By Elina Vieru | Curator, Oulu Museum of Art I Translated by Silja Kudel
Some years ago, the slogans of various interest groups were prominently displayed on roadside billboards here in Finland. One of the most memorable was “You can’t import the Finnish countryside”. Another classic, albeit with more playful associations, was “Take a risk: Fall in love with a Finnish Swede”. The challenge tackled by sculptor Minna Kangasmaa in her most recent series of works,
Systema naturae (2007-2009), is that of importing nature into the exhibition space – not literally in the materials she uses, but as the thing that discursively inscribes their thematic content and inspires their form. There is nothing extraordinary as such about using nature in art; it is after all a theme to which everyone can relate from personal experience – generally of a pleasant kind.
Kangasmaa’s approach to this theme has evolved over a period of many years. She combines taxonomy – the scientific practice of classifying organisms into logical hierarchies – with an iconography that might be characterised as ‘the collective legacy of womanhood’. Her crochet-lace wire flowers and glossy floral crockery fragments represent an everyday aesthetic for everywoman, yet they abound with subtextual allusions to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste and power, modern art’s decoration-phobia and the historically denigrated status of handicrafts. Just like falling in love with a Finnish Swede represents – playfully speaking – a certain deviation from the norm which enriches our cultural diversity, so too is the union of scientific taxonomy and reconstituted lace patterns an unlikely yet surprisingly happy marriage, its offspring inheriting the best genes of both parents.
Before we proceed to take a closer look at individual pieces in the Systema naturae series, we should briefly pause to consider the theme of Kangasmaa’s previous series of works, Grandmother’s Heritage, also the title of an exhibition hosted by Rauma Art Museum in 2006. Kangasmaa typically works by theme, with each discrete piece constituting a variation on a unifying thematic idea. The original creative inspiration for Grandmother’s Heritage was an extensive needlework collection inherited by the artist from her grandmother, comprising a large number of carefully preserved yet never-used samples of fabric crafts, but also a number of unfinished works.
Grandmother’s Heritage (2003–2006) reveals the artist’s early sources of creative inspiration by contemplating her own relationship with handicrafts and examining contemporary views on their necessity, traditions and recent innovations. The preservation of textile art from generation to generation represents a tradition of continuity, to which Kangasmaa adds her artistic interpretation in the concrete act of further refining and ‘finishing’ the work of foregoing generations. In the wake of industrial mass production, we have become glutted with a surfeit of commodities exceeding our true needs; thus, making things by hand is no longer a necessity, but a hobby motivated not purely by the envisaged result, but the joy of the creative process itself. Although fear for the disappearance of age-old artisan skills is a valid concern in today’s technologised society, the practice of handicrafts seems highly resistant to the threat of extinction. According to Statistics Finland’s most recent survey of Finnish recreational pastimes, handicrafts retained the top spot as Finland’s favourite hobby. Blogs listed under ‘Handicrafts and crafts’ receive more hits than categories like ‘Home and family’ and ‘Style, clothing and fashion’. Recent trends such as upcycling, green crafts, knitting activism, beanie-crocheting boys and grass-roots urban art like guerrilla knitting have received a great deal of media attention. According to futurists, rising trends like homing (the term originally describing the process by which adult animals return to their birthplace to reproduce), cocooning and DIY all signal the newfound importance of local collectivism in counterbalance to the extreme individualism of contemporary culture.
In the sphere of art history, the age-old conflation of women and needlework has been the topic of critical feminist readings for the past four decades. The deterministic shackle between the female gender and needlecraft has been a hurdle, if not an outright barrier, to women being taken seriously in the professional world. From the 19th century onwards, the art community marginalised women by relegating them to the domain of handicrafts and other analogous decorative arts, confining them to being mere producers of deftly executed yet anonymous and self-repetitive craft pieces. According to then-prevalent stereotypes, the female gender – being equated with the emotional, the corporeal and the private, domestic sphere – lacked the male qualities of rationality and conceptuality, the virtues required for inclusion in the Canon of art. Feminist commentators have emphasised that the historical tie between the female gender and handicrafts partly accounts for the gender-biased power relations still prevailing in the artworld today. Meanwhile, many contemporary artists have taken up formerly ‘unworthy’ themes, materials and methods and incorporated them into a new mode of experience, action and knowledge that democratizes art, thereby dismantling the barriers between high culture and everyday practice.
The works in the Grandmother’s Heritage series borrow their forms from basic needlecraft patterns – women’s evening gowns, traditional woven ribbons, quilting and crochet lace – but they are made mainly from hard materials like metal, concrete and fragments of broken china embedded in plaster. By having worked through this theme, Kangasmaa has now “put the handicrafts issue to rest”, although lace patterns still occupy a visible place in Systema naturae – their close visual affinity with the botanical world having inspired the artist to embark on a more general study of our relationship with nature.
Two elements as utterly disparate as lace patterns and the taxonomic system of classifying organisms presented by Carl von Linné in Systema naturae (first edition published 1735) provide Kangasmaa with tools for examining points of congruity between different systemic modes of thought. Lace represents the silent knowledge of micro-history; taxonomy the super story of science. Queen Anne’s Lace – Original Copy (2009) comments on the demand for originality and authenticity associated with works of art. Spread across a large white stage, it showcases a plant population fashioned out of magnet wire and steeped in an intricate network of subtextual allusions. ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’ or wild carrot (lat. Daucus carota) is the name of a flowering plant similar in appearance to cow parsley. Its delicate flower has inspired a crochet pattern spread in numerous variations by countless needlecrafters and pattern books. Scientists subsequently named the plant after this famous crochet pattern. The sculptor then proceeds to humanise nature by returning the plant – in its crochet-lace guise – to human reality. The epithet, Original copy, concedes that the installation replicates the already-existing, yet also creates something new and unique. Every artwork has a maker; nature does not – unless we speak in religious terms of God, or in scientific terms of a self-perpetuating ecosystem. The theatrical way in which the installation is staged in the exhibition space emphasises that what we see is not natural nature, but a conceptualised construct in which we, the viewers, exploit nature in an aesthetic sense. The instrumental value that we assign to nature does not, however, exclude that we might appreciate nature in its own right, without any ulterior self-serving motives.
The same lace pattern appears again in the multi-part concrete relief Greenwashed Detail I (2009), both in the delicate mosaic covering parts of its surface and also in the overall composition, which again exemplifies Kangasmaa’s typical compositional style of building up details into a larger entity. In addition to the three visible elements of the work, we may infer the presence of a fourth: that from which they have been dislodged and to which they might also return – the original pattern that is the prime mover of all things. At the same time, the work visualises how different elements, when arranged in auspicious relation to one another, can create balance and harmony. The large-scale relief, assembled on site piece by piece, also calls to mind certain elements of eastern cultures, particularly the glorious ornamental legacy of Islamic arts.
Concrete, being a sculptural medium that faithfully reproduces fine detail, has been one of Kangasmaa’s favourite materials since 2005, the year she executed Growth, a concrete mosaic and relief commissioned for a local school by the City of Oulu as part of its percent-for-art scheme. Kangasmaa is intrigued by the density of associations that concrete evokes: the dialogue of beauty and brutality, the bleak severity of sixties and seventies suburban housing projects, the painterly concrete minimalism of contemporary architecture and the sustainability criteria that public art projects must pass. Concrete is not an eco-friendly material – the title, Greenwashed Detail, refers not only to the copper sulphate treatment that gives the work its green patina, but also to the practice of covering up abuses, injustices and controversies by putting a disingenuous spin on things. The work invites the viewer to ponder the dilemma of beauty; beauty is not something intrinsically good to which we should automatically aspire, for its less attractive sides may include narcissism, aloofness and vanity.
We can regard nature in two ways: for its instrumental value or its intrinsic value, though sometimes the line between the two is not clear-cut. We appreciate nature for its ecological, economic or aesthetic value, i.e. how beautiful or scenic we find it. It would be fair to assume that our chosen order of priority differs radically from what nature itself would select. ‘Ecological value’ is thus defined as a combination of human-assigned values and those that nature itself selects. These can be divided into four categories: appearance; instrumental value to humankind; role of the species within the ecosystem and rarity, or endangered status. At the top of the aesthetic hierarchy we find large, fur-bearing or feathered herbivores, colourful birds and flowering plants. Following in close second place are large, fur-bearing or feathered predators, followed by corresponding smaller species of fauna. Lowest of all on the hierarchy is the group that is richest in diversity, insects and other invertebrates, “those minuscule creatures that rule the planet”.
Being a species at the top of the aesthetic hierarchy, flowering plants enjoy special favour within the visual arts, yet ranking plants in order of beauty is somewhat problematic. Customarily, the prettier the flower, the greater the value we assign to the plant. By the same token, even humble species of flora are equally crucial to the ecosystem owing to the role they perform in photosynthesis. Although there are many kinds of flower, none is ugly, argues the author Markku Envall: “They existed before beauty was ever invented as a category of attribution. Beauty is just an abstraction, a deracination of nature.”
Kangasmaa’s two-part Woodland Lace installation (2009) again draws inspiration from the iconography of lace, not floral in origin this time, but evoking the fractal chlorophyll tulle of foliage, branches and treetops. The first part consists of a patterned chipboard desk upon which there lies a book open for free perusal by visitors. The book contains photographs and texts of the imaginary ‘Woodland Laces Collection 2010’, which represents different woodland-types ranging from a well-kept natural wood to a rainforest and protected primeval forest. Kangasmaa came up with the idea for this piece while spending six months as artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf in 2008. The varied condition of the woodlands she saw while in Germany, from poorly-kept commercial forests to the majestic deciduous tree-giants in recreational woodlands, inspired her to take thousands of low-angle shots of trees etched against the sky. Kangasmaa observes and selects elements from her surrounding reality based on what she calls “retinal interface”, quickly and intuitively. Her collages of photographed foliages are like reiterated, self-replicating after-images that follow the bedazzlement of the eye and the soul.
The second part of Woodland Lace consists of two contrastive elements: a honeycomb of toilet rolls resembling the compound eye of an insect, and the gnarled torso of a tree trunk suspended in mid-air. Each toilet roll contains an impressionistic slide: a manifesto of air, light and chlorophyll. In Woodland Lace Kangasmaa uses what is conventionally regarded as the most natural and ‘native’ material for a Finnish sculptor to work with, but in a de-vitalized, industrial guise: in the form of plywood, paper and board – or then in its natural deceased form. The gnarled old tree corpse is an interesting interloper in this otherwise highly polished installation; indeed the artist herself is slightly confused yet also enthused by its presence. “This represents a new departure for me. I’m not quite ready to comment on it as yet. One thing is certain, however: I don’t want people to respond to my work solely either aesthetically or conceptually.” Nature is itself infinitely diverse; what at first glimpse might appear pointless or ugly has an important role to perform in the broader scheme of things. Death and decay are part of nature’s cycle, just like birth and fruition.
The gnarled tree corpse in Woodland Lace, together with another anti-sculpture, Greenwashed Detail II (2009), have a corporeal presence reminiscent of the minimalist, grotesque and intentionally open-ended vocabulary of Japanese butoh dance, which is based on both technical and improvisational exercises. Butoh is underpinned by a philosophy that views people as part of nature, embracing the ugly and the beautiful, the conscious and the unconscious. Just as the original name ‘Ankoku butoh’ can be translated as ‘dance of darkness’, so too the amorphous mass of roots buried deep in the darkness of the soil creates the beauty of the flower, teaches Butoh instructor Ken Mai. The flattened, rough-edged concrete slab spread across the floor in Greenwashed Detail II has no grace, art or clear point to it. Still, there is something very moving about it; the imprint of the artist’s kneecaps is discernible in the anonymous industrial surface, as if she had kneeled down to look at her reflection in a mirror of concrete. Two extreme opposites merge into one, and the mirror whispers: you are beautiful and ugly, butterfly by day and moth by night. In the words of Friedrich Schiller: “Seeks’t thou the highest, the greatest? Nature is’t able to teach thee: What it unwillfuly is, be thou that wilfully.”
Sources
Oral sources
Interview with Minna Kangasmaa, 8 February 2010.
Web sources
Laakso, Saara, 2009. Buton ydintä etsimässä http://www.liikekieli.com/kolumniesseet
Collanus, Miia, 2009. Käsityöblogit edelleen suosiossa http://tavantakaa.blogspot.com
Printed sources
Envall, Markku, 2009. Mikä keisarin on. WSOY, Juva.
Haapala, Arto – Oksanen, Markku (ed), 2000. Arvot ja luonnon arvottaminen. Gaudeamus Kirja, Helsinki University Press, Helsinki.
Järvinen, Kari (ed.), 2000. J.W. Goethe – Kasvin muodonmuutos. Biodynaaminen yhdistys ry. Tammer-Paino Oy, Tampere.
Kontturi, Katve-Kaisa, 2006. Feminismien ristiaallokossa. Keskusteluja taiteen ja teorian kytkennöistä. Eetos publications 3. Tampere University Press – Juvens Print, Tampere.
Ojanen, Eero, 2001. Kauneuden filosofia. Kirjapaja Oy, Hämeenlinna.