TEEMU
MÄKI – PHOTOGRAPHY
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| HOW TO BE A WOMAN?
(2006–) is a photo series where I portray women of
different ages, convictions and professions. I try to make visible the
internal and external struggle women go through when they try to live
with the culturally produced roles on offer for them. |
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I'm a male artist and because of this some would say that
it's
questionable or unreasonable that I try to approach these
questions at all, but I hope my perspective is fruitful precisely
because of this distance I'm endowed with. |
A photo series in which I try to see men
as
they really are.
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-workshop
In
June 2003 I did a photography workshop, BE YOUR ENEMY, for children
and teenagers in eastern Helsinki. It was funded and organized by
KIASMA
(Contemporary Art Museum) as a part of their subURB festival of urban
culture. In the workshop I the task for each participant was to make a
self-portrait in three photographs, in other words, a triptych. In the
first photo one was to pose as one's idol. In the second photo one
was just to be and reveal unpretentiously the mundane normal
self.
In the third photo one was to pose as one's enemy. I helped and guided
and a team of three pros (a photographer, a make-up and wig specialist
and a costumer) helped each participant to fulfill his/her visions. In
the end I myself did the assignment too.
Over forty
triptychs have been made in the Be
Your Enemy workshops that I've conducted with art historian /
curator Arja Elovirta since
2003.
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Testing
Your Ideals and Identity
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RELATIVISM
IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE
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A work in progress (2000–).
Photo-diptychs
proving that everything is relative.
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(In
These
Pictures the Artist Teemu Mäki Personifying
the Divine Purposes of Life)
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Photographs,
texts, a mirror, 1995–1997, overall size 400 x 400 cm. On text panel on
in the pile of photocopies: THE
SACRED DISHWATER, which has
been translated to Finnish, Russian, Bulgarian, German, Danish and
Italian. The theme is another biblical task: "Name your essential roles
–
or modes of being – the ones you can't deny or escape. Learn to embrace
them, to the extent that you can call them divine."
The pictures
are
titled:
Self-portrait as Bataille's
eroticism.
Self-portrait
as a
culturally male. Weightlifter.
Self-portrait
as a
culturally female. Femme fatale.
Self-portrait
as
an artist. Photographing my dead grandmother
(father's mother) on the day of her burial.
Self-portrait
as
you. The mirror.
Self-portrait
as a
procreator of life. Helping my wife to give birth
to our daughter.
Self-portrait
as a
devourer of life. Meat my brother.
Self-portrait
as a
rational verbalizer. The Sacred Dishwater.
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A multipartite work in progress since 1988, photographs, texts and a
mirror.
An early overview of This Is My Family,
a part of Death At Work,
Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland,
1994, 165 x 1000 cm
Excerpts from This
Is My Family and from other
chapters of Death At Work.
Click on the images to see the larger
versions:
DEATH AT WORK is a multipartite
work, not a series. I wrote about its construction principle in 1994:
"Most of my
photos are multipartite works and consist not only of photos
but also of texts. I have meant the texts and images to be of equal
value. The texts are inside
the
works, they are not press releases, background info or introductions to
the "actual" works, the pictures. Neither are the images illustrations
of the texts, instead, the content of the work is meant to be built
from
the collision of images and texts.
Multipartite
work is not a series,
series being a very common concept in the tradition of photography. A
series usually consists of a set of variations on a theme.
Typical
names of serieses in photography are titles like Irish landscapes, or Prostitutes of St. Petersburg.
From a serial work you can pick an extract and it can stand on its own,
even though it is thought that the full meaning of that extract only
becomes visible when the whole series is shown. I
have not made serial works at all, instead I have made multipartite
works, that rely completely on the idea of montage, on the idea that a
collision of pictures produce a meaning that can be far removed from
the
meaning that any isolated picture could have. That's why you can not
show extracts from a multipartite work."
There
are approximately 70 pictures in the whole work, at the moment. About
75% of the pictures in this work are black and white photographs, most
of them 40 x 30 centimeters each (with passe-partout and
frame 73,5 x 56,5 cm). They are printed on fiber-based Ilford
Multigrade
1k photographic paper and treated with selenium toner for maximum
archival quality. The color photographs are usually sized 73 x 56
centimeters each (with frame 73,5 x 56,5 cm). They are cibachrome
prints. As the work is so large, it has never been exhibited in its
entirety, even though it's meant to be an undivided whole. The
compromise I've made has been exhibiting extensive "chapters" of it,
the
most frequently shown chapter has been This Is My Family.
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A photo and
a text. Occasionally exhibited with an audio CD
of music, EIN TOD FOLGT DEM ANDERN,
thus
forming a triptych. The size of the photo and text panel is 40 x 30 cm
(74 x 57 including the frame. My atheist/relativist
version of the Ten Commandments of
the New Testament. I only came
up
with nine anyway. This piece was central to my early work: its photo
and/or text popped up again and again in various installations,
performances, musics, videos and multidisciplinary pieces.
EIN TOD FOLGT DEM ANDERN
A piece of music by Teemu Mäki and Max Savikangas.
(6'30,
included in the double CD: Max
Savikangas – Extraterrestial, UUCD102, 2003)
The lyrics of
the music
are a modified version of Christmas
Never Comes:
A death follows another death.
Christmas never comes.
The
presents have already been given. Everything you can own is inside your
skull.
Know your enemy from your friends: You
don't need any thing that you don't already have.
You are not dying of hunger, so how
meaningful your life is to you depends, not on what you do but on what
you think.
Consumerism's comfort doesn't make
you come but says instead:
"Don't worry, be
fatty, you're not ill, you just need a sleeping pill!"
Christmas is a celebration and
promise of eternal life and happiness...
...but only mortality gives us the
possibility to project personal purpose and meaning
onto our lives in a
meaningless world. And to be alive is to be
in pain.
Death at work
= life.
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