What is expected of a Nordic artist? Lunacy and an obsession with the dark
forces of nature? That undoubtedly made sense a century ago when August
Strindberg endured his "Inferno Crisis" and painted his portentous
canvases; when Ernst Josepheson had his angelic visions; and when Carl
Fredrik Hill, incarcerated like poor Hölderlin, produced his endless
scribbles on his father's mathematical manuscripts. Naturally things have
changed since then, but the old ideas about Nordic art seem to live on,
especially in other parts of the world. One asks oneself: When is the next
visionary lunatic going to show up?

However, if we search Nordic culture of today with more sobriety, other
features appear as more typical. Telecommunication giants such as Ericsson
and Nokia have turned this part of the world into an almost ridiculously
technologised  region, brimming with digital information. In fact, it seems
that what dominates today's Nordic culture is not the authentic depth and a
disposition to brood, but its very opposite: levelling. A strangely
successful kind of music is produced here, performed in an English without
clear geographical or cultural origin: ABBA, Ace of Base, Acqua. And some
of the most successful companies operate according to the same principle -
imitate well-known objects of design, produce cheap versions, and make them
accessible to the masses. This simulation process has not been as
successful anywhere else. Thus, Nordic culture has developed the
"inauthentic" to perfection: the copy.

However, some of the time-honoured themes of Nordic art - madness,
melancholy, light - still seem present today, even if tranformed and
heavely mediated through media and technology. This, for instance, is how
Eija-Liisa Ahtila describes the main character of her latetest work, Anne,
Aki and God (1998), a young man who - characteristically - worked for
Nokia before he entered even more virtual worlds: „Aki V. resigned from his
work as a computer application assistent with Nokia Virtuals, became ill
with schizophrenia and isolated himself in his one room flat. His mind
started to produce a reality of its own in sound and visions. Little by
little this fiction turned into flesh and blood, the line between reality
and imagination became blurred."

Most of Ahtila's projects exist both as films and as installations.
In fact, it's not so clear which genre these works belong to; perhaps one
could even claim that they invent their own. They borrow from established
forms such as documentary or music video, but they do it in a way that
dodges traditional classification.

Her three 90-second films Me/We; Okay; Gray  (1993) belong to my
favorite video works of this decade. In these compact and enigmatic works,
the natural link between human subject and voice has been loosened - or
entirely eliminated. Here, many voices speak through the same mouth, or the
same voice through many mouths. In the humorous Me/We, all the members of a
family move their lips, but strangely enough it's the self-absorbed father
who analyses his deteriorating family. In Okay a woman walks back and forth
in her room, like a nervous animal in a cage, spitting out information
about a violent sexual relationship: „If I could, I would transform myself
into a dog and I would bark and bite everything that moves. Woof, woof!"
The story is told in the first person, but many voices - male as well as
female - force themselves upon us. Gray, finally, is the real masterpiece.
Three women travel in an industrial lift and deliver a deeply worrying
report about an imminent (or has it already happened?) catastrophe. They
speak with incredible speed about chemicals and radiation, creating a weird
poetry. These works give us a sense of what Gilles Deleuze may have had in
mind when he discussed the potential of film not just to represent a
subject's position, but to create entirely new forms of life.

A teenage girl with short blonde hair is throwing a ball against a wall. A
man is sobbing heavily in a bedroom nearby; suddenly he screams out in
agony. A girl's voice explains: „Today my dad's crying. Late last night a
car drove over his dad who died instantly." These ominous opening words set
the tone in Today (1996/7), a three-part work that presents the same tragic
event as seen through the eyes of three different characters: a young girl,
a grown-up man and an elderly women. Their fragmented, strangely poetic
reports touch upon the accident, but simultaneously weave a dense web of
questions concerning family relationships, sexuality and death. The setting
is sombre, but the multi-layered flow of words, sounds, and images make
this work an unusually appealing cinematic experience.

 
In her films and installations, Ahtila plays elegantly with
well-established genres, documentary as well as commercial. There is
nothing ironic or smart about these projects; rather, she appropriates
established formal means in order to imbue them with new significance. At a
time when even TV commercials, such as Diesel's recent meta-porn ad, are
using clever meta-narratives, art has to move on from irony, and in
this respect Ahtila's formally complex projects come as a relief. Here
quotations from existing genres are made in order to create entirely new
forms of experience.

The three parts of Today refer to each other in subtle ways. The
girl with the ball returns in the man's ruminations on parenthood: „I have
a daughter. She throws a ball and asks me to watch. And those throws look
like the anger I have swallowed." Although the film is only ten minutes
long, the many cross-references and the elusive narrative structure are hard to
fathom after only one viewing, and questions remain after several. Towards
the end, for instance, the girl seems to leave everything open: „Maybe it's
not my dad's who's crying, but someone else's dad. Sanna's dad, Mia's dad,
Marko's dad, Pasi's dad - or Vera's dad. I'm in an armchair. I have a
boyfriend. I have something on my lap. I'm 66 years old." Whether this is a
fantasy or an unexpected look into the distant future we will never know.

For those of us who do not speak Finnish, the language sounds
radically foreign. It's not as if one even catches a word here and there;
it's all incomprehensible and beautiful. For non-Finnish audiences this
adds to the experience of these films: one reads the English subtitles
while listening to the impenetrable voices, at once strangely rough and
lyrical. It is hard to generalise about national characteristics, but an
alliance of severe directness - even brutality - and tender poetics is
something I tend to consider typical of a number of Finnish artists, from
photographer Esko Männikkö and filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki to Eija-Liisa
Ahtila.

This combination is clearly part of the magic of If 6 was 9 (1995),
described by the artist as a 'a split screen video installation about
teenage girls and sex'. The work consists of three screens that present the
sexual fantasies, everyday actions, and dreams of a number of adolescent
girls in Helsinki. It has a documentary feel, but is really a piece of
complex fiction. Anyone dispirited by Laura Mulvey's account of visual
pleasure and the objectifying phallic gaze in traditional cinema should
consider this anarchic and melodious account of the metamorphosis of
children into sexual creatures. These girls have the 'softest organs for
taking and grasping'. They are certainly not reducible to objects of a male
gaze. On the contrary, they intend to ingest the world around them in big
bites. As Ahtila puts it, the young females want to 'have the world and
touch it with their feet, cheeks, tits and arse'. The tender lyricism of
day dreams and soft piano music clashes with the straightforwardness of their
accounts. However, the directness of their stories does not exclude a sense
of wonder and mystery: „It was equally amazing to see in a porn magazine
that men have no hole behind the testicles. I thought that it had not
always been like that."