Arno Minkkinen:
Kimmo Koskela,
Peter Pan To The Resque
Our lives as artists advance in a manner not unlike screenplays shifting from one plot point to the next. The peaks are sporadic and the valleys plethoric. In the hot summer of 1982 – no longer tethered to the support system of academic teaching and working outside the formalist dogma of the time – my career hit an impasse that threatened to turn a decade of creative activity into a one-act play.
We were living in a brown house in Andover, Massachusetts at the time and I was back writing advertising copy about computers, sparkling wine, and ice cream cones. A four-year professorship at MIT and a visiting artist stint in Philadelphia had by then been reduced to single lines on the dwindling resume. Enter Plot Point I: Lucien Clergue
in France invites me to the big screen at Arles; Kimmo Koskela comes to live with us and paints our house yellow.
Kimmo was the type of guy who would walk straight into a lake with his clothes on so he could get a picture of everyone on the shore. His penchant for thinking outside the box, or circle, or shoreline, is now legend, the signature of his genius as an artist. It was the same with the house. Utilizing a system of self-made scaffolds, he circumnavigated the two-story structure like Peter Pan wielding a paintbrush instead of a sword, single-handedly transforming our home into an ad for Sherwin-Williams Paints.
The house, of course, was not the art object, but simply a metaphor – the time had come for me to renew my commitment to photography and the creative life. What I saw in Kimmo, as both my student at Iisalmen Kamera workshop the year before and later in the work he was doing to stretch the boundaries of photography in the mid-eighties, pointed to what all artists need, but don’t realize they crave: the example of youth, the intrepidness of the mind and heart that willingly engages the seemingly impossible – just for the dare, just for the hope, and maybe just because the fun mixed in is too fucking irresistible. And later, in the late eighties and early nineties when Kimmo began making films, the artistic ingenuity within him – that pixie dust of yellow paint – elevated of his work to new levels of magical inventiveness. It was also the time we began working on Still Not There, the film he directed for Finnish television that anchored our abiding friendship and collaborative spirit for years to come.
I would think that Matti Koskela, father/artist extraordinaire, finds in the work of his three sons an inspiring resource of youthful resolve and audacious discovery. They, in turn, surely look to his example for setting their course on a lifetime devotion to the arts.
Over the years I have pulled up to the old house on Lowell Street and noticed when it has been neglected. It’s then that I imagine Kimmo up on his ladder, fighting the heat in his swimming trunks, bucket of yellow paint by his side, waving his brush like a sword in the air.
The role of the artist is to renew our lives, but also, in turn, to listen internally to the song of the child within us all.
Or, as I like to remind my students, how Brancusi puts it: “Unless we see with the eyes of a child, we will make no art.”
Arno Rafael Minkkinen
Fosters Pond, 10.08.08
Kimmo Koskela and Arno Minkkinen, from the film, Still Not There, 1996
Kimmo Sarje:
Kimmo Koskela,
a Versatile Figure of media Art
As a media artist and photographer, Kimmo Koskela is both an accomplished professional and a flexible experimenter. Sociability and readiness to cooperate are his strengths, though sometimes his weakness as well. For he likes to help friends and colleagues to the point that he suddenly realizes that he is engaged in far too many projects, especially of the non-profit kind. While kindness of this nature tends to be economically fateful, it may also be an opportunity to do things that might never be experienced if one did not go ahead and blithely immerse oneself in things.
Every now and again Koskela finds himself in the post of managing director of a large art production company, or more precisely production community. It’s a job that he doesn’t really seek; on the contrary it will only alienate him from what he really wants to do – his own art. But relaxed informality is also an integral part of Koskela’s creativity. It is his way of keeping balance among the tensions of chaos and the cosmos.
Our collaboration and friendship dates back from the early 1990s, when Hannu Eerikäinen and I curated the First Triennial of Finnish Art for display in Helsinki and St. Petersburg. Koskela participated in the exhibition with Puhuva maalaus (Talking painting), an interactive video painting created with the dancer Rea Pihlasviita. On show at Kunsthalle Helsinki was a large gilt frame on which the movements and poses of Pihlasviita in the artist’s studio were projected according to the requests of viewers. The requests were passed on with microphones and telephone lines and the dancer could also comment on her viewers. It was the first telematic experiment ever performed in Finland and also a favourite among visitors to the triennial.
On our way somewhere in a car while transporting material for the triennial, I indirectly suggested two collaborative projects to Koskela. “Of course!” was his reply, although financing was limited to our empty pockets at the time. I told him about a miniature opera entitled Nostalgia for Avant-Garde, for which I had written a fragmentary libretto based on a text by Kazimir Malevich. The musician and actor Juha Haanperä had composed the music and performed it at the opening of my exhibition of the same name in 1989. Before long, the opera was being filmed in the inspiring interior of the Lenin Museum in Tampere. Subsequently our miniature opera of seven and a half minutes, which we directed together, was presented at various events, and has also been the basis for a couple of our video installations. Koskela’s collection of antique monitors and audio equipment has also facilitated impressive technohistorical displays. The art critic Pessi Rautio described our installation as a “total avant-garde experience” in the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat on 4 December 1999.
The concept of “living works of art” was the basis for my other proposal that was realized almost immediately. I told Koskela about some old Finnish writers, philosophers and artists whom I knew, and how their faces reflected wisdom and experience, and how ideas and values had taken flesh in their personas. They were a rarely used resource of our intellectual and artistic heritage. I suggested that we should launch a series of monologues, for which we would invite “living works of art” to speak of their worldview and work. Koskela constructed a studio stage of the most unassuming character in which the speaker’s face was in focus against a blue background, which could easily be replicated in different situations.
Before long, the artist Aleksanteri Ahola-Valo (born 1900) was in Koskela’s studio in Helsinki’s Punavuori reminiscing about his amazing life as an agitprop artist in the former Soviet Union during its early decades. “Aha! This is familiar to me. It’s a bit like Odessa, when I assisted Sergei Eisenstein when he was filming Battleship Potemkin, and especially the famous scene on the steps.” Chatting in more or less that manner, Ahola-Valo placed himself before the camera.
On a winter’s day, the half-blind philosopher Sven Krohn, like the Ossian of fable, recalled, fragile but with clarity, his philosophical sources of inspiration. The composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, prepared for the task meticulously and spoke to the camera in a relaxed manner. Each raised eyebrow, furrowing of the brow or the slightest change in tone was part of a careful and intellectually joyous tale and choreography. His monologue was completed in a single take, and I assume that not an inch of it was edited out. The author Anne Friend did not want to come to the studio, but this did not stop Koskela from staging similar conditions in her home. Wonderful wisdom, warmth and femininity radiated from this 90-year-old researcher and prose writer.
Curator Maaretta Jaukkuri was fascinated by our Monologues of this Century project and invited us to participate in the opening exhibition of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998. The Swedish art critic Ingela Lind regarded the work to be the most touching of the whole exhibition on visual grounds alone (Dagens Nyheter, 13 June 1998). At present there are some thirty taped monologues, which have been presented in various combinations at exhibitions and events. The collections of Kiasma and the Pori Art Museum contain approximately half of them. And even now this project is still in progress with varying degrees of activity.
A demanding electronic stage montage such as the revolutionary Opal D performance and cooperation with dancers and choreographers are the mainstream of Koskela’s art along with his ambitious documentary work. I am happy and grateful to my namesake for also having, alongside his many other projects, the curiosity and time for our joint conceptual and cultural-historical projects.
Kimmo Sarje
Ph.D, artist
