Melancholy Re-Charged

One of my favourite memories from visits to Kari Cavén's studio is the time when his then about 5-year-old daughter was with us in the car, sitting very relaxed in her child-safety seat and listening to our usual small talk about art. Suddenly she told us: "I will be an artist when I grow up." I then asked her what kind of artist she planned to be. The answer was immediate: "A conceptual artist."

Kari Cavén's art can be characterized both as visual and as text-like. It is the kind of conceptual art that is based on material objects, but these function solely as triggers to further re-working and thinking. The starting point is the choice of an object - something used and discarded, or brand new, but unusable. This is the starting point, but the found objects are worked on further. They are combined with new found elements, or something is added to them, or they are put into a new setting or incorporated into another visual syntax. This leads us into the myriad fields of associations that emerge in between the initial object/thing and the alterations that it has undergone. Here I am consciously adding the word 'thing', with its concrete and abstract meanings in the English language, so as to make clear that it is not just physical objects that we are talking about, but also the meanings that surround the physical object and which are opened up to us while watching the thing. The gateways to these new configurations are often referred to in the works' carefully chosen titles, which can be found phrases, or formulated for the occasion.

Walking around an exhibition by Kari Cavén creates a very particular feeling. You are surrounded by visual richness that keeps your eyes busy, but there is also a sense that you are actually in your own mind and world. This is where the ideas emerge and the smile is born. I have become more conscious of the kind of smile that these encounters give rise to. The first reaction is often connected with shared humour, a funny statement, a cool twist. When thinking a little bit more deeply about what one sees and how one reacts, an acute awareness of the underlying melancholy of the artist's vocabulary emerges. We see discarded tools, machines, abandoned toys, plastic pearls, pieces of furniture; pieces of lives, fragments of time. When these reactions are combined, the encounter with his art contains both this melancholic side, and the way that the objects have been re-charged with new meanings, sometimes critical ones, but more often alive and joyful, giving new hope.

… When looking at the toy ducks, which we associate with babies' bathing rituals, we can almost hear their loudly expressed enjoyment of the warm water, their physical, visual joy as the colourful ducks share the watery element with them. But in Cavén's installation there are dozens of them, but no longer as bathing partners, instead they have been given new roles. Their task is still to carry some of their original meaning, while also creating new ones in these new settings. There is a melancholic side to the ducks in these new situations, even though, as parts of an installation, we still connect them with simple, innocent joy and happy memories. But their time as toys is short and, when over, the duck has changed its meaning. In its old role and setting it is still a sweet, nostalgic memory inspiring the kind of melancholy that is usual when one sees one's childhood toys. But here it has taken on a new role and a new life: in a way, it takes on the role of the funny little toy. Its sweetness and innocence have been used as meanings and elements in an artwork, but the bathing scene is a thing of the past.

The register of Cavén's objects is wide, and seems not to have any strict internal logic, which, however, seems precisely to be its logic. We are entering the simultaneously banal and mysterious field of the everyday. This field has connections with spoken language, as opposed to the written one. With his specific exploration of the materials of the everyday, we can think of Walter Benjamin's view of the everyday and its trash aesthetics, as well as Michel de Certeau's poetic language, within which he attempted to create a language that was based on listening, on memories, and on unmediated descriptions.

Maaretta Jaukkuri

The writer is Chief Curator of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.
Language editing Mike Garner.