Fight as much as you have strength for. Interview with Eha Komissarov

Eha Komissarov: At the time, art was very exciting. The Estonian art field was striving towards freedom and trying to find its place in Europe. It was trying to find a way to wriggle away from Russian influence. When it came to culture, there were two main cities – Tartu and Tallinn. I went to the University of Tartu and at the time, Tartu was valued because artists were trying to revive the painting tradition of the Pallas Higher Arts School that had existed before the Soviet occupation. In Tallinn, however, tradition took a backseat, and they were trying to invent something new. I also remember that there was a ferry lineAlthough the distance between Tallinn and Helsinki is only 80 km, there was no regular ferry line between the cities from 1939 to 1965. between Tallinn and Helsinki, which meant that at certain times, the city was full of people, who looked and acted very differently from locals. My school was located in Tallinn city centre, just near Kaarli church and the Finnish hippies loved to sit and drink champagne on the church's stairs. So I was in high school when I first encountered flower children. In wild miniskirts, flowers in their hair, holding champagne bottles, sitting and drinking there. People like that. And with long hair. In Estonia, too, little by little, you could see more boys with long hair. So perhaps the rest of the world reached Tallinn more visibly than it did Tartu. Still, at the University of Tartu, significant intellectual and spiritual developments were underway. In search of freedom, people were looking towards the East – ex oriente lux. They were developing the New Age discourse. So all these minds were turning towards Buddhism and Eastern thought for clarity, to a more tolerant way of seeing the world, to mysticism. Because the imperialist culture of the Soviet Union was completely devoid of any kind of mysticism.

EK: It was a pure coincidence. When I was a student (late 1960s and early 1970s) the trajectory of possibilities for studying was very clearly defined. I was fascinated by history, but that was also a time when parts of history were banned and you could only use certain keywords to talk about things. There were many themes that were never touched upon when it came to the post-war period. Not that they were always necessarily forbidden but you needed permission to work in the archive and common people were not given access. Art history was taught as a minor and I liked it a lot.

EK: Personally, I was the most fascinated by pop culture and all the changes it was going through – the new language and how a new vocabulary and code appeared in culture, society and people’s behaviour. I loved that certain borders were dissolved. Soviet society was so institutional. But suddenly, all the young professors began addressing the students in a more casual way and even the rector of the university could be spoken to less formally. The change of code in behaviour was so exciting and so different from everything that had come before. To be honest, it was thrilling to see all the old values go to hell. 

EK: In society, most things were decided by men who were often remarkably dumber and more limited than the women for whom they made decisions. I became more consciously aware of that in the early 1970s. It was very easy for me to relate to traditional feminism when I looked at the choices available to women in Estonian society. Soviet society was a welfare society in the sense that nobody could get rich but also nobody starved, unless you suffered from direct repressions by the state, of course. The social transition of the 1990s in Estonia also presented a lot of people with tough choices. I was shocked to see children beg on the streets in groups and how prostitution became very clearly visible. I had no illusions about capitalism. I knew people were going to be out of jobs. And I knew competing would become the norm. That much I had understood as an observer. And so, I found some support in feminist ideas that helped me to address and make sense of all the social changes.

EK: I was interested in contemporary art because it was extremely difficult to get access to it during the Soviet period... Thinking of the Estonian art field at the time – you definitely had to know an artist personally to even see that kind of art. As a person, I am kind of an unorganised character. I really loved the post-war international art history. I truly loved abstract art, which was forbidden in the Soviet Union because of the Cold War. You could only see very little. At some point, dictionaries of art published in Germany became available in Estonia as well and many significant names of contemporary artists were included. Sometimes, we could get our hands on these, they cost next to nothing. The more hidden a culture, the more people are drawn to it. When everything is spoon-fed, it's less effective. That's what Finnish artists always said when they visited Estonia. They claimed that a society can't have too much freedom, it always needs some kind of resistance. Citizens must feel that they need to fight and resist through their art, that gives a new meaning to the work. I didn't like that – it felt like since Finland was free, it was easy for them to come here and discuss how we needed to suffer and be a little repressed. When I confronted them about this, they replied that no-no, it's just good for any culture to have a bit of conflict and pressure.

EK: I mean, a true Soviet citizen always had many roles. Party member, executive employee, a career person, a nationalist crying under the Christmas tree.As a religious holiday, celebrating Christmas was forbidden in the Soviet Union. There were numerous roles a person had to play; it was a complicated society. It wasn't easy. I am extremely grateful, of course, because working with historical materials taught me to look at traditional art. In some ways, effort was put into our education – once a year, we were sent to Leningrad to see exhibitions. Once, there was a big exhibition of the Golden Age of Finnish art at the Hermitage. To me, that was a complete shock when it came to exhibition design – they had spotlights on each of the paintings. Imagine that! Dark Hermitage exhibition hall and reflective mirrors and spotlights on paintings. Today, spotlights are not used to light paintings anymore but at the time this was a new and impressive practice. The way it made a painting and the space look! So my most memorable exhibition experience was, in fact, at the Hermitage.

EK: I didn't really think about my ambitions, I was more working on developing myself. I realised I didn't know anything, so I read a lot. Thanks to the samizdatSamizdat refers to literature that was not allowed in the Soviet Union, but which was reproduced often by hand and shared and distributed through unofficial underground channels. experience, I began reading books in Russian, since a lot more interesting literature was published in Russian. Not only about art but also world literature. I read and tried to educate myself. Finnish television was also an important source of information.As Finnish TV broadcasts made their way across the Gulf of Finland, the Finnish television could be illegally watched in the northern parts of Estonia.

EK: My ideal was always anarchism at the time. Often people do not intend to become gurus – they just have a message to spread and people start gathering around them. Some of the local art gurus radiated a completely new kind of thinking, things I had never even dreamt of. I wasn't working with any super exciting esoteric teachings or life changing issues because as an anarchist and democrat, I think that every person has to find themselves based on their own experiences. To an extent it's also about fate. I have seen people who have a terrible fate, who die precisely when it would be so important for them to live.

EK: I had a certain interest, a purely creative interest in the museum. When you work intensely and seriously with contemporary art, you will gain a new perspective on art history. Especially when it came to our local history, where everything was so restrained and adorned with myths of the spirit of Parisian art. I did not care about any of these myths. I was the generation who thought: "Paris is dead, long live New York!" I had been to Paris but not New York. It’s really easy to make decisions like that! But I knew that I had a completely new perspective on art history, and I wanted to put it to work.

EK: In the mid-1990s, when decisions about the new building for the Art Museum of Estonia (now Kumu – Ed.) began, this is when I started to think about it.

EK: I like what the Estonian philosopher Eik Herman said about museums: museums are filled with collections, but now a time has come, where these collections need to prove their right to exist in a new, contemporary culture. I have always had an ambivalent role. I have always championed the new and at the same time, in the museum, I am personally involved with many collections – I have helped to establish them, I have made recommendations and acquired works. And now I suddenly have to be the defender of these shabby collections – at the onslaught of art that is being made in increasingly better conditions. Maybe I'm stepping into inappropriate territory here, but Herman's idea really spoke to me. And when Covid came, so many of our exhibitions were postponed, which meant we needed to take a closer look again at the works we already had in the museum. So, we once again discovered that we have so much art, yet only a tiny portion of that circles in the public and most of it remains uninterpreted in the context of contemporary culture. We have abandoned it, left it to just sit there. 

EK: In order to blend things you need the other half. 

EK: I participated in a very radical manner, I felt that it was the time to cut the umbilical cord, take a strong turn and find a new focus, new energy, to be able to have a dialogue with the current moment. I brought artists to Estonia, who were doing important work at the time and also selected the more independent Estonian artists. Estonian art took a long time to get used to independence. It was as if everyone was always waiting to be told what to do. And finally it happened – the whole Soros system in the 1990s. I have read extremely critical opinions that the network of Soros centres was a network of Western colonialism, based on an imperialist idea. I don't quite agree. Estonia is a stronghold of its national culture, we stick together. The idea that people need to work together and support each other is really good in practice and there have been times, like the Art Nouveau period, for example, where art favoured these little groupings. But when the idea of national culture was thrown out, everything became very dramatic. Estonian artists didn't really go along with the idea that they needed to push everything they had known aside and suddenly start deconstructing art.

EK: In the past, there have been periods, where these artists have been highlighted and valued. For example, this has to do with how Estonian art silently resisted Soviet Socialist Realism. I'm probably romanticising my youth, but I consider this a great achievement and I am truly sorry that our culture can no longer read these codes. In the 1990s, artists were suddenly all like, "Oh, sure, some art was made in the past but THEN I ARRIVED and showed everyone my ass! I screamed, broke stuff, ran around! Look what I did!" I was always against all such extremities. Everyone like this was given a platform. The wilder you were, the better it was. In the 90s, I did think about how to approach the work of women printmakers in a contemporary context. I knew these artists; they had had a massive influence on my professional development as well. I was wondering how to save them. And then I realised it was they who needed to take the first step and break out of their system. But they almost never did. What I mean by this – you step outside of your conventional modus operandi and try to approach the world in a completely new way. 

EK: Absolutely. I love how during the period Kumu Art Museum was under construction, internet radicals were discussing how museums are a relic, everything needs to be put online and there is no need for expensive buildings. To that my colleague of many years, art historian Mai Levin very cleverly said: "Well, life has shown that in a museum, none of the artworks in collections are pointless and useless. Time moves forward and there is something for each new era, the ‘pointless’ work becomes relevant again. And everyone admires it." So that is the phenomenon of the museum. 

I think it is not too late for these women printmakers, as their work highlights certain keywords that are still very much alive in Estonian historical memory, that can still touch people. For example, the pursuit of aesthetic harmony, search for female expression, the need to create symbols, goodness, empathy, ideas like that. I would like to interpret these in such a way that young people today, who are so removed from the time these works were created and who are not interested in creating specifically Estonian art, would understand that this is what our art history is like, that these are the works that were created during difficult times. There were women who came and wanted to do something, and they did it! I want to interpret these works in a way that they would start making sense in a contemporary context again.

EK: Well, in the 1990s, we didn't have cleaners at Soolaladu, the contemporary art space of the Art Museum of Estonia. Can you imagine? We had to install whole exhibitions but the cleaner only came on the day of the opening. So, I often stayed there until 3 am. When we were done with installing, we needed to clean up the sawdust. We didn't have a vacuum cleaner either. I used brooms to sweep the space. And only then I could go home because I couldn't leave a mess for the next day, everything needed to be clean. Such were the conditions.

EK: Fight as much as you have strength for, but tackle these issues one at a time. And when you run out of steam, think of something else. But I think that the combination of all of these factors will lead to the rise of national narratives. In relation to the war in Ukraine in particular. Not because the conservative right decided so. I see signs that a certain kind of romantic spirit is being revived. Cynicism has run its course, it is depleted, there is nowhere else to go from here. Empathy will be more valued again and I don't think this means focusing on the situation of nations in a narrow sense but there will be another, wider perspective on the whole world. I would like to hope so. For something more empathic.