Ando Keskküla

Ando Keskküla’s artistic practice encompassed painting, animated film, and installations. He was also a curator, exhibition designer, teacher, and author of many articles on art, art life, and social issues, and he held leadership positions at the Estonian Artists’ Association and the Estonian Academy of Arts.

In 1968 Keskküla began his studies at the State Art Institute of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Estonian Academy of Arts) in Tallinn in the field of industrial art (design), graduating in 1973. From 1985 to 1993, he was an associate professor in the Painting Department at the State Art Institute.

In the 1960s “applied arts,” or industrial design, was a newly opened curriculum at the State Art Institute, whose head fostered a more open-minded attitude to creativity in young people. The 1960s and ’70s were years of extremely intense transformations in Estonia in the cultural sphere as a whole, with the State Art Institute becoming a center for collective activities. It was a favorable environment Keskküla and his companions were able to pursue a variety of ideas, which were mainly based on pop art. The first organized pop art event, the so-called pop night, took place in December 1968 at his home in Tallinn. The first and now iconic public pop art exhibition called SOUP ’69 was organized by a small group of friends in 1969 in the writers’ café Pegasus in Tallinn. [1] It marked an important turning point—a shift in values and goals in the artistic consciousness of young people, from postwar modernism and socialist realism toward pop art and conceptual art.

Although Keskküla graduated as a designer, he began his independent artistic career as a painter. His first solo exhibition took place in 1975 at the Tallinn Art Salon, and in 1984 he had a solo exhibition at the State Art Museum of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (now the Art Museum of Estonia). The novelty of Keskküla’s paintings—made with cool precision and an intellectual structure balanced with painterly sensuality—set a role model for younger artists. Keskküla’s works from this time ushered in a brief period of hyperrealism in Estonian painting that sought to move away from soft figurative “traditional realism,” and its interpretation of reality, acting as a conceptual project for other artists, who focused on conveying only information about objects rather than on painting as such.

Keskküla saw his own hyperrealism as a critique of realism and a departure from the European pictorial tradition, where painting is seen as a “window into nature.” The photographic quality of hyperrealism gave him the opportunity to capture the illusory nature of reality in paintings. He established a small school of followers and moved on to add three-dimensionality to his paintings. His works were now dominated by single objects in a void, with surreal undertones. In them, the surrealist strangeness of his previous works deepened and became more pronounced. Sometimes a certain aggressiveness enters the pictures, where objects have lost their function and have begun to generate tensions on their own.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Keskküla collaborated on animated films at Tallinnfilm. Rein Raamat, the head of the animated-cartoon studio there in the 1970s, had created a unique environment in the Soviet Union, inspired mainly by the language of pop art and surrealism. Two of the four films made in this spirit were directed by Keskküla, with art by Rein Tammik: Lugu jänesepojast [Story of a Young Rabbit] (1975) and Jänes [Rabbit] (1976). In Rabbit, he combined animation, film, and photography—a novel approach in Estonia at the time—to revisit the question of how reality can be depicted. By blending images and actions of real people with animated characters, he manipulated the viewer’s perception. Officially, these films were intended for children, but with their contemporary visual imagery and, in the case of Rabbit, with their multilevel composition and technical manipulations, they went far beyond the existing boundaries of the genre. Between 1979 and 1987, Keskküla also worked as an artist on several feature films at Tallinnfilm, for example 31. osakonna hukk [Murder on the 31st Floor], Kevad südames [Spring in Our Heart], and Vaatleja [The Bird Watcher] .

With the restoration of Estonia’s independence in 1991, major changes took place in cultural life. A multitude of opportunities opened up for creators and cultural institutions. For Keskküla, this meant working in several directions simultaneously. During the years of transition, 1989–92, he was the president of the Estonian Artists’ Union. Under his leadership, it seceded from the Soviet Estonian Artists’ Union (to which it had officially belonged throughout the occupation period) in 1990, a year before Estonia’s official declaration of independence. As rector of the Estonian Academy of Arts (1995–2005), Keskküla dedicated himself to building the academy into a modern academic and creative higher education institution. Open to all that was new, he brought new practices to Estonian art life. For example, his work as curator of the exhibition Aine-aineta (1993, Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Tallinn Art Hall, and other galleries in Tallinn) became a benchmark for curatorial practice in Estonia, where the position of the curator was still new and developing.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Keskküla temporarily gave up painting and turned to video installations, interactive art, and new digital technologies. In 1994 he furthered his training in this field at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Graphics, Animation, and Multimedia in Groningen, Netherlands. Once again he became an innovator and experimenter in a completely new and unknown field, creating the first interactive video installation in Estonia, which was exhibited at the Soros Center exhibition Biology. Technology. Utopia (1995).

The opening of a broader international debate on the impact of new technologies on society began in Estonia in 1995 with the launch of the Interstanding conference and exhibition series (four conferences from 1995 to 2001). The first one, Interstanding—Understanding Interactivity: International Interdisciplinary Conference on Computer Mediated Communication and Interactivity, focused on the various possibilities and facets of interactivity, including those related to the formulation of identity by small nations and minorities in the new “global information sphere.” The conferences were organized in cooperation with the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia; the Centre for E-Media at the Estonian Academy of Arts; and SCAN, Groningen, Netherlands. The event was curated by Ando Keskküla and Eric Kluitenberg from the Netherlands.

In the nineties Keskküla’s creative interests and activities were closely intertwined with his activities in the public sphere. During this period, he published many articles on a variety of topics, from the problems of higher education to the themes of the Venice Bienniale and the importance of Estonian participation in the Bienniale, which he considered a means of linking Estonian culture to the international art world. During this decade, he also exhibited his video installations, including three solo exhibitions, Opus Petra (1993, Luum gallery, Tallinn), Bonnard’s Room (1994, Rüütli Gallery, Tartu), and Manipulations (1997, Art Museum of Estonia, Rotermann Salt Storage, Tallinn). His solo exhibition Crazy Office at the Retretti Art Museum in Punkaharju, Finland, in 2004 was an interactive project in which the viewer’s movements activated a zone furnished as an ordinary office.

In 1992 Estonia participated in the international event Expo ’92 in Seville, Spain. The main purpose of the exhibition was to introduce Estonia as a country, and this role was fulfilled by an installation with TV screens created by Keskküla. He was again the curator of Estonia’s exhibition in 1998 at Expo ’98 in Lisbon, Portugal. By that time, Estonia had significantly greater opportunities to present itself—more space, better technology, and increased funding for the exposition—which enabled the pavilion to be transformed into a large-scale interactive video project that showcased the country’s rapidly advancing IT sector.

In 1996 Keskküla was selected as a representative of Estonia for the 23rd São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. He again presented an interactive video work (Untitled), depicting a man in a traditional home in Saaremaa, Keskküla’s birthplace, whose movements mirror those of the viewer. In 1999 he was one of the participants (together with Peeter Pere and Jüri Ojaver) in the Estonian pavilion at the 48thVenice Biennale at Palazzo Querini with the work Breath. The technologically sophisticated project depicted two elderly men who moved on the screen in response to sounds produced by the viewer.

Throughout his life, Keskküla had a constant thirst for inquiry and innovation. His way of thinking led him beyond the traditional boundaries of art, not only to explore and use different materials and technologies, but also to operate in the social, institutional, and political space.

Sirje Helme

Translated from Estonian by Peeter Talvistu

Photo portrait: Ando Keskküla, photo by Tiit Veermäe, kunst.ee magazine 03 (2005)

Notes

1. Although SOUP ’69 was originally the title of an exhibition, the name was later adopted to describe the group of artists associated with it. This designation was not intended by the participants at the time of the exhibition.