Seppo Knuutila
Self-made life, humor and pleasure
Modern Finnish folk art appears more relaxed, funnier, in the positive sense crazier than folk art in the rest of the world – in our opinion. If it is a question of an optical illusion, do we need to fix it? The strangest inventions, thoughts, ideas and performances stick in our minds. When humor is their semaphore, they lead directly to the sources of pleasure, momentarily revealing other possible realities. Because the enjoyment of art is deep, the enjoyment of humor superficial, their combination always connotes something controversial in this world.
At the change of century, modern folk art gained the sobriquet ITE, an acronym formed from the Finnish phrase itse tehty elämä (“self-made life”). The phenomenon has points of convergence with the creativity of primarily self-taught art-makers generally operating outside the sphere of established art institutions and systems, as well as its surprising, strange and original manifestations (outsider art) around the world. But at the same time Finnish ITE is in its own unique way gritty, “animalistic” (bears and elks are popular themes), ironic, heartfelt, and when viewed from afar, exotic.
The National Library of Finland’s web crawlers also harvest art belonging to the “self-made life” genre. Minister of Culture Stefan Wallin awarded the Finland Prize to Veijo Rönkkönen, creator of the concrete sculpture garden at Parikkala.
Photo: Minna Haveri
In Finland as well, the ITE process has demonstrated that handicrafts skills have not disappeared, nor will they disappear as long as there are people – adroit, with a thirst for beauty and a desire to express themselves – possessed by skill, ability and the need to make things. The works created by the hand remain and are reshaped like other cultural practices and values. Today’s works of folk art also possess such magical power that a visual world alluding to the past also opens through them.
Inventive realism
The inventive realism characteristic of modern folk art demonstrates an interest in the rendering visible of all possible and sometimes even impossible matters. From the public’s viewpoint, it is obvious that a practical interest belongs to the examination of modern folk art. The impressiveness of modern folk art is not often based on the presentation itself but explicitly on the attraction of the object it represents. But what is also essential is that the object’s attractive power is noticed, visualized and justified differently in the works, their reception and criticism.
New creative activity, with its characteristic open-mindedness and insightful linkages, is often associated with the humor, comic twists and laughter that accompany failure, sometimes success, as well as the colorful spectrum of interstitial variants: (thinks he has succeeded, doesn’t know if he has succeeded, “invents the wheel” or perpetual motion machine, achieves something other than was intended). Young children laugh spontaneously when they succeed. With age they learn to laugh at others’ mishaps and years ahead – if ever – at their own gaffes.
|
The genuine combination of the expected and unexpected is always surprising and jumbles our thoughts – even if only for a split second. Broadly speaking, it is the basis of our common emotional understanding – heart and mind – as well as humor and comedy. Every so-called great theory of humor (superiority, incongruence, psychological contrast, value shift, relief, ambivalence) contains in one way or another the assumption of a conflict that can be emotional, intellectual, linguistic, logical, social, and so forth. Typically, many conflicting elements converge when humor and comic expression are combined.
|
|
Assembled from wooden planks, the sculpture Trio Pönttöpäät (“Empty Heads”) is one of the most well-known of Martti Hömppi’s sculptures. He has been called “The Picasso of the Woodshed”.
Photo: Veli Granö
|
A basic technique of comedy is a juxtaposition that creates a comic conflict when a certain expression gets “lost in translation” between two systems of meaning. The factors leading to the comical effect can be pinpointed from various cultural products (images, texts, performances) as well as everyday human behavior.
What does ITE express?
Works expressing something that is the world’s largest or the world’s smallest have also been taken into modern folk art circles in Finland. But the world’s largest, as well as the world’s smallest, bark shoes are only large and small in relation to the other birch-bark shoes falling in between. Inasmuch as the “world’s” largest and smallest objects are samples of their makers’ artistry, they only have display value instead of practical value.
Typical of humorous work of folk art is the surprising and at times clearly attitudinal juxtaposition of content and materials. Martti Hömppi’s now fairly well-known sculpture, the ITE classic Trio Pönttöpäät from the 1980s, depicts an orchestra constructed with discarded wooden planks; it is a sarcastic commentary on the ability of politicians (in this case Mauno
Koivisto, Ulf Sundquist and Paavo Väyrynen) to manage “public affairs”.
A flair and talent for self-irony was also demonstrated by a portrait (1975) of President Urho Kekkonen; the head was a baker’s peel and the eyeglasses were the bits belonging to horse’s harness. This work was such a popular success that it was also copied. I myself bought a small copper-embossed portrait of Kekkonen from a second-hand shop in Pori for a fiver a few years ago.
In the anthropological study of humor and comedy, a popular approach has been to operate according to a so-called two-world theory where people construct “alternative realities” alongside their daily lives; the most reoccurring thesis is that in humoristic examinations, the world appears as it is and as it should be. In comical social relationships, authority and the power of command temporarily dissolve; narrators and listeners, doers and viewers, can experientially make contact with concrete utopias. But making authority, a stranger or an enemy laughable does not simply mean that humor can change the world. What is however important in all cases is that the external realism of experience does not destroy the internal realism of experience. According to the psychoanalyst Pirkko Siltala, the bridge between these realities “solidifies people’s ability to exercise their creative imaginations and share their perceptions, illusions and symbols”. This is what ITE expresses.
ITE has shown how the promises and living possibilities of localness can be implemented in the kinds of activities that are themselves part of a place and thus produce culturally specific and experientially new interpretations. The well-presented, but not necessarily best-presented past – narrated, painted, sculpted, crocheted, knit, sung – is invariably part of an evolving present that has been influenced by the future implemented by previous generations, and will continue to influence what the following generation will expect from the future.
Seppo Knuuttila is a Professor of Folklore Studies at the University of Joensuu.
|
|
Three traffic and data communications speeds from past centuries: gait, trot and gallop. Driver Antti Makkonen with the geldings Totti and Pilarus at the Esplanade Park in the summer of 2009.
"Haste mutilates, dulls and medicalizes the world."
Marianna Simo
|
