Persistent Guggenheim

After seven months of silence, JHJ could not stay away after the news that the Helsinki City Board narrowly voted to give its support to the Guggenheim Helsinki project (budget) in its meeting last night.

The feeling of devastation is widespread. Campaigns to stop the madness before the council votes to ratify this on Weds 30.11., both online and in the squares, are being organised.

So we feel it may be worth giving English-speaking readers some idea of the kind of rhetoric with which the Guggenheim is being squeezed through. (Along with other examples of 21st-century, post-truth-style, greenwashed and tourism-focussed urban planning in our once fine city, but let’s not upset ourselves too much in one sitting!)

Here is Board member Laura Kolbe (centre party), now somewhat vilified as the undecided vote that sealed our fate (though the Council still has a say), quoted in the online publication Uusi Suomi:

This set up really doesn’t arouse the passions in me, except that I want to give unconditional support to efforts to freshen up the sleepy cultural sector of the capital.… A future historian of ideas could get a doctoral dissertation out of all this…: anti-Americanism, horror of capitalism, class envy, the national romantic nostalgia of the baby boomers, conservatism in the arts and in culture, and much more. [translation JHJ]

Well, there you have it, and Kolbe is a respected historian and writer.

Nobody, consensus politics notwithstanding, has the single, correct diagnosis of our problems and the conflicts they create. The problem is that conflicts are currently being created as if on a conveyor belt of cheap urban construction fashions imported from abroad. They add to an already fraught political field. And the trouble is not just populism. Sometimes it feels as if the whole party-political system (representative? democracy?) is defunct as well as out of touch.

Broad outlines of right versus left wing ideological preferences remain, but recent urban planning decisions have caused several internal party splits, not to mention shocked reactions from experts of cultural and natural environments whose job it has traditionally been to “represent” mute constituencies. The decision to “densify” the city by “developing” (see below and our previous post…) the practically paradise island Vartiosaari, was the latest of many rude shocks for activists (many of them reluctant activists) who have long campaigned (as they continue to do) for a less violent form of urbanization in Helsinki.

There has been a loss of authority and above all trust in the city administration. A shame, since administration helped, for decades, even centuries, to produce this wonderful city that so many of us are now defending. Helsinki residents now need to go and stand out in the cold at regular intervals outside City Hall. Here we protest with our bodies when reasoned argument runs out of steam.

First residents became angry at losing green space – needed for housing, apparently. Where it’s close to waterfront, as much of the areas to be developed are, it’s much more obviously needed for “good tax payers” or possibly for construction companies’ profits. A similar odour attaches to the Guggenheim. Even Helsinkians, rarely quick to jump onto class-based political bandwagons, are worried about the quite specific commercially driven yet elite-appeal surrounding the G project.

The tragedy may not just be the hideous building. Guggenheim’s persistent wooing of Finnish elites is having an impact on Helsinki’s cultural and political life. Admittedly now it’s generating more than polite silence or ineffectual grumbling. The following excerpts come from a local newspaper, Helsingin Uutiset. Here [again in JHJ’s translation] Leena Marja Rossi, who ran the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York until her recent return to Helsinki, offers her perspective. She is responding directly to Kolbe’s diagnosis:

This is definitely not a sleepy town, anything but… I’m irritated by the way that people in so many quarters have fallen for the arguments offered by the Guggenheim’s promoters. The Guggenheim certainly is no Messiah…

The article goes on to discuss what many others have also noted, that Helsinki has several art institutions already, which are however, having to operate under rather straightened not to say austerity driven circumstances, yet many are still punching above their weight. The financial calculations presented to justify any support for the Guggenheim from tax payers, do not persuade Rossi (either).

The article ends on a note that JHJ can wholeheartedly endorse:

Finnish culture is both international and local. And it’s that local character that many tourists coming here is looking for.

And by the way, she adds that having observed the Guggenheim’s operations over the years in New York City, she wouldn’t say they’ve done anything to write home about [rough gloss by JHJ].

P.S. and then there are these wise words from somebody who really looked into the stuff and managed to write it up sensibly, not as a rant, but as a robust and well researched and many sided argument in favour of rejecting the Guggenheim foundations overtures. The blog of Pedro Aibéo. Thank you!

The Guggenheim wants in Helsinki – oh no!

The mood at the editorial office is distraught. Helsinki’s South Harbour, quite a fantastic piece of existing city, is at risk from the unholy alliance of creative city doctrine and international architecture.

See here for some good views on it from wonderful The Next Helsinki team.

Earlier today the winner of the prize for the notional Helsinki Guggenheim Art Museum was unveiled. There has been quite a lot of enthusiasm, even from unexpected quarters.

It’s unlikely that the jury ever concentrated on its task in the manner we Helsinkians deserve, given that there were 1 715 entries (some featured above, more on the G website).

And JHJ is not impressed by the architectural merits of the winning entry, Moreau Kusunoki’s dark tower called Art in the City (but Beacon/Majakka as well).

It looks glum and too tall and totally unsuitable for the waterfront.

Nobody here in the editorial offices here knows anyone who wants this thing – in pretty much any shape or form. (But especially not this Moominvalley wannabe glumness!)

There’s also no money for it. There’s no planning consent. The city already turned the idea down once. Officially. There’s little desire for it among ordinary people and not much among artists.

Those of us who desire the Guggenheim Foundation to eff off, frequently get told that were we more cosmopolitan we would want it.

At one point we all (at least here at JHJ) thought the horrible thing had been sent on its way. But no.

A very strong desire for it is coming from somewhere.

The politics is horrible but then the idea of the Guggenheim interfering [sic] in our art world as well as the cityscape, was always going to be controversial.

Proponents, including the country’s biggest daily newspaper, have spewed endless supportive propaganda for a Guggenheim. A little less outrageously, the G Foundation briefed Miltton Communications Group to do its propaganda locally (so-called public relations and marketing being the way business manipulates public opinion).

Given that the post-industrial economy we live in produces mostly data-fog and commercial entertainment, it’s not surprising that information about the museum is abundant but rather untrustworthy.

For Finnish-speakers, however, I do recommend listening to this YLE radio interview with architect and critic Tarja Nurmi. She covers many, many of the shortcomings of the project in a short space of time. Starts at around 9 mins into the programme.

It’s all so upsetting we can’t possibly pursue this any more.

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.

Gugglegum mistaken for ambition

Many who seek respectability in our town are doing their utmost to argue that their views on bringing the Guggenheim or “Guggis” to Helsinki are the result of careful reflection rather than jerkings of knee.

“We aren’t for/against on principle”, people seems to be shouting. “We are bringing a fresh and ambitious perspective to a tired and humble city…” Er, this style of rhetoric usually from supporters of the scheme.

Equating ambition with brashness is not new in political rhetoric, but it still irks. Particularly when it is applied to our fair Helsinki. A hair-raising example was a column published by The Usual  on 25.10.2011. In gooey globules of rhetoric it sang to The Usual’s hymn sheet of utterly, bizarrely sycophantic praises. Of the Guggenheim.

No wonder those of us who some months ago still had time for possibly sensible arguments in favour are increasingly against. Writing on his (Finnish-language) blog, the prolific art critic Otso Kantokorpi has collected an impressive array of online sources (in English). They do not add up to an endorsement of Mr. Gallen-Kallela-Siren’s dreams (soon to be articulated at a second-hand bookshop near you.)

The standard arguments apply. That’s to say, economic ones.

Alas, Helsinki’s city councillors are not reading this avalanche of information, which Kantokorpi keeps updating at breathless speed. (He informs us, for instance, of the architects already in the loop. This bunch make Prince Charles’ and Leon Krier’s New Urbanism look almost gritty!)

If our councillors were keeping up with this story, they would appreciate that the G operates more like a business than a charitable foundation. And they’d realise that Guggenheim Bilbao was but the very visible tip of an  iceberg worth of investments  in the entire region. Alas, rather than the hundreds of millions that were used to create the “Bilbao effect” today we only see the “effect” itself.

Careful critics such as D. Ponzini may talk of archistarships posing as urban policy, of said billions [sic] poured into shore up the McGuggenheim. But not too many are listening in Helsinki.

Helsinki’s political types not even stop to consider why we have never heard of any Guggenheim but the New York and Bilbao’s. Why does nobody know about Guggenheim Berlin or, goodness me, Abu Dhabi? Why they would want Helsinki to join this list of franchised non-entities is unclear?!

And more to the point, how dare The Usual write such drivel about this cheapened brand?!

Do they not realise, as Green politico Tuomas Rantanen said on Yle TV’s Strada, that the Guggenheim brand is not worth the millions being asked for? Shame the councillors aren’t doing their homework.

The really depressing thing isn’t the ample evidence for why we should question this “solution” to the Helsinki Art Museum’s undeniable problems. The really depressing thing is that we’ve seen this before. It seems that small cities like Helsinki are prone – in a serial fashion – to believing the suave, smooth-talking salesmen who tell them that the future is theirs if only they sign on the dotted line for this or that global brand to beautify their town.

Remember Kaarin Taipale’s brilliant analysis, Cities for Sale, of how Helsinki GAVE away money to the multinational JC Decaux, thinking it was dressing itself up in a hipper garb?

Oh, and while I’m on a rant: apparently (and I can’t remember where in the mesh of blogs on this madness I stumbled on it) the current G’s leadership have said they’re interested in some bit of Helsinki that has land and water.

Here’s one bit in Munkkisaari/Hernesaari. Not sure whether the heliport expansion in the pipeline there would enhance or detract from Helsinki’s efforts to suck in international (Russian?!) art lovers with the help of some Gugglegum.

(Oh, and another over-priced, has-been brand, with life-sucking properties for city streets will land near you soon too. Starducks.)