Open Enrollment | In Poor Taste,* Lunch with Jani Leinonen
Jani Leinonen
I was waiting in line to buy a movie ticket when I heard the news: Jani Leinonen had been incarcerated. Conversations with my Finnish friends in the previous weeks had been gripped with anxiety over the fate of a kidnapped Ronald McDonald figurine from a McDonald’s restaurant in Helsinki. A series of YouTube videos chronicled the antics of the activist group, the Food Liberation Army: beginning with the abduction of a Ronald McDonald statue on January 31, the delivery of eight demands to the McDonald’s corporation to divulge unsavory secrets of their food production processes (see video below), an invitation proffered to McDonald’s employees to speak out, and lastly the grim execution of Ronald McDonald on Friday, February 11, 2011.
Nearly two weeks following Ronald’s guillotine-style beheading, Leinonen agreed to recount his recent stay in the big house with me. I had imagined that the artist Jani Leinonen would match the bombastic hype of the events reported in the recent media flurry. Parallels were drawn–I hoped with hyperbole–between the Food Liberation Army and terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. I prepared myself to face a brash and dangerous character. Truthfully, I was afraid—I don’t make it a habit of lunching with potential terrorists.
My fears were allayed within minutes. It was immediately apparent that the artist and the affable person across the table in a red woven hat with white snowflakes overlap in name only. As we talked, Leinonen picked at a smudge of white paint on his right hand, a gesture that removed the last vestiges of the artist from the conversation. Though the artist might dabble in petty theft and vandalism, Jani, the ordinary person, enjoys snowboarding and strawberry milkshakes. My erroneous preconceptions of Leinonen disintegrated as he explained a belief in the artist’s responsibility to mediate social and civil injustices.
A contemporary artist such as Leinonen is a cultivated spokesperson; the artist is merely a mouthpiece for the cause or agenda that fuels the work. In graduate school in the United States, it cynically occurred to me that self-promotion can sometimes be an indispensable stratagem for success; cleverly, it can be dissolved into the conceptual thrust of one’s artistic output. In Finland, however, those who willingly bask in the limelight are often reproached for immodesty. Far from an exception to the rule, international coverage of Leinonen’s mock terrorism landed him in jail.
Open Enrollment: An Ordinary Day
At 7:30 am, the alarm clock on my Nokia cell phone rouses me from sleep. In preparation of the minus double-digit weather, I layer like a Renaissance oil painting —two pairs of tights, two pairs of socks, long underwear, black legwarmers over my jeans, one turtleneck and one wool sweater. My eyes and feet are glued to the ground lest I should tumble on the ice. The sun rises from a pink horizon as I walk to school.
The corner of Kunnalliskodintie and Koskelantie at 8:30 am
My woodblock printing course officially begins at nine but students drift in around half-past. Today we will start to carve our blocks. Choosing a worthy subject for my woodblock has been agonizing. The process of preparing multiple blocks for color printing is time-consuming; I want to ensure I am adequately attached to the image that will surely take hours to whittle and chisel to life. Moreover, traveling has a tendency to afflict me with the artist’s equivalent of writer’s block. I have difficulty absorbing and producing simultaneously. Though I’ve tried, I cannot keep my eyes open when I sneeze.
Eventually, I decide on a photo I took of a house from the 1930s. The house is on Intiankatu, part of my daily walk to and from school. I get distracted at the library’s copy machine, flipping through the pages of a book on Matisse before heading back to class. Last month I saw Matisse’s Paysage marocain (Acanthes) (1912) at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. The soft lavender atmosphere and lush neon vegetation in Matisse’s painting are alien to the piercing white snow and deep indigo sky from my photograph. The drama of Finland’s climate and the exaggerated angles of the raking sunlight rework the natural world in a bewildering way. As a result, the majority of my recent sketches are brooding landscapes. I assumed that Helsinki’s distinct post-war architecture would be most captivating, but I have been oddly more enthralled with spruce and birch trees.
Open Enrollment: An Afternoon with Miina Äkkijyrkkä
Lasipalatsi Plaza
As if I am perched above on a watchtower, I am peering out the window of Café Java in the Lasipalatsi plaza with my friend and Finnish translator, Marjukka. The second story window affords a panoramic view of pedestrians on the street below. Ironically, I am skipping my Finnish language course today to spend the afternoon interviewing the inimitable artist, Miina Äkkijyrkkä .
When she arrives, Miina Äkkijyrkkä is dressed head to toe in animal fur. She is wearing a dark brown floor-length fur coat and a bright red fur hat. Bypassing introductions, Miina tells Marjukka in Finnish that the café is too loud. Within seconds we are whisked away, down the street to Kosmos, an elegant restaurant designed by the architect Alvar Aalto in 1924. The restaurant, formerly a popular haunt among artists and writers, today proudly showcases an Äkkijyrkkä sculpture called Bisse Baby, 2002 in the front window.
Ravintola Kosmos
As we talked in a quiet corner booth, Miina gesticulated grandly. She pulled at our tablecloth and circled her hands in the air, making amusing sound effects such as a flushing toilet. Her face was expressive, her voice, distinct—low and gravelly. One time, she whispered to us and once, she nearly cried. With one watch on each hand and her wild white hair, I began to understand her reputation as one of Finland’s most colorful personalities in the art world.
There are many reasons why I wanted to meet with Miina Äkkijyrkkä (b. 1949, néé Riitta Loiva, though she has also used the alias Liina Lång). For nearly four decades, Miina has made a career almost exclusively based on the image of the cow. Her love for the cows is the foundation for her work as a sculptor and a cattle-raiser. Her steadfast commitment to Finnish cattle at once evinces her sincerity, validates her work,—and frequently, spins a web of controversy around her.
Open Enrollment: Artists Are Like Rats
Aalto University, University of Art (located at the Arabia Ceramics Factory)
“We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.” — David Hockney
Sometime in the afternoon on the second day of hanging a recent installation of my work at a gallery space at school, I was approached by one of my professors. He asked if the exhibition was related to my research.
I found myself unable to come up with an appropriate answer. After three cups of coffee and nary a drop of water, I was finding it hard to focus: a fluorescent light flickered in my peripheral vision. I looked at the spectrum of bold, metallic and iridescent craft papers cut into the patterns of American pinwheel quilts; I didn’t see an immediate connection between this work and the work I had been doing a few days earlier, reading feminist revisionist history in the library.
Drained but buzzed, I mumbled, “Not really, not exactly.”
Aralis Library at TAIK, seen from Eero Aarnio's 1966 Ball Chair
The beginning of my second semester as a student at Aalto University marks the halfway point of my time in Finland. As a student at this leading design center, the question of research and its relationship to my artistic work has continued as a reoccurring concern both to me and among my peers.
