Exhausting and frustrating

Many of us consider tweeting and hanging out on facebook to be work, and for most Finns at least, reading a newspaper, on-line or on-paper, is second nature. (At least it was until Helsingin Sanomat began so unashamedly to do politics that many people have stopped following it).

But at times like these, a news blackout would be bliss. Keeping up is exhausting and frustrating!

The troublesome G-issue just will not go away. Until it does, anyone who cares about the future of Helsinki, particularly Katajanokka and the South Harbour, won’t sleep too soundly.

The last few days have been a circus of news, opinion pieces, letters to editors, fb-updates and spoofs that, despite their number and their often colourful language, possibly fail to do justice to what is going on.

Many a man with power really, really wants Helsinki to collaborate with the New York based Guggenheim bränd. Day by day Helsinkians become more wary, while proponents’ arguments become more pompous and over-optimistic. Alexander Stubb, the popular minister, would like to see a landmark in Helsinki to rival the Eiffel Tower… Emeritus professor Y. Sotamaa says “do not be afraid” (letter to HS editor today).

Given this I wonder how Helsinki has survived as the liveable city it has!

And I realise that were it not for active citizens, “les trente glorieuses” and the fine buildings that that period of capitalist history bequeathed to us, would long ago have been replaced by some form of neo-feudal horror. Were it not for critical thinkers, there would be urban unhappiness so startling that even the naive optimists and the cossetted rich would see it.

JHJ’s view is that unless one keeps one’s eyes closed and imagination switched off, one must know that cities are in crisis. (The brand new tome, Cities for People, Not for Profit edited by Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer looks like a good up-to-date take on this. Later…)

Selling the family jewels – e.g. handing over that plot in Katajanokka to a global franchise – is not be the answer to such crises. Besides Helsinki’s track record with making international deals is not good, as reported here, in English.

In search of alternatives, Helsinki’s Occupy camp is still there, tiny but full of sisu. When it comes to the Guggenheim, citizens are turning with anger and energy to more conventional tactics.

Using HS, a number of arts professionals have criticised the rush and warned that embracing the Guggenheim will serve neither Helsinki as a city nor Finland’s visual arts. If anyone should be a partner, why not Paris’ Louvre, asks Maritta Pitkänen 19.1.2012.

Nils Torvalds, (relation of Mr Linux) also offers sage warnings. The bafflement of the troika Rossi, Kivirinta, Johansson, arises out of impeccable (international) credentials in arts management. They note, among other things:

Museokokoelmat ovat osa kulttuurista muistia, ja on surullista huomata, miten yliolkaisesti Helsingin oman museon johto ylipäänsä suhtautuu kokoelmakysymykseen. [Museum collections are part of cultural memory, and it is sad to note how nonchalantly the leadership of Helsinki's own museum approaches the question of collections in general.] HS 19.1.2012

If our money is spent on a Guggenheim, will cosmopolitan Finnish artists like Jorma Puranen or any of the others from the Helsinki School not face more icy prospects?

And if a global blockbuster exhibition were to come here, would it invigorate or emaciate?

But oh, if this were the only problem.

Questions about Janne Gallen-Kallela Siren’s connections to the Guggenheim’s board have been dealt with. But his leadership of the City Art Museum has taken an odd turn. According to reports he is about to go on holiday.

Also…

Before any decisions have been made in any public bodies – the Guggenheim not qualifying – the Museum’s staff have received an announcement that “yt-neuvottelut”, perhaps best translated as restructuring negotiations, are on their way. The reason given for the surprise announcement? The imminent impact of the Guggenheim!

Exhausted, frustrated – and stunned.

Visual Literacy in Helsinki’s Guggenheim project

The Guggenheim-Helsinki feasibility report and the way that Helsingin Sanomat (which this blog prefers to call The Usual and some just call Pravda) and a few other cronies have been hyping it up in the last few days has also yielded a good amount of laughs.

But presumably the Head of the Helsinki Art Museum, Janne Gallen-Kallela-Siren (JGKS), did not mean to have us all bursting at the sides when he gave yesterday’s interview to Channel 4 TV.

The interviewer asked him how he imagined the future museum. He had not, he said, thought about that.

Instead he had thought about 500 years of Gutenberg’s galaxy [sic].

The spoofs are coming thick and fast. On facebook … [but also commentary on the mainstream debate: "impossible to be critical of the G. without being written off as a pessimist ... it's promoted with the same sickly over-happy hype as innovation and the Aalto University" "is this a sick joke?"]

Many thanks to Creative Block for this visually articulate and verbally supported reaction to JGKS’s baffling show. For this weekend reality was indeed transformed, as his post notes. Apart from Creative Block’s fabulous illustration of the story, he provides a transcript.

”sitä olen ajatellut, että meillä on nyt takanamme noin 500 vuotta ns. Gutenbergin galaksia, galaksia, jossa painettu sana, kirjoitettu sana on ollut hegemoninen vallan väline. Ja me nyt tällä hetkellä seisomme visuaalisen vuosisadan kynnyksellä. Ja tämä vanha, Gutenbergin galaksi horjuu meidän ikään kuin takanamme ja jalkojemme alla … [Nyt] tarvitaan huipputoimijoita, -laitoksia, -instituutioita, -museoita, -taiteilijoita, jotka ikään kuin voivat ottaa tämän keskiön tällaisessa uudenlaisessa maailmassa, jonka me tiedämme olevan jo ympärillä, mutta jota me emme aina välttämättä osaa ikään kuin artikuloida todellisuutena.  … täytyy muistaa, että taktiikalla voitetaan taistelu, strategialla voitetaan sota. Ja strategian taustalla täytyy olla jokin päämäärä. Nyt meillä on ollut taktiikka. Meillä on strategia. Mutta meillä on ihan konkreettinen päämäärä, että jos kaikki menee kohdalleen, Suomeen, Helsinkiin nousee vuosina 2017-2018 museo, joka nousee toivottavasti maailman globaalien museoiden joukkoon.”

Basically, it’s something like that after these 500 years of the hegemony of the printed word, we’re now at the threshold of a new world. This requires new top talent, institutions, museums, artists and so on who can take centre stage in this new situation. He goes on to talk about strategy and tactics and that maybe by 2018, if all goes well, Helsinki will have a museum that will hopefully join the ranks of the globe’s finest.

Reproductions of JGKS’s own visual skills, as demonstrated last week when the report findings were presented, are also attracting a fair amount of comment.

Inspired by this story, I googled for that earlier silly picture. And found it. (Scroll down on this page for those snowball-throwing representatives of new talent.)

But I also found yet another spoof image of that attractive piece of Helsinki close to the water.

Finland’s state broadcaster, YLE, reports that there is something fishy about the way the whole feasibility study was drawn up.

JHJ asks: Should there not be transparency about who sits on what board representing whose interests, and should transparency not reach beyond Helsinki’s deputy mayor Tuula Haatainen reassuring the public that “it’s OK, we knew about it”?

Ripping off YLE’s image, we can safely conclude that in the fight between the Guggenheim and Gutenberg, all tactics are allowed and thus far there appear to be no winners.

That G-report: 200 pages of buzzwords like “deep”

The Guggenheim Foundation’s feasibility study for Helsinki is out. Its 200 pages, unsurprisingly vacuous and expensively produced as they may be, should be of interest to anyone who loves Helsinki. (Yawn – there would be better things to do…)

The G. Foundation and its Helsinki friends want the franchise here. And they have the South Harbour very much in their sights (photo below). So what are the motives, impacts and willingness to take risks (on their own behalf? on ours?) of this international institution? The report (executive summary at least) reads so much like the standard bull***t bingo that’s filled planning and urban governance bumph for 30 years, it’s hard to know.

The report’s producers apparently “worked diligently … to understand how a G Museum could benefit Finland”. There is no “center of gravity” in Helsinki’s art scene, it continues. The G thinks it can help plug this gap by offering to try to attract more tourists and expand the art market.

Ah yes. This is the world that’s been made in the last 30 years: here judgements on urban and art issues are debated in business/financial terms; the needs of tourists trump everyone else’s; luxury cars sell better than ever even as crisis reigns!

In these circumstances, perhaps it’s not that surprising that so many are so willing to sell Helsinki’s family silver (the South Harbour plus the city’s limited art funding). The Usual mostly plays cheer-leader, but the uber-respectable  Suomen Kuvalehti asked about the risks two days ago, noting that the deadline imposed on the city for deciding (February 15th!!) is far too tight. In the same rag the veteran film maker and politician Jörn Donner noted almost a year ago that the scheme is part of an unwise megalomania among decision makers.

More recently then. What are folks saying? A lot. Many are stunned (by the proposed site, the timetable, the risks, the impact on museum staff and, perhaps, visual artists). Waiting for the news to be digested, our friend Arkkivahti confines herself to very few words indeed – arrrrggggggg being the most operative one.

In a clip on YLE, artist Silja Rantanen picks up some important themes from the report. It is problematic from a moral and political point of view, she notes. It means public Finnish money bolstering US-based business.

She also does not like the way Helsinki is represented to the report’s American audience: the text is imperialist, based on a stereotype of Helsinki from the Cold War era. A G “museum” on this basis, she suggested, would turn Finnish art into an ethnographic curiosity. It might provide a set of walls for pretty random travelling artworks when what Finns deserve (our interpretation here) is stewardship, including further development, of something much more precious and locally meaningful. Rantanen sees cultural imperialism also in the way that the G offers its know-how to the Finnish (underpaid, overqualified and variously motivated) museum staff.

Indeed, although the G. report includes the deep word “deep[ly]” about twenty times, it doesn’t offer anything “solid”. Instead it promises consultation, expertise, “new ideas” [sic] …

Without the massive injection of more substantive resources, the so-called Bilbao effect that those finger-pointers above are hoping for, is never going to happen (as I noted earlier here).

Elsewhere? Angry anti-elite postings against the plans, as you’d expect, online. Interestingly, some [not "many", Ed.] Finnish artists and gallery people (said elite?) seem quite happy with the G. concept. They talk about art as if it were for the art market.

Has neoliberalism’s love of riches sunk into those folks like a hot knife into butter? That old Fifi/Adbusters image is rather suggestive. (Helsinki slang lesson: fyrkka = money).

p.s. I muse on the possibility that living next door to the Soviet Union has left many otherwise intelligent Finns blind to salient features of left and right politics – including the possibility that the community/communism has a lot going for it, and that Finland’s proverbial equality is fast disappearing into a black hole of cosseting the already rich. Provocative thoughts from the USA here.