An elitist of his time? A caricature of Richard Wagner by Leslie Ward, published in Vanity Fair in 1877 (caption read ‘The Music of the Future’). Picture: Wikimedia

The old phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ has begun to sound like an appeal instead of an bohemian creed, without any negative ambiguity. Please let art be created for art’s sake!

In our times of neo-liberal ideologies, the criteria for assessing art include its capacity to generate profits to creative industries, to have export value, to be of assistance to business in general. But art, in essence, serves no ideology.

Technology now allows us to be more entertained than ever before, if we so choose. Art and entertainment alike come to us by the use of various devices. What has often been called ‘elitist’ art – opera, modern music, ballet – can be enjoyed lying on the sofa in the home. Money is not an obstacle.

Art, too needs money, of course: orchestras, theatres, training of artists and artists themselves need subsidies from society. Entertainment is by nature profitable business, as it attracts and involves large paying audiences. Smaller audiences want to listen to classical music, read books and see films that are not made solely in order to bring in as much money as possible. But why should these forms of art be called ‘elitist’?

As the American filmmaker David Cronenberg puts it: ‘Entertainment wants to give you what you want. Art wants to give you what you don’t know you want.’ Art awakens the desire to experience something new, to step outside one’s comfort zone.

An article entitled ‘Elitist, yuck?!’, published by the music magazine Finnish Music Quarterly (FMQ), discussed the ‘elitism’ of contemporary serious (here, as opposed to pop) music.

Kaija Saariaho, one of Finland’s leading contemporary composers, was 60 last October. In honour of the occasion, the leading Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat commissioned an article by one of its editors, Ilkka Malmberg – whose work, incidentally, has featured here at Books from Finland – describing his experience of Saariaho’s oratorio La Passion de Simone. He wanted to see whether the uninitiated could ‘understand’ Saariaho’s music.

Malmberg conscientiously listened to the oratorio, and read a biography of the leading character, Simone Weil. His conclusion, he said, was as follows: he did not understand Saariaho’s music.

The article, FMQ reports, led to a public correspondence between Saariaho and Malmberg. ’Malmberg had found Saariaho’s music difficult – the sort that maybe does not appeal to a young audience. He wrote: “The younger generation in Finland no longer has this upward yen for high culture. It has a thousand scenes of its own; it’s perfectly happy for everyone to do whatever appeals. Without having to struggle.” The fact that a musical genre is not immediately accessible to all does not, however, make it elitist. It is absurd to call the people who enjoy the music of Kaija Saariaho elitist any more than it is the youngsters who feel at home in their own scenes.

‘Saariaho tried, in her reply, to draw her music closer to the public at large. She asked Malmberg: “What exactly did you expect of the concert? Why did you feel the need to prepare for it? Because from the listener’s point of view, a concert is a spontaneous situation; you just sit there and let the music flow over you! You don’t, to my mind, need to understand it; it’s an abstract empirical world that reaches each listener in a different way.” ‘

Relax, in other words. Chill out. Go with the flow. What is there to ‘understand’ about Saariaho’s music? Why not just experience it? How is one to ‘understand’ the painting with the black square by Malevich?

Besides, without having to struggle nothing new is ever gained. Art isn’t easy; neither is learning. But do we really want life to stay the same for ever, without any challenges, intellectual or artistic? No, of course not.

In a report for the Irish Arts Council, ‘The Case for Elitism’ (2007) the journalist Emer O’Kelly concludes: ‘If art is too difficult, too puzzling, too different, for the majority of people, then we insist on lowering standards of appreciation for fear of making anybody feel inadequate. The god of “access for all” has become a satanic destroyer of the imaginative leap.’

Isaac Asimov once said: ‘Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge” (italics ours).

In this time and age when culture and art have expanded to hitherto unknown spheres, multiplied and diversified into innumerable varieties, it is ridiculous to label anything that’s intellectually attainable as ‘elitist’.

Art is for all, access is limited only by choice: the refusal to take an imaginative leap outside one’s comfort zone.

Looking art – in all its glorious, multifarious range – straight in the eye will show me something that I didn’t know I wanted. Exciting! It’s curiosity, not contentment, that paves the way for our future.

Beijing, China, 1989. Photo: Pentti Sammallahti

Photographer Pentti Sammallahti (born 1950) has travelled widely over six decades; his mostly black-and-white photographs portray humans, animals, cities as well as open landscapes, in Nepal, France, Kalmykia, the US, Morocco, Russia – in more than 40 countries. His beautifully executed retrospective work, entitled ‘here far away’, containing more than 250 photographs, is introduced by Finn Thrane

Here far away is a retrospective work that comprises nearly fifty years of photographic activity and unfolds in almost as many countries. Despite this, Pentti Sammallahti’s discreet title points to the paradox that the photograph always represents a here-and-now: an encounter in the exhibition or on the page of the book between artist and viewer, which is of course subject to the law of mutability, but constantly reflects the capacity of the two to enter into a dialogue, to extend the picture’s mirror of the past into the viewer’s present and future.

Moscow, Russia, 1980. Photo: Pentti Sammallahti

In this respect Pentti Sammallahti’s work is ensured a long life, because with his photographic images he steps outside time and instead grapples with the great mysteries that existence offers the curious: love, death, spirituality, nature – key existential concepts that he would hardly allow to pass his own lips, but would instead be all the more willing to show.

This modesty flows as an underlying current through all of his work, but only makes sense if it is viewed together with the obligation to hold the wondrous forth for us to see: the magnificent landscapes, the diverse multitude of animals, the struggling people, the fragile earth.

Not least the last theme – that God’s great apparatus could collapse – is one that his retrospective book still seems to be revolving around. Insistently, but without pathos. One of the more sophisticated photographs speaks silently but strongly about it: in the winter-white park stands a tree that has lost its side branches in the storm. One of the branches has positioned itself horizontally in a fork across the main trunk, so they together form a cross. But the symbolism of the cross is quite sacrilegiously killed off by a pair of crows that have occupied the cross-branch as if it were a see-saw in a playground.

Helsinki, Finland, 1992. Photo: Pentti Sammallahti

Two birds, the same distance, the same weight: the game can begin. If the balance shifts, the disaster happens… The beating of a butterfly’s wings in Hong Kong can start a tornado in Texas.

So goes the most famous sentence of chaos theory. Here Sammallahti has reformulated it with understated humour in Finnish.

In the photographer’s portfolios from the 70s and 80s animals are still only sparingly present. But after they get their own opus, ‘Tiny Pictures of Animals’, in 1993, the frequency rises, and birds and all sorts of domesticated mammals are pressed into service as punctuation (or rather ‘punctumisation’) marks in pictures that set the characteristic tone of humour: laughter disarmed by affection.

Varanasi, India, 1999; Kathmandu, Nepal, 1994. Photos: Pentti Sammallahti

It is clear that Sammallahti is insisting on this Paradisiac fellow-feeling when a little dog grabs himself some ‘underfloor heating’ by sleeping on the back of one of India’s sacred cows.

But Sammallahti’s truly musical animal-trainer activity, which in the world context only finds its equal in the 84-year-old American Elliott Erwitt, arises as early as 1982 with the incomparable picture of a dog stretching itself beneath a deformed tree which it resembles not only because of the slope of the tree, but also by placing its forelegs at an angle and distance that exactly ‘apes’ the two supporting posts of the tree.

Helsinki, Finland, 1982. Photo: Pentti Sammallahti

Such a shot should in reality be impossible to capture. But Sammallahti has kept his eyes open for this special sort of mimicry.

Not only dogs, pigeons too can be used. Just look what happens to the heroic halo around the Paris statue of the victoriously marching General de Gaulle, when two cool doves of peace take up the challenge, and with both the length of their stride and their bodily postures perform a parody of the later president.

Paris, France, 2005. Photo: Pentti Sammallahti

The extracts above are from the introduction by Finn Thrane, published in
here far away. Photographs from the years 1964–2011 by Pentti Sammallahti
ISBN 978-1-907893-26-1 (English edition)
Edited by John Demos in collaboration with Mario Peliti
Texts: Finn Thrane, Kristoffer Albrecht
Design: Pentti Sammallahti
Print: Arti Grafiche, Pomezia, Italy

here far away is available in six languages:
English: Dewi Lewis Publishing, Great Britain
French: Actes Sud, France
Spanish: Blume, Spain
German: Kehrer Verlag, Germany
Finnish: Opus, Finland
Italian: Peliti Associati, Italy

Words and images from the book Leikin varjo / Guises of play (Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova and Musta Taide, 2011)

‘Ring dance’ by Ulla Jokisalo (pigment print and pins, 2009)

The playing hand is true as only the human body can be true, but in play the hand is something else. It is a new creator, accepting and gentle, arousing the lifeless to life. Everything has its meaning, for play is always about something, something of significance. Play is a mysterious celebration for at least one person. It is passionate improvisation on a long-term dream.

‘Invisible hand’ by Ulla Jokisalo (pigment print, original: cut-out paper, watercolour, 2005)

In play, everything is given a name and the connections of things are revealed in the fresh naturalness of a new-born world. The mysterious alliances and mergers of play feel as if they had always been intended for each other.

Play chooses its own means, metaphors and details. It selects its illusions and secrets. It cannot and must not be ordered by anyone. It is always on the side of dreams, reverie, ideas and possibilities.

In play, rules give freedom beautiful, harmonious, transient, and thus vanishing, form. Enveloped in harmony one can even bear chaos. The right hand of someone in my left hand, the left hand of someone in my right. The rhythm is the same, gazes meet and cross within the circle: the same and truly shared play for all of us. No one gives orders, for the circle is shared in a perfect manner by all its members. The players are enthralled by the dance, but in a shared and joint manner. The circle rises and takes flight, for no one restrains or disturbs the play. It has a conscience, and for that reason, too, it is absolutely real.

Playfulness expands our idea of what is real or contiguous in life. What is meaningful? Play gives the answers. Play with perfect motion is replenished all the time, in its order, content and narrative. Play stops us from sinking into indifference or numbness. It is the arch-enemy of asceticism, denial of life, and being a bore. It defends mad order, the lack of discipline, unruliness, anarchy, utopia.

Scissors and thread

We embroidered and embroidered, stitched and stitched, heads lowered, backs bent, cheerfully looking out of the corners of our eyes, losing our sense of time….

‘Marjatta. Point of view III’ by Ulla Jokisalo (embroidery, thread and needle on pigment print, 2008)

The sound os the scissors is best heard against a tabletop: they bite chew and crush the cloth. The tabletop amplifies the sounds, lent rhythm by the metallic clash of the scissors. The solid surface of the table is revealed from under the cut fabric….

‘To stand on her own two feet’ by Ulla Jokisalo (cut-out pigment print, embroidery, thread, needles and pins on fabric, 2004)

You know you have to look out for a needle. A weapon and means of torture, yet something that heals and mends.

But thread is even more. Fear can be touched within beauty. Thread can be a soft support, giving way and breaking if it’s really necessary. It can be a slashing line, cutting without mercy. Twist it the wrong way and you can separate its strands to be seen. Long ago it was tamed into the cells of waffle cloth, when it played one-dimensional, curved to make angles and pretend to obey. Cross-stitching also put magic thread in place, shackled it and made it serve images.

Poetry

According to Francis Bacon, ‘poetry is as a dream of learning’. Unattainable, coherent and true learning lies somewhere in the depths of dreams. Poetry has the ability to reveal it, byt only for a fleeting moment that cannot be expressed in words. But after that moment one will no longer desire the frightened obedience of the weather-vane. This moment freezes history into a smiling face whose forginving honesty hurts the heart. Let it hurt.

Translation: Jüri Kokkonen

‘Well-read’ by Ulla Jokisalo (cut-out pigment print, embroidery, thread, pins and needle on fabric, 2010)

Goddess of victory: charioteer and runner Nike (constructed from the damaged statue of Nike of Paionios, from ca. 420 BCE). Photo: Wikimedia

No one should ever start a piece with ‘already the ancient Greeks…’ , but here goes:

Already the ancient Greeks practised the noble arts of sport. The Romans extended the cultivation (their word!) of culture to leisure, amusing themselves by throwing Christians to the lions. Formula F1 came a couple of thousand years later, as did post-modern art, sitcoms and reality TV, whose presenters take the place of lions and whose celebrities are today’s Christians.

The Olympics, founded by the Greeks, were in full swing as early as the seventh century BCE, until the Christian Roman Caesar Theodocius I banned them as irretrievably pagan in the year 393. However, they were revived 1,500 years later.

In Europe, the various tribes organised themselves and began to form societies; the continent divided into nation states which, in addition to fields and sports, began to cultivate their own languages and, through them, science and art.

In his new non-fiction book, Urheilukirja (‘A book about sport’), novelist Tuomas Kyrö examines sport in Finland through history and his own experience. After an active early youth, Kyrö is now more of an armchair sportsman, but he seems pretty omnivorous in his tastes. According to him, sport is essential to the survival of nation states because of the constant competition for growth among nations. Of which, of course, the Olympics is the ultimate stage, or stadium.

In the Finnish nation state, sport and the arts are not merely juxtaposed but sometimes set against one another, certainly where state sponsorship is concerned. Fortunately, in addition to the niggardly hand of the government, the cultivation of matters of the spirit are funded via the lotto and the football pools, in other words directly from the generous (or greedy) hand of the people.

A new comparison has sparked debate in the Finnish media: the True Finns party, which is seeking power in April’s parliamentary elections – and, according to the polls, is likely to get it – has announced in its manifesto that ‘The fine paintings of Edelfelt and Gallen-Kallela and Sibelius’s world-famous symphonies are internationally recognised…. The True Finns feel that the preservation of the Finnish cultural heritage is of primary importance compared to supporting post-modern contemporary art. Government arts funding should be directed in such away that it strengthens Finnish identity. Faux-artistic post-modern experiments, on the other hand, should be left economically to individual sponsors and the free market.’

The party’s website also states: ‘Funding for excellence in world-class sport should be increased at the expense of the arts. It would, in the end, be a question of extremely small sums. To ensure the London (Olympics) project and one gold medal, all that would be needed would be around three million euros of extra funding for effective training…. For sport is the circus entertainment that interests the people more than the state-funded arts, which are also in a certain sense elitist…. Prowess in world-class sport and keep-fit for ordinary people  always go hand in hand. Olympic sports have always played an important role in our national identity.’

The winner's game: since the 1928 Summer Olympics, the obverse face of the Olympic medals bear Nike's figure. Photo: Wikimedia

So three million is the price of one Olympic gold medal? Of course, there is no guarantee of one, even with this sum. Prowess in world-class sport and keep-fit absolutely do not ‘go hand in hand’. Democracy does not mean that everyone has to be interested in the same cultural matters. Quantity is no guarantee of quality; what ‘the people’ like cannot be more ‘right’ per se than what interests the ‘elite’. Feeding Christians to the lions is not admirable in human terms, however much the people liked it.

There’s much to mock in this new admiration of the cultural heroes of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The ‘Finnish national’ artists Albert Edelfelt and Axel Gallén (later Akseli Gallen-Kallela) and the composer Jean Sibelius were also mondaine cosmopolitans seeking their training and a large part of their inspiration abroad (and their mother tongue was not Finnish, by the way, but Swedish).

Finnish identity and Finland’s national heritage were not born out of powers primordially ‘Finnish’. A return to an idealised past is not possible, not now, not ever. ‘National identity’ remains a notoriously debatable subject.

Ever onwards: Nike of Paionios (the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, Greece). Photo: Wikimedia

But aren’t sports and arts both such fun! Coming up on the Books from Finland site next are extracts from Tuomas Kyrö’s sports fan book, and in it, he also talks about the arts: ‘Competition, dance, theatre, rally-driving, literature, ball-games, individual sports, video installations. What they are is play. Immaterial and pointless activity. But, to their makers and participants, perfectly meaningful…. Completely pointless, and damned important.’

Hannu Väisänen: ‘Green and yellow in March’ (work in progress, oil on canvas, 130x193cm, 2010)

I decided to go to the Museum of Fine Arts.

After paying for my entrance ticket, I climbed the wide staircase to the first floor. There all I saw were dull paintings, the same heroic seed-sowers and floor-sanders as everywhere else. Why were so many art museums nothing more than collections of frames? Always national heroes making their horses dance, mud-coloured grumblers and overblown historical scenes. There was not a single museum in which a grandfather would not be sitting on a wobbly stool peering over his broken spectacles, interrogating a young man about to set off on his travels, cheeks burning with enthusiasm, behind them the entire village, complete with ear trumpets and balls of wool. The painting’s eternal title would be ‘Interrogation’ and it would be covered with shiny varnish, so that in the end all you would be able to see would be your own face.

I climbed up to the next floor. All I really felt was a pressing need to run away. No Flemish conversation piece acquired in the Habsburg era was able to erase a growing anxiety related to love.

Then all my drowsy senses were awoken by a small painting, hardly the size of a box of chocolate, which I had accidentally stopped in front of. I startled so violently that I didn’t know whether to breathe through my mouth or through my nose. On the label beside the painting I read: Sassetta. Saint Thomas Aquinas at Prayer. Siena. Circa 1400… Aquinoi Szent Tamás… imája…

That small painting immediately turned me into an exclamation mark. I forgot all my needs. The green space of the painting, illuminated from the back, drew me towards it. Saint Thomas looked as if he were floating in his black cloak before the altar, his gaze fastened on an approaching dove, which was pulling a golden ribbon behind it. Particular care had been taken in the painting of the small library on the right-hand side of the painting. Books of all colours lay on their reading stands, closed and open. The centre of the work was made up of an octagonal marble fountain in the monastery garden, painted so that you could sense the coolness and freshness of the water. The finely painted tonsure on Saint Thomas’s head and the halo that surrounded it combined the flat and convex forms. A red cross was embroidered on the altar cloth; it too seemed to float clean and smooth in a painting that was otherwise so still. When I remembered that the Sienese masters also used gold leaf in the base coat of their paintings, I was not surprised at the colours glowing from a distance of five centuries. I had come to Budapest to study in the city’s art school. In a couple of minutes, Sassetta’s painting taught me more than two art schools were to teach me over many years.

Sassetta: Saint Thomas Aquinas at Prayer. Courtesy of Szépmüvészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts), Budapest

But what was that back-lit green that dominated the painting? Household green, said someone inside me. But where did the colour come from? It was not merely chromium oxide. The same green had appeared somewhere before. Then, suddenly, a memory rose up my spinal cord and entered my frontal cavity. I had seen that colour at home, in the barracks. The kitchen table, benches and the matching corner cupboard had been painted exactly the same green as the walls and study of the Benedictine monastery in Sassetta’s painting.

In the museum guide I read the legend of how Thomas Aquinas had asked for fresh herrings to eat shortly before his death. He had eaten them with a smile, retreated to his study, and died. It was believed that the herrings had been poisoned. I did not believe it. A religious hero like that simply could not die of a couple of poisoned herrings, even if he appeared, in Sassetta’s painting, as slender as a bellhop. The painting had all the elements of my childhood kitchen: the green of the table, the herrings, prayer, but raised above intellect and chronology. Righteousness begins wherever it chooses. And after, all in the Bible even hand basins were raised to the level of heavenly coppers.

According to the museum guide, the painting demonstrated the three principles of Thomas Aquinas: wholeness, right relations and purity. It was true. Everything in the painting was whole, and it produced wholeness. When I went on to read that the painting was only a small part of a reredos commissioned by the woolmakers’ guild of Siena, one of the parts of its predella, I wondered whether I should spend the rest of my life traveling the earth to see all the parts of the reredos. But I was in Budapest. I merely ordered myself: lick honey at every opportunity! As I left, I thought how I would describe my experience to Tamás, and in what language? I gazed at the wet, slimy cobblestones as I walked toward Vörösmarty square, where I would catch my tram.

One one of those metal-grey mornings when the trams screeched particularly desperately on both sides of the block of flats, after Tamás’s mother had poured very pale café-au-lait into our handleless cups, Tamás whispered to me that he was in love with some Ildiko and asked me to act as go-between. The Ildiko in question had already heard of me and would like to meet me. Tamás was beside himself with joy.

What should I do now with this café-au-lait, I wondered. And where should I put this thick sandwich with its sausage and all? Certainly not in my mouth. I counted in my mind how many nights still remained before I caught my train home.

My excessive interest in Hungarian folk music, barak pálinka, Bartók’s pentatonic compositions, Mikrokosmos, and the sulphur and mineral richness of the many bathing establishments came to an abrupt end. Tamás explained that Ildiko already knew everything about me, that a foreigner’s support would strengthen their as yet dawning union, that foreign languages and cultures would unite us all. To crown it all he told me of his dream of moving to Australia with his Ildiko. Suddenly I remembered all those hopeless families and children in my home town, families whose intention it was to ‘slip off to Australia next week to pick oranges’. Then I thought that there would soon be four of us sleeping in the big bed. It was big but not boundless. They were going to Australia! My ‘saison hongroise’, as I had characterised that period in various Budapest art cafés, was ending in a silent whimper.

I whimpered and went away, alone. I did not wish anyone to see me off. The eastern railway station expelled from its stomach a plump, dark green train decorated with numerous hammers and sickles; I sat, my lip quivering, in the carriage reserved for foreigners. I was returning home via Moscow. The train was the right one, but felt wrong, as did everything else. The country was wrong, the time was wrong, I was wrong and everything I had imagined was wrong. Why Hungary? Why not, just as well, Sylvania or Vojvodina? In my mind, Budapest shrank to a box, twenty-four by thirty-nine centimeters in size. It was no longer anything but a shell, which contained Sassetta’s painting of precisely the same dimensions.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Miina – Äkkijyrkkä

Miina Äkkijyrkkä (born 1949; real name Riitta Loiva) is a Finnish artist known for her cattle-themed paintings and sculptures. Äkkijyrkkä is also widely known as a passionate supporter and breeder of Eastern Finncattle, an endangered breed native to Finland. Most of the accompanying texts in this book which describe her ideas and her art come from a series of discussions with author and Lutheran minister, writer Jaakko Heinimäki, recorded in the spring of 2009. Miina Äkkijyrkkä speaks openly about her art and the diverse phases of her life, her values and faith, and her clashes with the authorities and the rest of society. This book is magnificently illustrated with Juha Metso’s photographs, which were taken over a period of 15 years in Finland and abroad. More information about the artist and her works is available here.

Marita Liulia is a visual artist who specialises in interactive media art. Her works have been shown in more than 40 countries. Choosing my Religion discusses the nine major religions of the world. It contains 150 pictures and photographs, as well as texts by the artist and an article by associate professor of comparative religion Terhi Utriainen. The book, like the exhibition at Helsinki’s Kiasma museum which it accompanies, focuses on the religions and on animism. Liulia has travelled in 50 countries, studying religions and discussing them with both scholars and laymen. Her project concentrates on the possibilities of equal choice between religions and emphasises their positive aspects. The subject of the photographs in the book is the artist herself, who abandoned her Christian faith as a teenager. As a child she suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and was unable to walk until she was 15. Liulia has portrayed herself in the traditional dress and emblems of the different faiths. In her view one of the features uniting all religions is the fact that in them women play the role of servants who pass on the faith to succeeding generations. Choosing my Religion comprises the book, the (touring) exhibition and a website.

On camelback: in the exotic part of Veijo Rönkkönen’s concrete cosmos there are animals and palm trees, side by side with the living plants of the northerly latitudes. - Photo, left: Veijo Rönkkönen; right: Veli Granö.

Extracts and photographs from Veijo Rönkkösen todellinen elämä / The real life of Veijo Rönkkönen (Maahenki, 2007. Translation: Kirsti Nurmela-Knox)

Veijo Rönkkönen (born 1944) has lived all his life on an isolated, small farm in eastern Finland, Parikkala, less than a kilometre from the Russian border, where he has quietly built a garden inhabited by nearly five hundred human figures made of concrete. Entrance is free.

In this book, the photographer and writer Veli Granö introduces Rönkkönen’s work of almost half a century, pointing out that art demands to be created despite professions and careers: ‘The choices that lead one to develop into an artist are not always voluntary, nor are they necessarily made through happy coincidences. Not all artists choose this career from a vast range of possible and interesting jobs; for some it may be a kind of by-product of their battle for survival.’ Veijo Rönkkönen had to make a living by working in a pulp factory for 41 years. Making art was his way of surviving in the circumstances he was not able to choose himself.

Contemporary folk art questions the prevailing conceptions of art. For me, its most important characteristic – and the point where it most deviates from the accepted conception of art – is the total freedom it leaves for the viewer. Modern art created by professional artists is automatically labelled as ‘art’; when defining modern art, its origins are often used as a starting-point: a particular piece is modern art as long as it was produced or performed by an artist. However, some of the works in this category may seem alien to the general public. Modern art has been met with loud, sometimes overly harsh criticism. This is in accordance with the trend of extreme popularisation at work in the current cultural atmosphere. In this regard, contemporary folk art can offer a useful countercultural challenge to high art and accepted artistic practices.

One does not need to be familiar with art to understand popular or vernacular art, since it can be enjoyed with a spontaneous and playful attitude. Viewers can rank the works according to their own tastes, and they are even free to laugh at these works. Questioning the art world’s hierarchies, institutions and its particular definition of an artist can even be seen as questioning modern reason. Vernacular art brings art back to its playful, carnivalistic origins, where experience, innovation and the works of art themselves are forever developing.

Nature conquers cement: moss gently creeps over the faces and bodies of the sculptures – nothing is eternal, art is as evanescent as its creators. – Photo: Veli Granö.

There are no superfluous items in the park – and I include the artist’s house and its contents in this – no act or thought that does not belong to, or is not clearly a part of its complex structure. The park itself is a ‘total work of art’, which compares readily to the development of the self.

Veijo’s decision to make art from concrete, one of the most durable of materials, is obviously related to the motif of the battle against time. Of course, even concrete is not immune to the ravages of time: moss sneaks onto the shoulders of the concrete peopleand lichen decorates their faces with colourful masks. The changes are slow, almost invisible, but the photographic record enables us to observe them. While the pictures of the sculptures, taken over the years, depict the tricks that the seasons and time have played, they also illustrate the drawn out decay of the works. These images of slowly ageing works form the family album of the silent sculptures.

Even if Veijo has always been keen to know the audience’s reactions, he has never talked to visitors voluntarily or asked their opinion on his work. Yet he meets people almost daily when working in his garden and never refuses to speak to them. His answers to any questions concerning the sculptures are, however, very curt so that the inquirer immediately understands his reluctance to continue the conversation.

Despite his withdrawn character, Veijo has always placed importance on the role of viewers. From indoors he observes those walking in the garden and looks for anything out of the ordinary. Should someone stray onto the flowerbeds, he will open the window and tell them to return to the path.

Left: Toothsome: Veijo Rönkkönen began to use dentures in his figures in 1976; ‘Javelin Thrower’ flaunts the false teeth of the artist’s father, who died in 1975. Visitors have since donated dentures to be used in Rönkkönen’s work. - Right: Concrete carnival: as visitors enter the yard, they encounter a parade of dozens of statues – women, men and children; this one is called ‘Old wife without teeth’. Veli Granö calls the parade the artist’s private carnival. - Photos: Veli Granö.

As a result of the break-up of the Soviet Union, life on the Finnish side of the border zone became a little easier. The first thing to go was the ban on stopping near the border, then the ban on using binoculars and cameras. Security cameras replaced the soldiers in the nearby watchtower. As the rules were loosened, the roadsides near the sculpture park filled with cars parked in dangerous positions. Thus for security reasons the road authority decided that a car park was required. A tourist information board and signs were erected. Since 1992, there has also been a little shop that sells refreshments and postcards of the sculpture park.

Veijo’s sculpture park is the most notable tourist attraction in Parikkala, and it is regularly advertised in various media. Numerous tourists visit the site every summer, and the busiest summer thus far saw some 26,000 visitors. Despite its status of an ‘official’ sight, Veijo has kept the park as his private garden and has nothing todo with the tourist business that surrounds him. He has no connection to the shopkeeper either, although he has paid the shop a visit at night.

His refusal to have any part in the business side arises from his overarching need to remain absolutely independent. ‘What if I decide, all of a sudden, to close up the park?’ goes his reasoning. Nevertheless, the local entrepreneurs and promoters of tourism need not be too worried. An audience is essential to Veijo, and there has never been an entrance fee, regardless of the season or the time of day. His reserved attitude towards publicity gives the sculpture park its extraordinary ambience, and the visitors can experience the dialogue between the public and the private space.

The line of statues, along with most of the other works, can be seen as Veijo’s private carnival. By turning everyday values upside down, the carnival serves as a form of therapy. The motley crew of the un-Finnish- looking figures brings medieval carnival processions to mind. It is interesting to try to figure out the origins of these strange characters. The artist himself says he simply tried to fit as many different sculptures as possible into the group.

Passer-by: the artist’s mother lived with him until her death. Here she walks past the carnival figures sculpted by his son – whose work she never appreciated until he began to be recognised. - Photo: Veijo Rönkkönen.

The media and tourism have made the world a smaller place, and this shows even in the artists’ gardens. Ideas imported from exotic regions have played an important role in the western art history. As early as during the first decades of colonialism, many artists felt that lifestyle in urbanising Europe was artificial and detached from reality. Gauguin’s travels to Tahiti and the impact of African and Oceanian sculpture on the birth of European modern art in the early 20th century are well known. Incidentally, it was this same interest in the exotic that prompted the focus on Europe’s own ‘primitives’ – outsider artists and the artwork of children.

Contemporary folk art cannot be studied within the framework of art history because the makers of folk art are seldom aware of their place in the greater tradition of art. In this respect they differ from traditional rural folk artists, who closely followed the visual conventions of their communities. Art by a contemporary folk artist usually has its own evolutionary curve, dependent on the artist, and its progress dies with its maker. Veijo, too, is quite unfamiliar with art history, and it would be more fruitful to look for the aspects that his art shares with comedy, a tradition he now continues. His attempt to create an exotic ambience of the Orient in his garden should be seen purely as his own personal project, without any reference to art history.

Dreams of childhood: the dozens of children in Veijo Rönkkönen’s park were all created over the past few years. They play, run, dance and fight like a tribe of small, colourful gymnasts. - Photo: Veli Granö.

Veijo’s sculpture park can be seen as a reflection of his own life. The various parts and works express the stages of his life, from growing up with the dreams and fears that he experienced, to some signs of ageing and mature giving up. In many parts, one can sense tones of a persuasive dialogue. Some of the sculptures are provocative, even aggressive, whereas others produce a sensation of thorough consideration and an aspiration to achieve spiritual harmony. The park is like a portrayal of a personality, with all its doubtful and conflicting characteristics.

So far, we have followed paths through the changing moods in the park, but paths always lead to a destination. Veijo’s sculpture park reaches its climax in the Yoga Park, which aims to portray a holistic spiritual experience. The path that leads to the heart of the park is like a trail to a mythical temple that is flanked with images of symbolic scenes, or sometimes tasks, troubles, temptations and even mazelike traps to challenge the traveller. The traditional temple path’s function is to cleanse the mind of worldly thoughts and prepare it for the experience of transcendence.

Behind Veijo’s work, we can see all those dreamers whose aim was to create life. Pygmalion is there, with the statue he made and then married; the alchemists, who wanted to create the homunculus; the Jewish mystic who made Golem out of clay; the smith Ilmarinen who forged a cold bride for himself, as well as the whole tradition of those who were punished for their hubris.

Veijo’s yearning for life and its flickering touch explains the importance of plants and natural environment in the sculpture park. Flowers and bushes give the garden the atmosphere of transience.

Many of the sculptures have a place for planting flowers. The blooming flowers in the sculptures’ embrace manage to veil the eeriness of the immobile stone. Here nature, forever changing and producing new and fantastic flowers, will soon shed its petals into the stream of life and death; it is the manifestation of the life force, it is life itself.

Extended self-portrait? Veijo Rönkkönen took up yoga in the 1960s, and started creating yoga figures soon after. In this Finnish back yard, the yoga park with its 250 statues is an extraordinary artistic creation. - Photo: Veli Granö.

Veijo has realised that the same vivid effect can be achieved without the gardener’s hand: if allowed, the plants push slowly up from the ground, from the roots of the statues and up along their sides. Lichen and creepers draw fresh impressions on their faces, and heavy moss capes fall gently upon their shoulders. However, these small, colourful plants can be deceptive. Their strong acidic roots corrode the sculptures’ surfaces and add to the slow process of decay. Even though Veijo would like to think that the sculptures shall remain in their place to aspire to eternal life after he is gone, he does not want to stop nature from destroying his work. He understands that his life can only continue in the process of change that he started by conquering a moment of permanence for his sculptures.

Contemporary folk art in Finland goes by the acronym ITE, from the words ‘itse tehty elämä’, a self-made, ‘DIY’ life. The French call it art brut; the English-language term is ‘outsider art’. The artists are ‘unschooled visionaries’ who make their art independent on any societal requirements or definitions. John Maizels, the British author and editor of the art magazine Raw Vision, reckons Veijo Rönkkönen as one of the masters of the outsider art.

In 2007 Veijo Rönkkönen, the artist of a self-made life, was awarded a state award, the Finland Prize, worth €30,000. More pictures: http://www.nykykansantaide.fi/veijo_ronkkonen_18.html ; click ‘Galleriaan’.