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I guess it is a typical position of an East-European coming from a small country – which seldom has stood a chance at a status of historical nation in Hegel’s sense – that makes me particularly receptive to the idea of the Historic Moment. These are the moments of decisive importance, which might challenge the monolithic carelessness of comprehensive histories. I was eleven, when Georg Ots, the only ferry cruising from Tallinn to the West at the time disappeared for two weeks without any a notice. As it turned out it had been rerouted to serve as a hotel for Mikhail Gorbachow during his negotiations with Ronald Reagan in 1985 in Reykjavik. I was in my teens when the Berlin Wall came down and when the students protested in Tiananmen Square. In that same year, on August 23rd 1989, I participated in the Baltic Way, the mass demonstration against the secret pact of the Molotov-Rippentrop treaty and the resulting Soviet occupation. Two million people joined hands in an uninterrupted human chain from Tallinn to Vilnius as a show of their solidarity. I was present at the Tallinn TV tower with my parents to meet the tanks sent in by the military clique, who tried to restore Soviet law and order on August 20th 1991. Only later on did the long-term impact of these events become clear to me: the crucial experience of the first-hand resulted in a certain craving for the moment when a stasis or status quo is turned into something with potential. Historic moments are hardly ever an issue among my generation of East-Europeans even though most of them have personal experience with dramatic events in recent history. As they see how their memories are constantly revamped for neo-con, retro-nationalist causes, they decide not to have anything to do with them, I suppose. Maybe the market demand for uniformly multi-cultural northerners, southerners, easterners and westerners, matching but for small decorative differences, outweighs any particularity. Or maybe history just rarely counts in the contemporary world. This holds up exceptionally well for art critics, who tend to be soft in terms of historic awareness, perhaps to assure the illusion of novelty required for the continuous commentary of the trivial present.

Political Sloganism

What was of political importance in late 1980s early 1990s art in Estonia?If I am to address a case when personal history, transitional politics and creative ambition have come together, I can think of no better example than a set of early works by Jaan Toomik (Tartu, 1961). These works mark the artist’s transition from neo-expressionist painter to post-conceptual, post-medium artist, his years as apprentice you could say. The sixties were for Toomik an exceptionally interesting period against which he attempted to simultaneously position himself as a radical local artist and one directly connected to the historical avant-garde. Even though his intentions weren’t openly articulated or publicised, they became clear through the core gestures of radical subjectivism he exercised: the direct actions, the canned shit, an empty gallery, pure noise and a bloody canvas. The series of works I will describe below conveys his will to be absolutely present in real time without referencing historical events, but by personifying history himself. And they are historical in their manifestation of individual truth – valid for a brief period of time and serving as a sudden rupture, remodelling a reality thus far defined by former convictions.In the summer of 1989, just before the Czech Velvet Revolution, Toomik performed an action in Prague together with a fellow student, Vano Allsalu, both then on a residency at the Art Academy in Czechoslovakia as painting students. English not yet being the lingua franca it is today, they had to resort to Russian to communicate with the Czechs. They were thus repeatedly taken for Russians and accused of annexing Eastern Europe. The disappointment in being labelled and categorised as the ‘enemy’, demanded an outlet and eventually resulted in an action: Toomik walked back and forth along the King Charles Bridge, with a placard hanging around his neck, which read, in Estonian, ‘My prick is clean’! He didn’t respond to any curious passers by who took him as a political protester and asked about the cause of his demonstration. Allsalu took pictures. The statement made with ‘My prick is clean!’ was more than just political satire. The action played intentionally with its enigmatic nature – it’s slogan was meant to remain puzzling in the context of its display and the event’s significance was not fully elucidated by the few black and white photos that documented it. It dealt quite obviously with the workings of an unexplained transference from a domestic (Estonian) to a foreign (Czech) context, juxtaposing opposing imagery of Soviet-era compulsory May Day processions and Estonian pro-independence demonstrations of the time. By 1989 the Popular Front was at its peak in popularity and had openly taken course towards Estonian independence. Although what first springs to mind as a breakthrough event leading to independence was a demonstration in Tammsaare Park on the 24th of February 1987 – a commemoration of the Independence Day of the first Republic – the iconography of the enlightened political activism of those years was not only limited to large scale events. The appearance of activists’ stand-ins in urban environments was becoming another sign of the times. Marching along the King Charles Bridge in Prague, Toomik adopted the look to those men and women, many of them former dissidents, who were permanently on guard in front of the Tallinn Drama Theatre carrying slogans like ‘Freedom for Political Prisoners!’. Toomik used the iconography of demonstrations so typical for these years, enigmatically coupled it to its political antithesis and thereby created a situation reminiscent of a Situationist detournement. The statement ‘My prick is clean!’ didn’t have a any special significance at the time. It was not an everyday expression nor was it a common slur. It was constructed to reference the syntax used in political campaigns, combining it with a vocabulary used under more personal circumstances. The message thus both repeals obscenity and serves as a joke, distanced from its erotic source, distanced as well from any political potential. Since young artists then often manifested, first of all, the lack of essential content behind any kind of slogan, Toomik’s action can be taken as a rite of (personal) renunciation.

Nihilist Activism

Since the late 1980s the most prestigious local ‘industry’ in the Soviet Union was re-cycling scrap metal and exporting it for the ‘real money’. Selling humanitarian aid and importing third-rate Western crap were alternative roads to prominence. The liberal slogan ‘anything goes’ applied to very specific everyday para-practices. I was 12 when I sold banana-flavoured condoms on the black market in Tallinn, that had been distributed during sex education at the Swedish youth camp. I was 16 when I helped friends smuggle nerve gas sprays from the black market in St Petersburg. This was all not done out of desperation, as we were middle class kids well groomed at home, but out of a desire to adopt the spirit of the times. Doing some business, which usually meant a dodgy deal, was ‘in the air’ – the key word of these times being ‘shadow economy’. In politics this was also the period of applied nihilism. An idealised picture of nationalism picked up from the years of the regained national independence, was slowly mutating into the official state parlance covering up the only remaining interest of the right wing: to recover the property once nationalized by the Soviets. 1 The time was ripe for counter nihilist gestures in culture. The period from 1991 when independence was declared up to 1993 was most influential for the establishment of an economic base-structure and a cultural consciousness of the second Estonian Republic. Because the infrastructure of production had collapsed the conditions for art were extreme everywhere in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, there were some focused responses to this strenuous situation. Young Russian artists brought up to fight American Imperialism in Afghanistan first had to face the collapse of the official Soviet ideology they were opposed to and then the treason of their former dissident heroes. Many of these ‘heroes’ had fled the country during the harshest time for the East. Bitterness gave birth to the most vital school of Moscow Actionism. In the Russian context, the political gesture of Oleg Kulik, who stepped out as a frenzied dog barely held back on his leash by Alexandr Brener, to defend an empty gallery during his first dog performance in 1994, personified the symbolic vacuum, the rupture created by the historic moment. And, against his own will, Toomik did the same for the Estonian scene, performing a historic moment. Toomik today is a local household name for moral hysterics who complain about contemporary art. The main reason for this is his work May 15– 31, 1992, which has acquired a downright mythic notoriety. The notion of ‘turd art’, has almost been completely divorced from its original ’birth’. No one in Estonia knows about the work, but still everyone ’remembers’ the scandalous brown stains on Toomik’s sleeve. In fact there is but one place to find a picture and description of the piece – the artist’s portfolio at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. In glass jars forming a circle Toomik installed his daily menu and faeces during a given period of time and exhibited it in a group show. In the context of the exhibition, reference was made to an existential dimension of life – the hardship of hunger, a reality in the Post-Soviet economic crises. This was just before the country’s monetary reform and the launching of the Estonian kroons, and with the value of the rouble falling by the hour, Toomik metaphorically managed to connect money with waste. The fact that this shameful remnant of being a human being – one’s own shit – normally so neatly washed away from the social sphere, was brought back to constitute an artwork, rendered the abject core of the creator’s subjectivity instrumentally bare.2 However, there was no feeling of shock, no ripple of scatological laughter, no fury incurred by possible blasphemy against the art world (as with Manzoni’s Artists Shit – which no doubt served as inspiration). Because there simply was no art world, no market, no interest, no infrastructure, no one to be insulted by art in 1992. All the moralistic condemnation of the work came in later years from a society aiming to reconstitute what ‘is normal’, in terms of representational value. Toomik offered them a personal and somehow threatening time- and site-specific re-reading for the ethics of an Arte Ultra Povera. The personal exhibition Toomik opened for the 75th anniversary of the Estonian Republic in the late winter of 1993 was called Windows. He had covered the 5 by 2 meter large windows of the Tallinn Art Hall Gallery with celluloid – using more than a kilometre of ruined newsreels left over from the fire of the film archive in Tallinn – achieving an effect of stained-glass. Besides the burned log at the other end of the room, perhaps a stand-in for Toomik’s recently deceased brother who had been an integral part of Toomik’s work process, the gallery was empty. ‘The colours lived on their life liberated from material on the walls and the floors of the gallery, supporting the invisible presentation of Estonian history,’ wrote a critic.3 The windows opened to a view of another installation by Toomik, Bed 75, actually part of a group show in Tallinn Art Hall. In a loosely constructed installation, 75 bed frames the artist had purchased from the Russian military garrison soon to be leaving Estonia, were displayed at the Freedom Square, which only few years prior, during the Soviet period, had been Victory Square. As the only direct reference to history in the work by Toomik, this piece, as the others addressed in this article, should be seen as a rite of renunciation.There must be more works like this. More works that can serve as key gestures forming post-soviet sub-consciousness in changing East-European cultures. We should come back to the past and let these works and their motives speak of the world they were created for. It is from this perspective one should look at East-European art of that period, of the late 1980s and early 1990s, in search of works and actions that tried to cope with the existing situation. Works that showed a dedication and a decisiveness characteristic both of popular politics and early entrepreneurship at the time.1 This section is based on an article once written to counter-strike the selectiveness of official memories. There is no alternative to personal impressions so far as there still exists no survey integrating economic, political and everyday history of that period. For comparison see Anders Härm & Hanno Soans, We are Glad its all Over, at www.balticart.com 2 Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, The MIT Press, 20003 Eha Komissarov, Jaan Toomik, from the text accompanying the artists portfolio at the Contemporary Art Centre, Estonia.