kiwanoid
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KIWANALYSIS
Kiwa (also KIWA, Ki’wa and Ki wa or Kiwanoid as a sound artist) belongs to the generation of artists who entered the art arena in the 1990s and whom the art critics have labelled as X, Y, E or TV generation. Aside from the active, as a rule deconstructible media image, the main characteristics of the generation in question could also be interdisciplinarity and intertextuality. A quote, pastiche, games of language and identity, (post)psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis were self-explanatory as artistic methods; an important place was also taken up by such keywords as conceptuality, simulacrum and absurd. Kiwa is undoubtedly the most interesting and yet the most cryptic representative of his generation, and it is hard to subject him to a generalising analysis. The traditional binary oppositions like reality and hyper-reality, morality and immorality do not apply in his works; instead he joins a certain kind of cynicism and (self)irony with infantility, which is what made him the favourite enfant terrible of the local media. All of Kiwa’s artistic practices – texts (articles, essays, poetry), visual art (sculpture, body painting, painting, video art, performance, installation) and his sound art or different roles as a curator, editor, model and society figure – make up one consistent text, a personal semiosphere, where one theme is expressed through different mediums. For this reason Kiwa has works which share the same title, but are carried to life in different mediums. By schizophrenic means Kiwa unites the Warholean pop-ideology with the irrationality of the Beuysian ritualistic action art, with the shaman-like pursuit for the origins of the world. Although the artist himself has summed up his artistic practice as “relating to the pop-culture of today”[, the phenomenon of Kiwa means more than just the subjective encyclopaedia of contemporary pop-culture. Year after year his art becomes less a “by-product of a lifestyle”, developing into an autistic-hermetic (sub)-discourse. In the creative biography of Kiwa, the member of the scandalous punk-rock band Nyrok City was touched by a ‘change of paradigm’ in the middle of the 1990s: moving from punk-ideology to the manifestation of the club culture and sound experimentalism, Kiwa associated himself with the ‘soft’ visual language of the art radicals of the conceptual level and pop-culture, which he nevertheless started to undermine from the inside. The series Kings of Pop (1996) deals with the imagology of pop-culture, but creates only intrigues and disappointment – a random club-goer with his personal problems could become a king of pop. In the Estonian context Kiwa is generally associated with the wave of trans-pop of the 90s, which has been defined through self-irony, mass-culture, glamour and other characteristics of a society going through a transition.The rather brutal crowd of artists, who organized road exhibitions and experimented with different alternative formats, Kiwa was indeed the most ‘pop’. Mixing the terms of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, Kiwa operated with the aesthetics of kitsch, camp and advertisement. He made flyers to his exhibitions and performed with a DJ set at the openings and this shifted the discourse of art exhibition into the rhetorics of (para)disco. Manipulating with the media fell into the same strategy. In a certain period of time Kiwa was a ‘social sculpture’ (on the model of Beuys’ term), constantly appearing in the writing press; leaving his mark everywhere was conceptualized by him as ‘media graffiti’. Posing as a model, Kiwa called upon the narcissism of the fashion world and even created a pseudo fashion collection, 12 Alter Egos (2001). His video 0,1980: My Dream Pop Star (2003) also dealt with the mythology of superstars and the idols of the masses, the example in the Estonian context being A Anne Veski. Kiwa touched parallelly both subcultures and political art, impersonating the antihero of his time, the ‘anarcho-popper’. In Graffiti Patrol (1998), an artistic action meant to sabotage the politics of joining the European Union, the artist, dressed as a street hooligan, harassed a representative of the European Commission, wishing to make a graffiti on the House of the Representation of the European Commission in Tallinn (remember, Estonia did not join the European Union until in May 2004). The same theme was reflected in a performance with Ene-Liis Semper, done on commission by the Bank of Estonia, Holy Union (1999), where through the body narrative of stunt fliers the symbolic union of the Estonian crown and the common currency Euro was performed – the artists, hanging upside down, were dipped into paint containers and then into shredded money. Kiwa has used graffiti in another key as well. His video and performance Work in Progress (1998) proceed in a Zen-like way after the same schema – dressed in a kimono, Kiwa is writing pseudo-hieroglyphs with a spray paint and in the end disappears into his picture. Yet the artist’s goal was not to admire the traditional Japanese culture, but to play through the superficial clichés of the Western society. In another way, through the psychedelically arbitrary associations the theme of Japan is reflected in Kiwa’s works of girl-art, which adopt the visual language of the local pop-culture, but also of the ‘international’ child pornography. Teenage Japanese girls in school uniforms, skinny legs, miniskirts, ballet shoes and dolls become as objects of fetishism on these pictures. Kiwa paints poetic images as well as frivolous characters and provokingly erotic, almost pornographic pictures; the expressive Bad Painting holds an equal place next to the ‘flat’ pop-like iconicity. One of the sign-like symbols of the era is the nymphette[vii] – a little princess in a tender age, who for Kiwa is the embodiment of the iconic (belletristic) characters of Alice and Lolita[viii]. Through an ambiguous play scene, Kiwa’s video Da Girl is Rockin (1998) demonstrates the subconscious sexuality hidden in a little girl – the interpretation of the rockin’ girl depends on the corruptedness of the viewer. In the painting Self-Portrait as a Japanese Chick (1998) and the video Pink (1999) the artist embodies a child-woman on a swing, provokingly taking frivolous poses. The playing through of gender roles leads us to Kiwa’s cultivated androgyny. Claiming that “the age of innocence is over”, he blemishes the taboos of the welfare society and shifts the current moral criteria with the tawdry codes of sex industry. Yet at times the sad wonderland in his works simply reveals an “escapist yearning for the (imaginary) idyllic world of girls”[ The several years old multimedia project Metabor (since 2000) – Kiwa’s goal being to capture a certain ‘primal sound’ – also has an escapist and utopist flare to it. Metabor serves as the laboratory of experimental electron music, in the “boreal sound landscapes of which, recorded at situationistic meta-rituals”[xi], art crosses the border – creating a total environment through the union of sound and space, which are added to by video, text, kinetic objects and performative elements. The result is the synthesis of all mediums, Gesamtkunstwerk, a total cosmopoetic experience. In that, the word ‘metabor’ is formed through the incantation ‘mutabor’ (a form of ‘change’ in Latin), found in the fairy tale Kalif Stork by Wilhelm Hauff and also in Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf, on the door of the magic theatre. This is aimed at creating a psychedelic, paganistic, (techno)shamanist state. Although this kind of ‘secular trance’ is primarily about an aesthetic pleasure, it could lead to a shift in one’s perception – and in this sense ‘metabor’ is the magic word for preparing for meta-metamorphoses. ‘Metabor’ also refers to ‘boreality’, to Nordicity. One of Kiwa’s keywords, ‘boreality’ most directly coincides with the mythological Norse, yet it also involves a linguistic relation with the nonexistent nation of the Hyperboreans from Greek mythology. The idea of capturing primal sound finds parallels with Kiwa’s verbal texts, or rather in the method of writing them – writing down thoughts, sentences, associations which have come to him in his dreams or just randomly; and thus psychedelic automatic writing is born. Kiwa also uses excerpts from the texts of other authors, which he ‘recognises’ as belonging into his books. The result is a peculiar palimpsest – for example in his book Metabor we find fragments from the texts of the designer Kaarel Kurismaa among Kiwa’s writings – which further dissolves the concept of authorship and creates new shifts. Kiwa’s linguistic games for creating neologisms are also based on the same principle of layering: the goal of creating a seemingly accidental mistake is to create a new word (metabor), to shift a familiar meaning[xii]. The hypothetical language is based on glossolalia – the dictionary defines this as ‘yelling of meaningless word in a (religious) frenzy’, but in Kiwa’s case this could rather recall the ‘predictions’ of the oracles of Ancient Greece, uttered in a trance, in which skilled interpreters saw the message of God, thus creating meaning out of fragmental unarticulated speech acts. The analogue of such a process in the art of sound is glitch – a creative method based on the aesthetics of errors. The phenomenon of mythologizing and individual mythology is reflected through several layers in Kiwa’s works. The simplest example is Kiwa’s autobiographical myth, the construction of his media image. Next to the mystifying act the production of fictions takes place. In Kiwa’s case the examples could be: his curatorial work with the exhibition Young British Art (2000) with fabricated art celebrities, running of the nonexistent record company yO-yO Records and organizing the Festival of Nonexistent Bands with fictitious bands (. Kiwa is shifting meanings, giving several names to the same work, signing works with a wrong date and constantly inventing himself new alter egos. The Estonian cult film Hotel of the Dead Alpinist (1979), directed after the sci-fi novel by Boriss and Arkady Strugatsky, inspired the sound and text project (2004), which came to be associated with the name Olaf Andvarafors. In the image of Olaf Andvarafors, Kiwa combines several characters from the film – his Andvarafors is the hybrid of the robot (Olaf) and the alien (Luarvik Luarvik)[xiii]. As an artist Kiwa enjoys illusoriness and imaginariness; for him paradise is “the greatest existence of possible worlds per cube centimetre”[xiv]. Kiwa’s personal world with its private language as well as personal iconography forms an even more complex system. Kiwa’s auto-mythology, the projecting of self into his works and his self-portraits in hundreds of hypostases are powerfully articulated. Indeed, one of his doppelgangers postulates: “I am Olaf: all is Olaf.”[xv] It is significant how he semantically expands his main pseudonym to denote his artistic practice: ‘Kiwa’ brings to mind the word ‘stone’ in archaic Estonian language[xvi], and lately he has been interested in the idea of the sound of stone; Kiwa’s dislocated reality has also given birth to his electro-punk alter ego Kiwanoid.[xvii] In the case of Kiwanoid, the UFO mythology of the 20th century is also reflected: once again – science fiction. In addition, Kiwa is applying the symbols of the mythologized world of technology in his trivial consciousness: the machine of metabor is capturing primal sound; the robot is generating texts, which shift reality, etc. From the bulk of cultural-mythological reminiscences, the sailor’s shirt is also worth mentioning – Kiwa has worn it himself and has also painted it on his characters. The shirt is a reference to the androgynous character from Thomas Mann’s short story Death in Venice (1912) as well as to the sentimental sea romantics of the 1980 Summer Olympics Regatta in Tallinn, which became to be the republic’s peak event and could also be taken as the deconstruction of the archetypal symbol of the good child. Several motifs carry the potential of metaphor in Kiwa’s works. The swing and a virgin, a Lolita-nymphette flaunting with her innocence are associated with fertility and the symbolics of the reproduction of the human kind. Yet the sexual undertone remains but a single part of the semantic field of these motifs, because a big role has been devoted to the prophetic power of the ‘virginal alternate perception’[xviii]. The art of Kiwa is a labyrinth, or rather a labyrinth in a labyrinth. The labyrinth is like a (personal) universe, the model of which lies in Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Library of Babel (1941). References to this can be found both in Kiwa’s texts as well as in his painting Marianne Ravi (2003). In the context of religious semantics, moving towards the central point of the labyrinth traditionally symbolised returning to the Spirit[xix]. Kiwa’s works are saturated with references to the lost Paradise and the Arcadia of little girls, with efforts to restore lost innocence and wholeness, which come forth in the primal sound, located in the centre of the magical circle, and in the absolute beginning of the state of ‘freak zero’. The motif of the butterfly as the symbol of soul and reincarnation is also referential to a symbolic return[xx]. The image of a butterfly actually fits the best to signify Kiwa’s artwork – what appears to be two-dimensional, beautiful and frivolous, could turn out to be a substantial signifier.
CV
SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2008 2007 2004 2003 2002 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995
SELECTED FESTIVALS AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS IN ESTONIA 2008 2007 2006 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 Speed / Dionysia, road exhibition (Tartu); Annual exhibition of the Estonian Artists’ Association (Rottermann’s Salt Storage, Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn); Time Space Movement I, performance art festival (Paide)
SELECTED FESTIVALS AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS OUTSIDE ESTONIA 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997
SELECTED CURATORIAL PROJECTS 2008 2007 2005 2004 2002-2008 2001-04(?) 2001 1999
BOOKS Lens of Text: The Feeding Milk of Mother Heroine (compilation of estonian experimental literature, scouted and compilated by Kiwa) Tartu: ID Salong, 2006 Metabor: skid mark of the force before the shape. Tartu: Bookmill, 2005 Way of the Robot is Shift/The Secret Void. Tallinn: Estonian Art Museum, 2004 Toys Escaping from Childrens Hospital. Tallinn: Society for Estonian Language, 2002
WORKS IN COLLECTIONS Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn; Tartu Art Museum, Tartu; private collections (Estonia, Europe and America)
SELECTED GENERAL TREATMENTS Härm, Anders. Reflections of Media Space in Estonian Video Art. – Nosy Nineties. Tallinn: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, 2001, pp. 160–174. Keskküla, Ando. Aperto Estonia. – Flash Art International 1999, October (no. 208) Komissarov, Eha. A Punishment or a Gift. – Estonian Art 2002, No. 2 Laanemets, Mari. Allegoorilised taktikad kaasaegses kunstis. – Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi 2004, nr. 1, pp. 47–72. Laanemets, Mari. Kloun on kehv preester. – Vikerkaar, 1999, nr 8–9 Marto, Catarina; Brejon, Benjamin. Feminiinne, mitte feministlik = Feminine, not feminist / trans. Rael Artel, Mari Laanemets. – kunst.ee, 2001, nr. 4 Taidre, Elnara. Kiwanalysis. - Estonian Artists 3. Tallinn: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, 2008 Tallant, Sally. Kiwa. – Central Station. Milch Gallery London, 2000, lk. 18–19.
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