KUOLEVAINEN
In collaboration with Aune Kallinen and a group of teenagers
52 minutes, 2006–2007
KALIKI
In collaboration with the composer Max Savikangas. Based on his composition Kaliki.
15 minutes, 2004–2007
HISSITANSSI 1, elevator
dance & HISSITANSSI 2, another elevator dance
In collaboration with Päivi Rissanen and Pia
Karaspuro.
6´30 minutes each
2003–2004
ITÄKESKUS DANCING TREE
In collaboration with Pia Karaspuro, Jouko Kyhälä,
Outi Pulkkinen and Päivi Rissanen.
13´30 minutes
2002–2004
PEOPLE APPEAR FROM NOTHING
(number one of The Leningrad Essays and Poems)
30´20 minutes
2003
RAKKAUS LIITÄÄ IHMISMIELEN
TAVOITTAMATTOMISSA
(osa kaksi sarjasta esseitä ja runoja
Leningradista / number two of the Leningrad
essays and poems)
Finnish/English/Russian
5´33 minutes
2003
RIKKI (BROKEN/SULPHUR)
a video installation, two tapes & screens, 80 minutes, 2000
MILK
In collaboration with Anja Bargum and Åsa Wallenius.
9'50 min, swedish version, Mjölk, 9´00 minutes, 1998
| "Somebody starves to death somewhere,
somebody else feasts in luxury somewhere else, what is their relation?
If the luxury is there at the expense of the starved, does it
automatically cause guilt in the mind of the exploiter? If the feeling
of guilt does arise, does the luxury lose its taste? If the guilt,
experience of it, does not arise, is the exploiter emotionally numb? To
be without guilt, is it to be unable or unwilling to feel in general?
Can one have the guilt, suffer from it, and yet whenever the time is
right just switch to another mode and willingly enjoy feasting at the
expense of others? Somebody is dying of hunger, on the other side of
the
TV-screen, somebody else is feasting, on this side of the TV-screen,
this is a fact. Who is hurt by this? The one who dies of hunger. The
one
in slave labor in a sneaker factory. What about me? Who benefits from
this? The owners of the sneaker factory? The one who feasts and watches
telly. Does the ice-cream have more intensive taste when on TV there is
something to compare it with, ice-creamlessness? If on the other side
of the screen there was somebody with chocolate, should I have the most
expensive caviar to still have this luxurious feeling? If everybody
gets caviar, a Mercedes and vacations in Bermudas, will we some day all
of a sudden realize that a carrot, day care and sauna is enough? Tell
that to the last cupful of rice. If everybody had TV and chocolate,
would the paradise be not only here but everywhere? Or would at least
the desperation be gone? An unemployed who is more interested in
alcohol than public library, how much happier is he than the starving
one? What do I use to measure the difference? Am I now getting rather
gloomy? Lets get back to the point. What if I decide that the
deprivation of the majority is not the result of the luxury of the
minority, if the privileged are not feasting at the expense of the
poor,
do I still think that the poor must be helped? Does guilt arise? Does
it lead into action? On whose behalf and against whom? Or do I choose
pity? Maybe also charity? Unless it interferes with my mortgage
payments. Pity and charity, are they results of the ill feeling that
seeing a being like me starve to death causes? Or are the pity and
charity a result of the wealth? Because of my wealth I can afford them.
Because of my wealth I need them. Why? I'm standing on top of the
mountain of my riches, and to experience the sweet dizziness of it I
have to look down, and down there in the abyss there must be people
starving to death. The underprivileged must be helped, do I think so
because that's just how it is, automatically, or because it is in my
own
interest to do so, not to be faced with an angry revolt of the poor
later? Is that what I'm afraid of? Or am I afraid that my indifference
at the starving proves my affection to my child quite shallow, untrue?
Does it that? Shallow, untrue, to whom? To me, to others or to the
child? Can't the commandant of a concentration camp, in his spare time,
be a good father?" (monologue spoken in the video)
|
COME AND GO
(swedish version KOMMER OCH GÅR), 6´20 min, 1998
AS IT IS (FAMILY VALUES OF A COUPLE OF MURDERERS, part three)
in collaboration with Pirjetta Brander
5´55 min, 1997
THE MOTHERHOOD ITCH (FAMILY VALUES part two)
a collaboration with Pirjetta Brander
14´00 min,
1997
| "We worked on the Family Values 1 + 2 couple months before the birth of our first child.
We used the special changes that took place in Pirjetta's body, our
relationship and moods, as material with which to ask fundamental
questions like: Why to live, why to give birth, are children our feeble
bridge over the gulf of death, what are the similarities between making
art and making children? Our daughter, Aino Ursula Mäki, was born
June 15, 1997."
(Teemu Mäki, 1997)
"I studied the myths connected to pregnancy and motherhood, which were totally alien to me. The physical transformations of the female body during the pregnancy were difficult for me to accept, these works are, among other things, about coming to terms with them. The birth of a child of our own raised many questions about identity and also answered some." (Pirjetta Brander, 1997)
|
SCHICKSALLSSYMPHONIE (FAMILY VALUES part one)
in collaboration with Pirjetta Brander
10´04 min, 1997
THE SACRED DISHWATER
21'40 minutes
1994-1996
PYHÄ TISKIVESI
(the Finnish version of THE SACRED DISHWATER)
for the Finnish National Broadcasting Company
21'40 minutes, 1994–1996
MY WAY, A WORK IN PROGRESS
90'19 minutes (11. version)
1988–1995–
IN A DREAM I FUCKED MY GRANDMOTHER (a love letter)
4'30 minutes, 1995
a video poem. The text is here: In a Dream I Fucked My
Grandmother
A POEM FOR JONAH
13'00 minutes, 1995
a video poem, text of which is here: A Poem for Jonah / Runo Joonalle
WHORE AND EXPLOIT
a work in progress, 3. version, 62'20 minutes,
1995
"...is a COMEDY in four chapters,
full of excitement, fear, logic, cruelty, insanity, splendor and gentle
beauty, l
ike fairy tales that one tells to
one's children, so that they would live till death, and n
ot be killed by boredom before it,
with the exception that this is a tale I told to myself."
(an adaptation of R.W. Fassbinder's prologue to his film, Die Dritte
Generation)
| Whore and Exploit is about whoredom, about ways in which it is possible
to find one's life worth living in a society where everything has a
price-tag on it and almost all jobs are forms of prostitution.
Whore and Exploit is also about Athens, ethics, pragmatism, minimalism, humor and
about the concept of brotherhood. This is the third version. The length
of it was limited by U-matic cassette's maximum playing time, which was
good: I was able to leave the piece to rest for a while. I will
continue
the work later, what I have here is a sort of skeleton and foundation,
on top of which a more elaborate thing will be built. But, this being a
work permanently in progress, I like to show it at this stage too, it's
designed so that it's justifiable to do so. My growing infatuation with the "work in progress"-form is based on my belief that with this open form it is possible to reach further, than when striving after the ideal of the faultless form of the "finished product". "A work in progress" as a method results in pieces that admittedly wobble, lose their composure, but it is precisely through this stuttering flow that I can accidentally express more than in my earlier, formally tight and polished works, like The Good Friday. Also I think that the polyphony of means that I'm developing; using very different techniques and modes of expression in a single piece, like in here, automatically results in a more fragmentary approach; that of a work permanently in progress. Another factor contributing to my infatuation with this approach is my ridiculously sincere, megalomaniac, attitude towards making works: I refuse to start another piece if it is not absolutely necessary. I believe more can be achieved when building on and constantly refining what one has made before. This attitude is comparable, if I may say so, to the approach of my true hero, Cecil Taylor, who has during the last 20 years been playing with the same signature themes, attacks, and combinations of instruments, still finding and organically stumbling into new things inside his own playground, which results in music, that not in spite of repetition involved in making it but perhaps because of it, is fresh every time it's heard. This work was started at a low point of my life. That is where its indifference towards time, its slowness and insistence comes from: it is an attempt to find something, anything, that would still be of any interest to me, it just so happened that this something was in the most dismal and mundane details of life, like dishwater (in my own iconography I refer to this work as the Dishwater Symphony). Whore and Exploit is dedicated to Kathy Acker, because of its content, but its formal approach owes more not only to Cecil Taylor, but in my mind, because of its atmosphere, to Morton Feldman and Maria de Alvear, so in a way it is a tribute to them too. I also wish to thank Juha-Pekka Hotinen for his inspiring ideas about the importance of the "zero-intensity" as a method in art-making. This work is chapter 5 in the ongoing series of film and video works titled Films for Nothing (after Samuel Beckett's prose work Texts for nothing). All these works are independent works, but together they are supposed to really resonate and make sense, emotionally too." (the original info leaflet from 1995) |
EIN TOD FOLGT DEM ANDERN
unfinished, exists as a piece of music only, 6'03 minutes, 1994–
THE SHIPPING CRATE
in collaboration with Roi Vaara,
from his performance tour, 17'00 minutes, 1992
SANTA-MARIA FURIOSA
in collaboration with Ilkka Sariola,
video of a dance solo by Sanna Kekäläinen, 52'00 minutes,
1991
24'12 minutes
1990
| Joe is my adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Eh,
Joe. Beckett wrote the piece (April-May 1965) for Jack McGowran who
played Joe in the first televised version (BBC2, 4 July 1966). My video differs significantly from Beckett's script, but again I want to remark that my intention has been to be as faithful as possible to the content of the original text. Cast: Mattijuhani Koponen (Joe), Penny Tuerk (the Voice). |
TAPIO
11'20 minutes, 1990
|
"Originally TAPIO was a music video to a song by one of the best
rock-bands in the world, Radiopuhelimet. As I was
trying
to find a form that would make what I've understood to be the ambiguous
content of the song accessible, I was forced to lengthen the piece more
and more so that eventually the actual song covers only one fourth of
the length of this video. TAPIO is, like my works very often are, about
the only real and important problems of this Western civilization of
ours. It's now 1993 and all that we need to do is to find solutions to
these problems or at lest a way to live with them:
1. The capitalist has lost the connection between his mind and his body. Property is your substitute for body. To preserve this illusory body you keep it growing, forcing it to imitate organic beings. By consumerism you safeguard yourself from physical pain and at the same time make up for it by punishing your surrogate body for its non sentience. Trying to wake it up. Imitating interaction of mind and body. Useless exorcism. 2. What after orgy? What to do when you realize that you don't need any thing that you don't already have, that there is no reason to believe in any kind of correlation between the accumulation of your property and your mental well-being. 3. What to do when you can no longer put your faith in the future, when you can no longer perceive the history of mankind as an evolutionary process towards a "better", "happier" and wiser society and consciousness. What to do when you can no longer take seriously any notion of god or gods, when you can only laugh at the impossible idea of you having an afterlife or even eternity to live as yourself with your present set of brains, ideas, emotions, instead dying; turning into a recycled bunch of chemicals and minerals. What to do when you can not seek comfort or the last resort in the idea of being a part of a whole greater than you are and dearer to you than yourself, when mankind is no more seen as the pinnacle and crown of evolution but just one species among others that come and go. Most definitely go. What to do when you can't even "altruistically" dedicate yourself to the preservation of life on earth, to saving the bunnies and flowers from the exterminating man. "Why can't I?", you ask - because now while you've reached the pinnacle of almost autistic egoism, you have at the same lost your belief in any kind of universal hierarchy of values, now everything is just a matter of attitudes, anything can be anything else depending on the viewpoint you choose. And more concretely; nothing is above anything else in the big picture. A man, a Cadillac, a rat, an idea, an HIV-virus, all things are equal if you have the proper perspective, that of mother Nature. When your dreams turn to shit just pass them on to your children, yes you can still do that but it doesn't give you the kind of relief it used to. TAPIO is about the end of western civilization, and about conforming myself to it." (original info leaflet from 1991)
|
CONCEPT OF HAPPINESS
2'30 minutes
1990-1991
Based on Samuel Beckett's poem My Way Is in the Sand Flowing.
MY WAY
7'15 minutes, 1990
OHIO IMPROMPTU
(4. version) 12'00 minutes, 1989–1990
|
This is in a way an ongoing production for I have made four versions of
the piece and I'll make more. These slightly different readings
shall all be saved. Currently distributed is version number four. Ohio
Impromptu is a video adaptation of Samuel Beckett's play Ohio
Impromptu. Video version retains the original text as a whole but the
setting, actor's appearance and moves have been altered to some
extent in order to be as faithful as possible to the content of the
original. |
ANOVISIO TELEREXIA
collaboration with Ilkka Sariola, 5'30 minutes, 1990
THE GOOD FRIDAY
9'10 minutes, 1989
|
"The main theme in The Good Friday is the relationship between
christian faith and fascism, that is, between masochistic humanism and
sadism. Fascism is an inevitable product of Christianity. Here my
reasoning is very near to that of Wilhelm Reich's in his book Die
Massenpsychologie des Faschismus. The Good Friday
is a realization of the fact that masochism (=inverted sadism) is the
last straw both for the starving, exploited and oppressed and for those
who are drowning into the comfortable numbness of western middle- and
upper-class culture. Western civilization is a symbiosis of
humanism and sadism, the underdog masturbates with the idea of heaven
and with the illusion of being ¨good¨, ¨wronged¨ and
¨morally superior to his oppressor¨. Those in power have
always cherished Christianity for this very reason. There is also an
interesting contradiction between the orgasmic masochism of Jesus
Christ
and modern humanism, humanism that has based it's concept of happiness
on denial of pain. Western societies have accepted as a truism that
abolishing pain and striving after more and more comfortable society
will result in shared happiness. I am opposed to that. I can only laugh
while watching your culture committing suicide with the "eternal"
growth
of consumption, growth that gives the impression of progress even
though the proportions of class inequity must remain the same,
because: To feel rich you need the poor and to be good you need
the evil. The Good Friday is an edited documentary of a ritual during
which I meditated on what is said above, took it in and identified
myself with Jesus. I invite the pain and the pain invites me to
resurrect. Finally, I need to point out that what I say in my opinion
in no way "explains" my work. I believe that works of art are
independent and after finishing a piece its author becomes just a
member
of its audience. The very justification of art's existence lies in its
verbally unexplainable nature: art can not be translated into rational,
verbal and logical language, into the language of the consciousness.
This is why I never talk about my works. Instead, I expect my works to
express themselves. However, I am occasionally, like above, when asked,
willing to tell about the ideas I have in my consciousness, my thinking
and ideology in general. This I do because sometimes people who have
great troubles in getting a real contact with my children (=my works)
find it helpful to know something about their father or maybe about the
landscape where they grew in." (the orginal info leaflet from 1989) |
MONEY TO BURN
12'00 minutes, 1989
SEX AND DEATH
30'00 minutes, 1988
|
PAINTING & DRAWING PRINTMAKING PHOTOGRAPHY VIDEO INSTALLATION THEATER & PERFORMANCE TEXT CV links |