One, two, three, testing, testing and nothing, no one on the other side
Chalice, The Microphone’s Holy Journey, 2003
Texts that do not describe or explain, but create their own autonomy, their own last heroes, until it’s realized that the text is the last hero
pilv, luuk, vaher, keil, kiwa “4.55 5.30,45 6.2”,
Textual Lens – The Heroine Mother’s Nutritive Milk
When Kiwa, the former bass player of the oi-punk band Nyrok City (thrown out for wearing glitter pants) arrived in Tallinn from Tartu in the fall of 1996, with artistic ambitions, he reinvented himself as a true multimedia pop artist. His most clearly formulated roles included those of supermodel, DJ, trans- and anarcho-pop artist, graffiti guru, drag queen, art critic and media manipulator. In his works that were born as a byproduct of his lifestyle, we saw Lolitas and Alices, motifs of the 80s Estonian pop culture subconscious, paraphrases based on Pop Art classics, and almost sexless and undoubtedly naughty chicks who seemed to have stepped out right of Japanese manga. The period before 2001 also included the production of Ulay-Abramovic-style body art videos with Ene-Liis Semper, and the pseudo-exhibition yBa, which the undersigned helped to curate. Having secured his position as an artist and media star, Kiwa withdrew somewhat unexpectedly from the fifteen minutes of fame that he had wrested on the pages of women’s and youth magazines, and made a radical turn by delving into the deeper levels of the underground. Kiwa’s new platform of activity was located on the edges of pop culture, among a circle of dedicated audio freaks outside the sphere of media interest. As a conceptual gesture, he terminated work related to any kind of visual exhibition art. During approximately the same period, he immersed himself in difficult-to-tolerate experimental music (bands like Unestapja and Luarvik Luarvik) as well as cryptic textual experiments that tested the reader’s limits of endurance (the book The Way of the Robot is a Shift.) Kiwa also became the initiator of a series of events related to experimental texts, sound and performance, such as Metabor (2001‒2004), Cabaret Derrida and the Festival of Non-Existent Bands (2002‒2008). In 2004, Kiwa moved his headquarters from Tallinn back to Tartu, and he became one of the leading figures in the experimental literature and art scene there. A collection of texts compiled by Kiwa entitled A Textual Lens: the Heroine Mother’s Nutritive Milk (2006) and the exhibition entitled From Text to Machine (2007), which he curated, prepared the conceptual ground for his updated return to fine art. This took place in 2008, with the exhibition entitled High on Nothing at the ArtDepoo gallery in Tallinn. In the exhibition’s press release, one of the undersigned formulated Kiwa’s long-term absence as follows: “Honestly, we can’t be sure that by the time that this exhibition opens anything besides exhaustive descriptions of the works of art will exist. We can be even less sure that anything will exist at all.” However, according to the artist, six works – six logical-formal operations – that resulted in emptiness existed. From this emptiness – “nothingness, non-existence, void, naught and silence” – the material for this catalogue started to take shape. Kiwa’s field of activity was the “maliciously dry humor of textual operations, manipulation with communication errors, the partial deletion of operational diagrams and maps, the breakbeat of decoded imagery, and the blind observance of textology, which results in meta-meanings, noise and voids.” Enter the untitled.
An infinite number of fathers
One thing that is acutely obvious in the catalogue is the assortment of great names in art and cultural history that have been hijacked: Kant, the Strugatsky brothers (purloined letter 2), Malevich, Duchamp, Kaarel Kurismaa and Sven Grünberg (engineers), Jackson Pollock, and Fluxus. This continues Kiwa’s already characteristic gallery of father figures, of which there are clearly too many to be taken seriously in the context of mainstream psychoanalysis. The classical authority model is diffused: The fathers as the various operating modes of the kiwa-machine can be switched on and off at will, and substituted for one another or intertwined in various combinations. Basically, this is a distinctive mimicry that does not allow us conclusively to close the brackets around the subject of the artist. Replacing fathers is the normal state of affairs for a kiwanoid subject that is constantly slipping away, for whom the usual oedipal interpretation schemes do not apply. There can be an infinite number of subject positions as well as fathers, while the essence of the subject cannot be localized or positively designated. There are lots of fathers, but the boy himself may not even exist. Or, he is everywhere at once. The abundance of fathers as a model of applied schizophrenia, as understood by Deleuze and Guattari, provides the artist with pure intensive pleasure by constantly changing plateaus in order to be in a constant state of receiving, and not to be subordinated to subjectivization.
($)
In the work entitled pause we see one of the constant motifs of Kiwa’s work – the microphone. A hand holding seven microphones is directed at a symbol that can be interpreted as a transcription of a musical or textual pause. This image becomes intriguing due to the co-utilization of two different means of designation. On the one hand, the slashes seem to allude to textual interruptions in the written word, to omitted parts of the text, but the three slashes that replace the three dots seem to be an equivalent for a full stop in music. On another level, two different means of depiction exist together in the picture – on the one hand, the pictorially depicted hand and microphones, and on the other, the pause, or “halt” in Greek. This is an impossible situation, in which the subject that is a precondition for communication – someone to interpret the symbolic language into audible language – is missing.
The dichotomy between the two presentation modes also appears in the conflict between the picture and the title, like brackets in a composition. The impartiality of the headphones and microphone, which are connected in a joint and closed system, appear in the title on another level – as a textual operation, indicating that it is an attempt to portray silence, the lack of a subject ($). As the artist himself says, “If we remove the singer or speaker from the microphone (and the band from between the headphones), every viewer can recreate a suitable non-existent band or nil sound.” The loss of the subject, or, more precisely, the cancelation of the subject, crossing it out, is one of Kiwa’s main strategies. The lack of a subject and the abundance of fathers seem to fulfill an equivalent function. The only difference is the direction of the escape trajectory: One functions in the direction of nil, the other in the direction of overabundance. Why do Deleuze and Guattari contrast Oedipus vs. Schizophrenia, psychoanalysis vs. schizoanalysis, tree vs. rhizome, Subject vs. a Body without Organs, one vs. many, uniformity vs. dissimilarity, the hierarchical and pyramid-like vs. proliferation and shift? It is in order to be free of the grip of an ideological dominant, of the interpellation necessary for the functioning of power mechanisms. This is as political as Kiwa gets.
In the video burning alive, we see a microphone transmitting and amplifying the sound of self-immolation until the destruction of the sound-sensitive membrane. The microphone fulfills its function – to convert the sound signal into an electrical signal – until the dramatic conclusion. We see how the Thing itself – a living microphone – replaces the missing subject. Or we have been mistaken from the beginning and the microphone, or more precisely the device / apparatus / machine, is always subjectivated for Kiwa – it is burning alive. Enter the machine!
An engine’s path is blank; a construction’s path is amazing
On several occasions in Kiwa’s body of work, we encounter operations that substitute a machine’s consciousness (sometimes also a robot as an alter ego) for the artist’s consciousness. We see how the artist has decided that decisions shall be made by a machine and has ceded the execution process of the work of art to the latter. The artist’s points of departure for the black square fade and red star fade series, which are printed on a copy machine, are the archetypical images from the fields of art history and politics. The logic and total length, as well as extent of the mutations, is determined by the amount of printer ink in the cassette. In addition to the logic of attrition within oneself, Kiwa is interested in the micro-decisions that the machine itself starts making as the ink starts running out, such as compensating for black with red and for red with yellow and coughing out blanks. In the course of this experiment, the machine successfully simulates the fetishized artist’s touch on paper associated with graphic art – every picture is unique, an “original,” thereby confronting us with the machine’s imaginary subjectivity.
The works entitled five white paintings and unfinished are also based on the logic of computer errors. The first of these depicts an alienated Googling situation in which a search for white paintings results in one image materializing only as a text that indicates the inaccessibility of the text, while the works that are found materialize as white squares, having been lost in translation. The second work depicts the frozen condition of a digital picture, in which the entire picture is downloadable only as a grey monochromatic surface matching the picture’s dimensions, while the image itself is only visible on the upper edge.
In the work bearing the Fluxus-like title of smash piece, instead of ceding the execution process to a machine, the artist has entered into a violent dialogue with it. Intervening in the copy machine’s scanning process with a hammer and chisel, he creates a situation wherein the machine records its own destruction. Kiwa treats the scanner analogously to the way in which the Fluxus artists treated musical instruments – rather than being interested in the ability of the instruments to create coherent sounds, the artists were more interested in the sounds created by their materials. Similarly to the piano, the sounds of which were released during its demolition, the scanner also releases a visual cacophony, noise that Kiwa also tends to fetishize as a primary state. Thus, the Fluxus-like title of the work is not accidental – the demolition of the machine alludes to the earlier similar demolition of the piano. However, unlike the piano, the scanner is able to record its own destruction, to perpetuate the dialogue with the artist that has Luddite-like tendencies. Kiwa also communicates with a machine in the action-documenting photo series penal colony, the title of which is a reference to Kafka’s novel, In the Penal Colony. As if taking some body art action or SM ritual to the point of absurdity, he presses various connectors (Apple 30-pin doc connector, Firewire, 5-pin USB mini-B plug, etc.) into his body, creating scars. Risking over-interpretation, one could raise the following parallel: If in Kafka’s novel, the machine inscribes an order on the prisoner’s body, Kiwa punishes himself because he is not capable of being identical enough to the machine – the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Machines, matrixes and codes are important tools for Kiwa, especially because they free the artist from the obligation to make choices (the artist as robot, the robot as artist). Kiwa has also chosen the method for compiling this catalogue based on a similar principle. The arrangement of the works is emphatically systematic (alphabetical), but arbitrary in the temporal plane. In order to alienate the selection principle, Kiwa has also used a computer program that generates random numerical combinations. In the sound installation entitled infinite number of artworks, the computer program with a machine-like voice lists an infinite number of works, with random numbers as their only distinguishing characteristic. Starting with Duchamp, the act of naming something a work of art has, by itself, become a widespread method, but Kiwa’s robotic voices have relieved this of any designative function. The act of naming is a completely neutral occurrence, as if the work of art is born when the next number is assigned. The substitution of machine for artist is brought to completion here. The tendency of works of art to “produce sensations” is canceled, “reducing the status of the art to nil or nothingness.” Enter nothing!
One is the guardian of zero
Kiwa calls his field of activity “nothing-ology.” He describes nothing-ology as “The examination, creation and presentation of the precondition for nothingness through matter/language.” Based on this logic, “The precondition for the existence of zero is one; you can only speak of nothingness in the language of reality, since individual nothingness remains only an uncontrolled hypothesis. As soon as the cat is dismembered from the smile, it seems suspicious.” Kiwa is interested in “the development of being without and void at the expense of things, in anti-production, and the renunciative case.” The focus of nothing-ological creation seems to be the binary code – zero and one. This is dealt with most directly in the painting one is the guardian of zero. The central figure of the painting – a girl with a dog that is guarding her – is borrowed from Johann Köler’s famous painting, Faithful Guardian. In Kiwa’s reinterpretation – the number one is guarding zero – the internal relationship in Köler’s painting has been reduced to the aforementioned code. This is a conditional presentation of two parallel worlds that correspond to each other – a metaphorical model situation. If in the series entitled nature documentaries we see how ‒ as a result of using the program’s “error” ‒ the digital and pictorial information of the landscape image is interpreted into a cryptographic text or sound, in this case he identifies with the primary code of the significant image, which ostensibly provides us with a sense of security. In this way, we get close to the main formula of Kiwa’s imagery: “In my thoughts I shout, ‘I’m a princess, a princess’ and this sounds like ‘I’m a censor, a censor’ and also like ‘I’m a void, a void /…/’” The creation of voids in the field of meanings and the “maximum number of possible worlds in one square centimeter” are inverse operations, the goal of which is a war against a single and dominant reality. This is most clearly expressed in the painting entitled wanderer above the sea fog, which uses an operational system similar to the nature documentaries series. This is a paraphrase of one of the fundamental works of Romanticist art – Caspar David Friedrich’s painting from1818. The borrowed motif signifies the romantic hero that scans the sublime natural landscape with his dominating gaze, while the landscape reflects his inner conflict. However, what is left of the sea fog after being processed in the kiwa-machine? The matrix veil has fallen and the hero discovers himself in a digital garbage dump, where the relationship between the designator and the one being designated has atomized into a random jumble of letters, into a sublimely threatening anti-text. Enter noise!
Enter the Glitter Motor
For Kiwa, his simultaneous presence in all worlds seems to be just as liberating as a moment of silence, a void: the glitter’s luster of spectrum (one m2 of glitter and glitter text), black square (black square fade) and white noise (the motorgirls are performing for you). Everything and nothing at the same time. We can treat his simplest one-liners as applications of the random noise principle, i.e., the “egg-breaking paintings” that can be interpreted as paraphrasing Jackson Pollock. The glossolalia-themed paintings in linguistic code, in which we see white noise with the text [speaking in tongues], have the same effect: filling the entire frequency band and containing all codes, languages, and idioms so as to form a freeze frame of white noise for Kiwa, a manifestation of an everlastingly incomprehensible holy text, an infinite field of potentials before the creation or naming act. The Motorgirls, a “non-existent band” comprised of two black watering cans, simultaneously perform all the conceivable music that exists or might potentially exist, in such a way that, in principle, this band should be enough for us. According to the artist, “The only real question is whether we should go to see the film or not. Just consider the extreme options, because, in conclusion and retrospectively, these are the axis mundi.”
Visually, the double glitter effect operates throughout our spectrum and, as a universal, constantly shifting, self-concealing marker of lust, simultaneously cajoles and veils. The worlds behind the veil are covert voids, where autonomous private regulations apply. This is also the place where Kiwa finally succeeds in losing the girl in the void. Enter zero!
Zero-liners
Several works can be found in this catalogue, which could be called one-liners in the classical sense. This includes works that, as a rule, have identical titles and bear one very clearly articulated thought. Works like nothing, untitled, zero, code for zero, and others can be reduced to simple elementary operations. nothing is comprised solely of a blown-up label with the phrase “Nothing” (0 x 0 cm); zero depicts nothing besides the transcription of “zero” in Morse code; and code for zero presents the logic of this code, but only as an aid to make out the “zero” in the previous painting. untitled is an unsuccessful Polaroid – a black square. selected film stills, which is comprised of film stills with the word “nothing” in their subtitles, is a somewhat more complicated phenomenon. “Nothing,” the vacuum of meaning behind the stills, is deconstructed from the film and becomes a new mantra. One could assert that these works reveal the primary level of Kiwa’s nothingological operations, the material minimum for the articulation of zero. They are not one-liners, they are zero-liners. Enter the untitled!
Exit
During the time that we spent writing this text, we were troubled by enter the untitled, the work of art that is the namesake of this catalogue. The work is presented by the artist in a way that seems to make it the primary code of the entire catalogue. However, its associations with the other works are obscure: It’s too complicated to be a zero-liner; incomprehensible as an image of machine operation; too constructed to be interpreted in the context of random aesthetics; too specific to be a noise painting… The painting is comprised of five different-sized surfaces that form a connected image, which we see as a kind of diagram of a spatial situation. In one way, it seems to be exploding from the top, and in another way the picture seems to be spreading out to the bottom edge.
Initially, Kiwa refused to call this anything other than “pure mysticism, a nameless experience.” According to the artist’s subsequent confession, the picture is “an impression of braking before form, a freeze frame before procurement, embodiment, materialization,” or in other words, pure “potentiality, the fixing of an interim or foregoing state on the linguistic periphery.” This is “nothing” as potential, “a cross-section of the process phase that remains elusive to us.” It seems to us that that here the cat has been dismembered from the smile after all: It is individual nothingness, which is described outside the binary code (0 and 1). Here we have no void formulas in the nothingological context, but an attempt to represent pictorially the void experience (pre-code state). And now: Exit the text and enter the untitled.
Anders Härm & Hanno Soans