In the infinity of wonders – voyages into the world of Elina Merenmies
“Reader, think hard about this fable and you will feel pretty strange.”
Juha-Heikki Tihinen ⎜PhD, Art Historian
To begin: “Slowly her imagination started to picture a gale of its own, very much blacker and wilder than the one that was shaking her house. The breakers grew to great white dragons, a roaring tornado sucked up the sea like a black pillar on the horizon, a gleaming pillar that came rushing towards her, nearer and nearer…”
For me, Elina Merenmies’ (1967) artworks are a way of discovering a new world that I recognize instantly by its mood, even if I could never have imagined anything entirely like it. As in the first quotation at the beginning, from The Fable by the Soviet-era Russian writer Daniil Kharms (1906–1942), when I see Merenmies’ works, I begin to feel strangely uneasy. There is a strangeness or wonder linked with the way that her world is manifestly mirror-image or double-like, that is to say very much like our own reality and yet recognizably different. This is typical of art in general, but in Merenmies’ case the oscillation back-and-forth between strangeness and familiarity follows a singularly dense rhythm. The impact of the fantasies is often based on the fact that they feel so very real, that it is not insuperably impossible to believe them. On the other hand, the very credibility of these fantasies can add to their strangeness and unexpectedness, since, when a world that parallels reality is revealed, even for a moment, we are offered a chance to change our worldview. This tradition is represented by a seam that runs through the art that begins with romanticism, one in which the unconscious and the astonishing have played an important role in shaping artistic thinking. Apart from the romantics, symbolists and surrealists, examples also include self-taught artists, interest in whom increased historically in line with the growth in curiosity about the unconscious processes of the mind and creativity, and about individual ways of thinking. The second quotation at the beginning talks about this, too, with the gale imagined by the Fillyjonk clearly being radically more terrible than a real storm.
In his famous autobiography Speak, Memory, the Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) wrote about how he had tried to reach, that is, to go beyond, the limits of his own memory. He writes the following about the limitations of human memory: “I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought — with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went — to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short of suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived.” Nabokov describes the method he has used to try to expand the scope of his memory and experience. In my own case, Elina Merenmies’ works have, time and time again, opened up vistas onto things that were only just imaginable, but which have been there in her works as precise, clear images, just like the Neo-Platonists’ idea of divinity.
When faced with Merenmies’ works, I often experience feelings somewhere between total astonishment and semi-astonishment, as when viewing colour restorations of Classical sculptures. The white marble or tarnished bronze is no longer a material made more elemental by time, but colourful and absolutely new-looking. Merenmies seems, time and time again, to take up the biggest issues and feelings, always providing them with a new personality. This is about the power of fantasies, since even though I am well-acquainted with the views expressed about the original colouring of Classical statues, and understand the arguments for them, for me, on an emotional level, the colour of classical statues is still bleached marble-white. I constantly need reminding that this is not the case, my imagination is so strong that exorcizing it requires powerful spells. For me, Merenmies’ works act in this same way, that is, they drive out the banal garbage – the commercial-image-like visuality – and make me really look. In the artist’s technical solutions themselves there is an inherent exhortation to look more closely, since in Merenmies’ works even the more inexperienced viewer recognizes how she has spared no effort in making her paintings and drawings. The abundance of details becomes like the ornamentation in Islamic art, in which mathematical repetition of the same thing gives rise to a powerful experience of transcendence.
Ever since the art theories of the Romantic period, it has been possible to see an interest in the afterlife as a common feature of art and religion. I also see this interest as characterizing Merenmies’ production. For her, making art is about revealing invisible forces and influences. Aided by art, totally new viewpoints on our own lives can open up, so that the same can happen to us as happened to Tove Jansson’s (1914–2001) Fillyjonk, whose conception of the world and its potential threats to her self changes with a truly enormous gale. Jansson is also a good example of an artist in whose works ‘reality’ and ‘art’ are mingled time and time again, there being striking congruencies between many of her characters and her own family members. Thus, in her production the dialogue between art and reality becomes a central area for the creation of meanings. In Merenmies’ case, the tension between reality and fantasy is very much based on the feeling of veracity, and on the way that even the most fantastic figures in her works feel highly tangible and fleshy. The US writer Susan Sontag (1933–2004) wrote in her essay on Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) about how the revolutionary nature of the French theatre theorist was concealed in the way that he wanted to bring out the organic basis of feelings and the physicality of ideas using the corporeality of actors. Merenmies’ living ghost trees, spectral figures and, in fact, her entire gallery of characters is fascinatingly fleshy and full of life, and yet at the same time imaginary.
Second: “The live fungi are already in the parlour.”
In Tove Jansson’s A Tale of Horror the next-to-youngest Whomper is constantly inventing one story more horrifying than the last. In one particular fantastic story live fungi have eaten the youngest Whomper of all – his baby brother. Little My drives the next-to-youngest Whomper into a state of terror by telling him about the menacing approach of the live fungi that the Whomper himself has invented. Here imagination takes over and the realities vanish, even though the Whomper initially remembers that he has invented the fungi himself, a moment later, he no longer cares about this information, but trusts in his fantasy-fuelled ‘perception’. But what does the experience of the next-to-youngest Whomper have in common with the creations of Elina Merenmies’ imagination? Perhaps the fact that, having slipped into the Merenmies-esque world, we begin to discern a little of absolutely everything. One epithet that characterizes Merenmies’ production is undoubtedly ambivalence, since in several of her works concealed images, or alternatively things that are very slowly discernible, take on great significance. It is possible to enjoy the work without screwing up your eyes, but it is only possible to travel at full throttle once we permit ourselves to look more closely. At the start of her career, Merenmies’ paintings were highly expressive and were finished quickly. Nowadays, the works in themselves demand both a long time and a process to reach completion.
But are there continuities in Merenmies’ output, or are her works always like night and day in comparison with each other? If we want to look for unbroken lines in the artist’s production, it offers us alternative classifications, both formal ones and others based on the choice of subject matter. Blood vessels, tree branches, fur and drawn lines are one of Merenmies’ focuses of interest, in which the concurrent significance of both the surface and the choice of subject matter are accentuated. In recent times, in many of her paper-based works she has made use of the simultaneously expressive and decorative power of different kinds of lines, because the lines of the drawing both create a two-dimensional impression and encourage the viewer to examine the artist’s handiwork more closely. In many of the paintings tree branches or a network that is not clearly defined create a tension on the surface of the work, which again adds to the ambivalence of the painting’s depth effect. This creates an atmosphere somewhere between dream and waking, which I interpret as a tribute to the surrealist tradition that begins with Hieronymus Bosch and carries on right up to Max Ernst. As an artist, Merenmies is not a straightforward continuer of surrealist traditions, but many of the features of her art take on a clearer shape for the viewer if we remember the ways of working and focuses of interest adopted by the surrealists and their predecessors and successors. The artist herself has talked about how, for example, Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) have made a profound impression on her. The importance of Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower is accentuated in Merenmies’ own account, added to which she has been deeply immersed in Poe’s work ever since she was young. Nevertheless, it was at that time that The Bible and an illustrated 1920s medical guide became her most precious sources of inspiration. Both travelled with Merenmies to Brussels when she left to study in 1988. She spent long periods abroad, and it was also there that she joined the Le Dernier Cri group.
The congruencies and disparities between the drawer’s and the painter’s ways of working are one of the main points of interest in Merenmies’ work. In her identity, she is above all a painter, during whose student days at The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts the genre or the medium, in this case painting, was clearly a creative and defining feature of the artist’s own painter identity. Merenmies is still specifically interested in painting and in its significance as a defining field for her own traditions and practices. In the background to this is a radical shift in recent art history, in line with which Merenmies, who studied at traditional art academies, has ended up as a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts. In the background we also see how the personalities and teachers who were interested in the students at The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1980s, Leena Luostarinen and Henry Wuorila-Stenberg, were simultaneously both painters and art-academy teachers. The significance of the medium, and also her love for it, is an inheritance from those days. Being a painter means various things to Elina Merenmies. It involves tradition-consciousness and respect for technical expertise, which manifests as a love for chalk grounds and hand-made paper. It also involves an interest in painting’s own self-assessment and self-renewal. This can be seen in the artist’s continual enthusiasm for teaching ever new generations of art students, or in the way she has worked with various experimental, virtual painting techniques. For Merenmies, being an artist means combining this with artisanal professional pride, which it is natural for a person to feel when, in terms of their materials, her works will last for centuries. She still finds inspiration in the example of the Flemish masters, the first to use oil paints.
Third: “And seeing the angel laugh, the devil laughed all the more, all the harder, and all the more blatantly, because the laughing angel was infinitely comical.”
As early as the 1960s, Susan Sontag wrote in her essay Notes on ‘Camp’, about the appearance in the tragi-comic of a new genre that emerges in the 20th century, one that no longer takes the guise of the purely comic or solely tragic. A corresponding coalescence takes place in the quotation from Milan Kundera above, and also in Elina Merenmies’ works, in which, for example, the dreadful and the comic are frequently intermingled. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) wrote in the preface to the English translation of his work on the artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992) about how the violence in Bacon’s art is not an admiration of violence an sich, but an interest in the way that living flesh behaves in different situations. In other words, Deleuze claims that Bacon paints the world as it is. As I see it, there is cause to remember a comparable state of affairs in Merenmies’ case, too. A second question then is: What is the world like? Is the world made up more of the movements of living flesh or of the tragi-comic? Should the violence of the world be portrayed in art or should it be a refuge from the tragicness of the world? With Merenmies’ works the viewer is usually roused to notice the beauty in the dreadfulness or becomes aware of the role of the victim in what is precious.
The French Jacques-of-all-trades Jean Cocteau’s (1889–1963) documentary La Villa Santo Sospir (1952) is a splendid example of how the creations of the same person are reminiscent of each other. The dreamworld familiar from the artist’s films, its beauty and dreadfulness, are present in this one, too, even though in cinema history it is classed as a documentary and not an artwork. We come across numerous images that the artist has developed right from his first film Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930), and which we meet again in what was to be his last work Le Testament d’Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus, 1960). Did Cocteau not invent anything new during his entire career? That is not the point, but rather that the pictures and events that he cultivated time after time carry us off into infinity and are never fully explained. This is as paradoxical as a sweet death or following a dreamer. When I look at the person sleeping next to me, who is alive and yet absent in her various movements and sounds, I cannot help noticing how she is both there and absent. I fail to grasp the logic of the sounds she makes, since this eludes the waking self. In her works Merenmies, time and time again, brings the hereafter into the here and now, and provides evidence, to use an example from classical terminology, of the contest between Parrhasius and Zeuxis over who could ‘fake’ the most virtuoso illusion of reality. The competition between these classical artists over who could create the more real-feeling works resulted in the birds being fooled and, finally, also in one of the competitors committing the error of believing a painted curtain to be the real thing. For me, Merenmies time and time again creates reality look-alikes, inherent in whose semblance of reality there is always the spell and impact of illusion.
One feature that runs through the artist’s production is the way that her works generate multifaceted references to both culture and art history. Multifacetedness is a keyword here, too, since the world of Merenmies’ works is situated in the landscapes of contemporary art, art history and a variety of references. We meet Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Gustave Doré (1832–1883), Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), characters from the Bible, and the presence of all manner of heroic anti-heroes, all the time. Merenmies’ heroes are courageous or courageless, but they are what they are. An amusing parallel also opens up here with La Grande Bouffe, which the artist admires. In this film, made by Marco Ferreri (1928–1997) in 1974, four gastronomes decide to eat themselves to death. The friends, along with some female company and a huge stock of food, retire to the tranquillity of a country villa in a work that parodies the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. The end result is giggle-makingly unbridled, melancholy, and totally exorbitant in its gluttony, in the absurdity of its deaths, and in its extreme mockery of the pursuit of pleasure. The deadly seriousness both disappears and is maintained in this film in which the outcome of the farce is clear right from the start. Are the main characters heroes or more like tragi-comic anti-heroes, whose death by gluttony is both painful and sickening, and has nothing of the heroic suicide about it.
Different people have appeared among the artist’s band of unconventional heroes and heroines at different times, one of them being Edith Stein (1891–1942). Stein, or Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, was a Jewish philosopher who became a Catholic nun. She died in a concentration camp and was canonized in 1998, the first Jewish-born saint since the days of the Early Church. In the lives of saints, time and time again, there is an emphasis on the distinction between ordinary life and a powerful inner need. For example, Saint Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg, real name Xenia Grigorievna Petrovna (approx. 1730–1803), the artist’s personal patron saint, is a good example of the heroes that Merenmies is interested in. Saint Xenia is the embodiment of the saints who are referred to with the expression “fool-for-Christ”. Xenia wandered St Petersburg for decades, wearing the uniform of her dead husband, a barefoot helper of the needy who gave away all she possessed, for which reason her relatives tried to dispute her right to possess it. We frequently encounter original characters like Saint Xenia in Merenmies’ production, and she has also painted Holy Fool (2006). The theme of being a fool or of rejecting ‘common sense’ has links with the artist’s production more broadly, since in her works dreamlikeness, imaginativeness and unusualness, time and time again, trigger in the viewer visions of the wonder and strangeness of the world.
In his autobiography the film director Luis Buñuel (1901–1983) wrote in surrealistically paradoxical fashion about his attitude to his imminent death and to the subsequent impossibility of keeping up with the mass media that he so despised: “Only one regret. I hate to leave while there’s so much going on. It’s like quitting in the middle of a serial. I doubt there was so much curiosity about the world after death in the past, since in those days the world didn’t change quite so rapidly or so much. Frankly, despite my horror of the press, I’d live to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers. Ghostly pale, sliding silently along the walls, my papers under my arm, I’d return to the cemetery and read all about the disasters in the world before falling back to sleep, safe and secure in my tomb.” In his writing Buñuel beautifully describes the ambivalence that makes life interesting. His most famous dictum about ambivalence – “Thank God, I’m an atheist” – is a good example of how the possibility of a new way of thinking emerges more effectively out of an ambivalence that does not divide the world mechanically into truth and lies, but specifically focuses on the middle ground between the two.
Dreamlikeness is one characterization that matches my mental images of the worlds of Merenmies’ works. In dreams and in art the associations flow more freely, strangeness feels natural, and anything is possible. Sleep is the other side of wakefulness, a side through which the person can come into contact with various unconscious processes, and transcend the limits of time and place. They can talk with and meet the dead, travel to a moon made of cheese, and move effortlessly on the middle ground between dream and reality. In the fantastic landscapes of Merenmies’ works the freedom typical of dream and art is enacted, but there is also prevalent in it a powerful sense of reality and tangibility. Their materiality is powerful and the time shifts in them have a touch of the lightness and precision of art-historical references. I have gone in an instant from the door of a medieval convent cell, via the reality of the concentrations camps, to a piggy’s wedding. And this, for me, is just as natural as it seems to be for the creator of the artworks.
To end: “[T]hat small acoustical detail remains inconsequential and unexplained. From the action’s standpoint alone, it could have been omitted without loss. The sound simply happens; all by itself; just like that.”
Milan Kundera (1929) wrote the above in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting when pondering the account of Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) youth, about which Kundera says: “When he was very young, Thomas Mann wrote a naively entrancing story about death: in that story death is beautiful, as it is beautiful to all those who dream of it when they are very young, when death is still unreal and enchanting, like a bluish voice of distances.” Kundera is so enchanted by a strange, isolated detail, which sets his imagination in motion and ultimately still remains inexplicable and isolated. Faced with Merenmies’ works I myself often experience an admiration specifically for this feature when I look at details on which I get stuck, but whose ultimate meaning is never exhausted. When this happens, the precision of the details plays host to a dense realm of different feelings, ranging from helplessness to self-confidence, or from the grotesque to the breathtakingly wonderful. Not everything slots into place or is explained, rather, it remains open and the mystery is preserved. Sigmund Freud once observed that God lives in the details, and I think that it is there that the power of artistic imagination, the mana, also resides.
And now for the last word: Before I leave this world, I really want to see Elina Merenmies’ version of the Moomins.
Literature:
Buñuel, Luis 1993: Viimeinen henkäykseni. Translated into Finnish by Sulamit Hirvas. Otava, Helsinki. [My Last Breath. Translated into English by Abigail Israel. Flamingo, London, 1985]
Deleuze, Gilles 2008: Francis Bacon. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Continuum, London & New York.
Harms, Daniil 1988: Sattumia. Collected and translated from the manuscripts by Katja Losowitch. WSOY, Helsinki. [A Fable in: The man with the black coat: Russia’s literature of the absurd by Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedenskiĭ. Translated into English by George Gibian. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1997]
Jansson, Tove 1991a: Kamala tarina. In Näkymätön lapsi ja muita kertomuksia. Translated into Finnish by Laila Järvinen. WSOY, Helsinki. [A Tale of Horror in: Tales from Moominvalley. Translated into English by Thomas Warburton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995]
Jansson, Tove 1991b: Vilijonkka joka uskoi… In Näkymätön lapsi ja muita kertomuksia. Translated into Finnish by Laila Järvinen. WSOY, Helsinki. [The Fillyjonk who Believed in Disasters in: Tales from Moominvalley. Translated into English by Thomas Warburton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995]
Kofman, Sarah 1988: The Childhood of Art. An Interpretation of Freud’s aesthetics. Columbia University Press, New York.
Kundera, Milan 1983: Naurun ja unohduksen kirja. Translated into Finnish by Kirsti Siraste. WSOY, Helsinki. [The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Translated into English by Aaron Asher. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. 1999]
Nabokov, Vladimir 1968: Nabokov Nabokovista. Translated into Finnish by Juhani Jaskari. K.J. Gummeruksen osakeyhtiö, Jyväskylä. [Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Everyman, 1999]
Sontag, Susan 1980: Approaching Artaud. In Under the Sign of Saturn. Penguin Books, London.
Tihinen, Juha-Heikki 2008: Halun häilyvät rajat. Magnus Enckellin teosten maskuliinisuuksien ja feminiinisyyksien representaatioista ja itsen luomisesta. [The uneasy borders of desire. Magnus Enckell’s representations of masculinities and femininities and the question how to create the self.] Taidehistorian seura, Helsinki.
Tihinen, Juha-Heikki 2009: Maalarin monet mietteet ja maailmat. Taide & Design 5. P. 36–49. TD-Media, Järvenpää.