricism.
Aleksandr Borovski (RU), Head of the Contemporary Art Department, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg, art critic (2003)