Peeter Laurits
At this very moment, at the peak of progress, intoxicated by economic growth, at unprecedented heights of hedonism, in a world of seemingly inexhaustible abundance, in the torrents of a tsunami of benefits and pleasures, they rebuff the most ecstatic phase of transition in the euphoria of being alive – death and decay, fear and grief. They cover their faces in embarrassment, close their eyes, close the Book of Changes, stiffen up, turn to stone. They pretend not to remember nor to understand what should follow.
Grief is usually organized and gets buried away with the corpses. It is surrounded by a concrete edge. Covered with lifeless sand. Followed by equal rake lines. Reminiscent of the Soviet-era ploughing of the trace-control strip at the border, the endless stripe of anguish and fear on the beach of infinite vastness. A Euclidean anxiety disorder.
This fear is usually followed by the mania to collect evidence of one’s existence. Museums are clogged with memories and dreams. As part of the collection, each item of trivia becomes an artifact. Gargantuan museum institutions engage in witchcraft – subjugating the weather and the seasons, blocking dust, jinxing the flow of change, drowning it in formalin, suffocating it with inert gas, restoring, conserving and performing black magic tricks as if the impermanent could be made permanent. Meanwhile, the Book of Changes is having a laugh at us. Growth turns into shrinkage. Flowering becomes withering. Accumulation turns into dissolution. Diastole transmutes into systole and joy into grief. One cannot only breathe in, everyone also has to breathe out from time to time.
I was madly in love with museums already as a child. Tallinn's Old Town was full of them. With the money my parents had given me for the ticket I bought candy because as a regular visitor I was guaranteed free entrance. The candy was to be shared with the guards, as they also had a sweet tooth and had their own candy bags with them. We mutually treated each other, but I somehow always ended up with more candy. This was the basic course of capitalism for me.
So, in this trance-like state from an excess sugar, I wandered under the medieval vaults and admired the mummies of treasures. I dreamed of going to school, to become smart and then to create my own museum. Though situated under the same vaults, my dream museum was different; it was a lot cooler, abundant and chaotic – goblin crystals, armours and stuffed mermaids jumbled together in a disorderly manner, as if left behind after a getaway. As much as I loved museums, I also loved the elephants in the porcelain shop.
When the American troops and local gangs looted the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in 2003, I was already 40 years old and much more conservative. Watching video footage of the dismantling and scattering of the treasure chambers of Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Babylonian, and Persian civilizations, I was filled with rage and disappointment. And also, a frightening acknowledgement – was this the museum of my childhood dreams?
Some might find this cynical, but I like ruins, different systems taken over by various disorganized forces. The most lavish are the abandoned cities. Angkor, Pompeii, Palenque, Ayutthaya, Sukhothai, Machu Picchu, Agdam, Pripjat. There is captivating beauty in the dance of the universe and the way the moss chews the stone, in the way the logic of architectural structures is pierced by vastly different logics. Simultaneous decay and germination of an infinite number of life forms in various proportions and tempos. The Chernobyl disaster being the most spectacular nature reserve.
In 1949, George Bataille introduced a new economic theory in the political-economic treatise The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (La Part maudite. Essai d'économie générale). He proposes that in every economy there is excess, an «accursed share» that must find an unproductive outlet in the form of art, erotica, gifts or grandiose spectacles. Otherwise, this accursed share turns into wars and self-destruction. The unused excess energy creates economic growth, but growth has its limits. Growth beyond natural boundaries causes collapse.
Bataille was inspired by the practices of potlatch of the peoples of the Northwest coast of America, the Haida, the Tlingit and the Kwakwaka'wakw. Potlatch is a celebration during which one's assets are ceremoniously burnt, as well as given away as grandiose gifts. Almost any event – a wedding, a baptism, a funeral or a national holiday – can be a good enough pretext for organizing a potlatch. It is a ceremony of strengthening tribal ties and celebrating togetherness, as well as a ritual for contacting the world beyond ours. The prosperity of a family or a village was not judged by how much someone had, but by how much they could give away, meaning, it was not the wealth that was valued, but the energy. In order to get rid of the accursed share, jewellery, tools, canoes, whole households were burnt or given away. Potlatch was also an opportunity to negotiate the use of shared resources – where someone goes to fish or cuts down trees.
Until 1951, potlatch was criminalized in Canada, but the tradition nevertheless remained viable. Ten years ago, during the Birgitta Festival, I had the task of hosting a group of Kwakwaka’waks. Their chief was a wise man in his 70s, who had already organized several potlatches, where he had given away all his assets. He hoped that before his death he would reach such spiritual maturity that during the last potlatch he could also give up his name – then his life would have been accomplished. A deep bow to him.
The Finnish artist Tuomo Vuoteenoma (in translation Bedridden) writes in the context of his exhibition «Purgatori» of artworks as a hazardous waste. Like in every other industry, overproduction creates storage problems also in the arts field. How long should a work of art be preserved? Should residual art be dumped into the sea, as it often is the case with industrial waste? Although creating art causes less toxic pollution than, for example, the entertainment industry, Vuoteenoma still thinks about how to get rid of unnecessary art.
John Cage's mesostic poem «Overpopulation and Art» begins by claiming that in the 1950s we arrived in a period where the number of people living was greater than the total number of dead throughout history. Living outnumber the dead. The present became equal to the past, the dead became the minority, and we now live in the future. How does this change the way we communicate? In his lecture, Cage talks about changing the relationship between people, that only a completely new idea, something that no one yet understands, a mystery and music with unrepetitive variations could help us, but there is another side to all of this.
IBM estimates that humanity produces 2.5 quintillion (2.5 x 109) bytes of information every day. We are transforming the atoms of our planet into information at an accelerating pace – into the fifth state of matter next to solid, liquid, gas and plasma. According to Melvin Vopson's calculations, maintaining the current growth rate, in about 350 years, more bits will be stored than there are atoms on our planet. More than half of the planet’s mass should have become information by then. This report was published last week by the American Institute of Physics.
The Postmodern Western civilization is in its essence much more conservative than we would like to admit. We are floating in a precarious orgy of safety, wearing fashionable protective masks, soon with a built-in VR viewer, but what will we do after the orgy? Even questioning whether overpopulation and economic growth can be halted, or whether there is an alternative to capitalism, feels like a form of aggression. We do not want any new ideas nor to know what no one yet understands, we do not want a mystery, we want music with repetitive variations and a feeling of safety, no matter how illusory it may be. Changes and uncharted experiences cause anxiety, they must be avoided like a virus, they are banished to the scene of avant-garde culture, from where it is safe to contemplate them, but they don’t get implemented in real life. Fear is tied down by a tourniquet. An artist who tends to wander too far from the habitual safety zone, to disappear from sight or interfere with «real life» is seen as a danger. But it is precisely the determined changes and unknown territories that we need to learn and practice on this current page of the Book of Changes. Interfering disengagement. Letting go. Sacrifice. Potlatch.