Minna Långström: A few words to the graduates
“Kuvataideakatemia was quite a different place back in 95 when I started studying here, 29 years ago. Had I seen the curriculum and possibilities of today’s students, I’d have been stunned. It’s interesting to think of what the school will look like in another 30 years”, says Minna Långström in her speech at the graduation ceremony in June 2024.
Thank you, Hanna Johansson, for the invitation and this chance to congratulate everyone who is graduating from Kuvataideakatemia today. I’m very glad to be here.
The Oxford dictionary definition of a paradox is something that can seem, at first sight, contradictory, but with further investigation is revealed to be well founded or true. What my recent film about Mars photography, shown at the Hommage à Lauri Anttila exhibition this winter, told me is that sometimes we don’t just see things differently, we see different things… even in the same pictures.
Art and the practice of it is full of paradoxes. For one, art can’t be measured in terms of usefulness, yet it is the most valuable thing we have. If there are any rules in art they are about defying rules, or at least it is about creatively misunderstanding the rules of the practice, which I think starts already in art school. It is the role of the art student to be critical of the institution, and thereby being part of its change. We may not feel it constantly but the art school is never stagnant, never complete, always in a mode of transformation. How could it be anything else, as art itself defies definition. I like to think of the art school as a mothership, to which you are now about to cut the cord. For some it may be difficult to leave, and fortunately for those, the mothership extends out her tentacles, offering ways of being nurtured by this creature after graduation through alumni courses, residencies, lectures and other events.
Today the art school prepares us the best it can (and much more concretely than before) for life as an artist, including networking, resumes, collaboration etc, but everyone knows that reality is always more complex, right? There’s no one recipe. Being an artist can mean so many different things, but generally it centers around the work itself, trying to protect time for it, enjoying moments of reward it gives us in the absence of much material reward. Looking at my own experience some of the less established events I’ve participated in -which would be the vast majority- have always been the most adventurous. Your work can take you into the most incredible of situations. Sometimes quite absurd even. It’s an interesting position to be in, because in a unique way being an artist is a ticket to enter virtually anywhere you want.
Kuvataideakatemia was quite a different place back in 95 when I started studying here, 29 years ago. Art schools most everywhere were quite open ended back in those days before the University Reforms. The administration was minimal, consisting only of a handful of people. While there were wonderful classes by legendary teachers, some of whom have devoted their life to this institution since then or until recently, one of the biggest differences is that back then there weren’t any seminars. We had critiques, once or twice a year, ten minutes per student, and most of the time was spent in the studio. Had I seen the curriculum and possibilities of today’s students, I’d have been stunned. It’s interesting to think of what the school will look like in another 30 years.
When I visited your Kuvan Kevät exhibition a few weeks ago, I experienced a kind of freshness that comes from topicality, an effect I recognize from earlier spring exhibitions as well. In ways that feel new and free, the works courageously meditate both on form and critical issues. All art is political, however compared to the 90’s I find the Finnish culture much more open to art dealing with difficult social and political questions. And I think there’s value in both a rather blunt way of doing that as well as a more slant, indirect way. As Emily Dickinsson writes in her poem: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Success in Circuit Lies.” We are especially susceptible to new ideas when they are brought to us indirectly. I think she talks about the role of art and artists. The poem ends with: “The truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind.”
As Ursula Leguin, one of the quite rare science fiction authors dealing with Utopia rather than dystopia says about the art of words: “Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art.” Artists know instinctively when there is pressure to conform and to sensor ourselves in order to exist materially. On the other hand, sadly, censorship and otherness has produced great poetry, beautifully codified messages. Another paradox.
Some of us here today may come from families or environments where art and humanities are valued, some of us less so. In a sense, having a government hostile towards culture, we’re all thrown into the same discussion some may have with their uncomprehending relatives. Echoing Ayn Rand, actually, our Finance Minister has said that art is luxury, causing the cultural field to bring out the official numbers in plain open: even in terms of capitalist logic, art makes sense, since it brings in exponentially more money and employment than what modest state support is bestowed the field. But without that support, the financial gain and the possibility of a tiny country like ours to ”compete” (continuing with the same logic) on the international stage significantly decreases. While some may look at art as a too expensive luxury, others may look at the mass production and global sales of useless luxury goods (such as short life span electronics) as something with a cost so high that it threatens our very existence and rapidly that of other forms of life on this planet. A nice thing to think about is that while these kinds of utterances (Rand’s and Purra’s) bubble up at certain times, they will quickly creep back into the place they came from, while art and artists will never go away.
Instead we will keep on keeping on, defending our rights to better working conditions. However war and catastrophe stops life as we know it, including art making. And here I want to thank the students of the academy for their incredible activism both regarding the unimaginable horrors taking place in Gaza and the ongoing severe cuts to education.
Ursula Le Guin -again- reminds us that a system is always fixable, never a rule. She famously says:
”We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.”
Humans are narrative creatures who therefore need to be especially aware of the power of narratives. It’s good to base it on knowledge. But science, as well, is not immune to narratives as we have seen for example in neo-Darwinist ideas guided by neoliberal assumptions of nature in terms of fierce and cruel competition, while the increasingly ground winning argument by several evolutionary biologists follow a completely different narrative: that the major paradigm in nature is not competition but collaboration; symbiosis.
Still the opposite to collaboration and community is not individuality (instead, try exploitation?). The spectacle has swallowed many words and turned them into fake mirror images of themselves. Only when we care about and support each individual in society to be their best selves, can we have a truly functioning, democratic community.
Because of narratives that were too narrow and too fearful to present but a narrow point of view, all over the world, during the last few decades, various groups of people and minorities -as well as those who can see their point of view- have raised their voices, looking at their own histories, and starting -in the words of scientist and Native American writer Robin Wall Kimmerer- to remember things they didn’t even know they’d forgotten because of the dominance of a majority narrative. This has created back clashes, but yet takes us closer and closer all the time -through small victories- to a more truthfully represented reality. There’s a paradox in this as well, because it concerns the ”other”. While it’s elementary that we try to understand other experiences than our own, and to be open to them, in the words of the philosopher Immanuel Levinas: “If one could possess, grasp and know the other, it would not be other.” In a certain sense, solidarity also means to accept and respect the other as the other, an ocean of unknown, and our biggest hope is to learn by being rocked by this ocean. Learn that there are many truths and many lenses, all needed for the larger picture.
Once again congratulations! I look forward to a future with your art and artistic research in it.
Minna Långström, artist and filmmaker