Doubting Thomas
Korkeila’s Baroque pose

Ba-roque, b&’r, -rak’, -rok adj., often cap. [F, fr. MF barroque irregularly shaped (of a pearl), fr. Pg barroco irregularly shaped pearl] (1765): of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a style of artistic expression prevalent esp. in the 17^th century that is marked generally by the use of complex forms, bold ornamentation, and the juxtaposition of contrasting elements often conveying the sense of drama, movement, and tension 2: characterised by a grotesqueness, extravagance, or flamboyance 3: irregularly shaped – used of gems a baroque pearl. ¹

The discourse about Jukka Korkeila’s paintings has usually centred on notions connected to German neo-expressionism, contemporary culture’s visual overflow, Japanese experimental music and gay subcultures. ² All the above-mentioned observations have validity but, instead of repeating what has already been written, I wanted to find over- or under-tones which might link Korkeila’s production to older traditions – namely to Baroque and Minimalism.

Despite their apparent differences, these seemingly disparate phenomena share, similar ontological beliefs, perhaps most importantly the concept of theatricality. A mistrust of essentialist notions about objects of art, their media and the role of the artist and that of the viewer is also integral to both these movements. In their original use, both terms contain a pejorative slant, which can luckily be turned into a positive and meaningful one. As importantly, we should remember that Baroque (and Minimalism) should not be understood as styles but as perspectives, or as cultural attitudes.

I am writing this text in a building designed by Finnish architect Erik Bryggman. He was a colleague and a catalytic figure to Alvar Aalto, both being vehement propagators of ‘The International Style’ (here better known as Functionalism) at certain points of their careers. From outside, where a schlager festival is taking place at full volume, come the muted sounds of Finnish tango, which are actually quite apt. Baroque, Finnish tango, Functionalism and Jukka Korkeila’s paintings are all manifestations of the interplay between strictly puritanical and normatised culture on the one hand and the culture of ‘unpure’ syncretist values and attitudes on the other.

In protestant countries, with their iconoclastic picture-ridden churches, fat-free milk, decaffeinated coffee, ultra-light cigarettes, idealised thinness, and abstract art, Baroque has always been an uncommon, vulgar and alien entity. ³ This also applies to residents of more southern parts of Europe; for Benedetto Croce "Baroque was never art, and art was never Baroque."

Baroque does not lend itself easily to discussions about Nordic culture and its manifestations. Finnish poet Markku Paasonen has, quite fittingly, stated that "since we don’t have a Baroque of our own, we must invent one." This is not easy in a land where "fat men write thick novels consisting of ascetic and slim sentences." ⁴ Baroque language is oppositional to the Finnish ideal of stripped-down communication, where excess is avoided at all cost and where any surplus causes anxiety. On the contrary, Baroque speech is always too narrow and it can never say enough.

This idea of a non-linear and generous Baroque way of reading (and writing) offers some tools to unravel Korkeila’s works, where the overabundant picture-plane is never static and offers constantly changing routes. No single glance can embrace it, as opposed to the pure, instantaneous experience of modernist artwork. As in Korkeila’s wall painting Theory of Penal Abduction (2002), in which, over the trees of Schwarzwalde, a German flag hovers, embellished with a person sticking out his behind, this richly narrative moment is only one sequence among many. On the other hand, we must take into account that the viewer can halt this swarming plethora of moments. For Korkeila "a painting is an imaginary window. Your eye moves around the surface of the painting, registers certain things and may construct a comprehensive whole out of it all. In painting, the viewer can freely put together different pieces, choose how long she looks at the image, and ascribe subjective meanings to the narrative." ⁵

It would seem that Korkeila’s art does have features or units that would lend themselves to a Baroque experience. Adjectives like ‘bold’, ‘convoluted’, ‘elaborate’, ‘extravagant’, ‘exuberant’, ‘fanciful’, ‘fantastic’, ‘flamboyant’, ‘florid’, ‘grotesque’, ‘ornate’, ‘overdecorated’, ‘overwrought’, and ‘vigorous’ could be easily applied when describing his paintings. But, in addition to these terms, some of Korkeila’s works – notably watercolours and certain individual paintings – are more focused and, although similar in spirit, do offer slightly sparser vistas at a first sight. Upon closer inspection, peculiar motifs appear which shake the perception in a totally new direction. These ‘punctums’ include, for example, strangely twisted ‘balls’ under a protagonist’s armpit in Tyrolean Sunset (2004) or a panda bear appearing between arse cheeks in Patience (2004).

Like most of Korkeila’s paintings, Tyrolean Sunset is a work "whose subject is overruled by an odd detail that takes over the representation, abducting it in different directions, resisting coherence, and thereby provoking resistance. The detail or ‘navel’ that functions in this way sets in motion the process of performance in a painting that entangles the viewer across time; a process, moreover, that itself takes time, thus foregrounding the double temporality of the image and the look that takes hold over it." ⁶ These ‘pregnant moments’ and other condensations of events in Korkeila’s works "lead to a movement that can only be observed within continuous time, not in collapsed or atomised time. This makes them, and their ‘folds’, Baroque rather than classical."7 In this labyrinthine continuum, meanings are generated from one sign to the next, back and forth. Simultaneously, painting is transformed into a site where tactile, corporeal, haptic, visual and maybe acoustic and olfactory perceptions and sensations occur. Asserting meanings to these perceptions is not – even if it might seem so – a free play, but always provisional and context-bound. The same applies to Brazilian Baroque experience and art. It is fragmented and non-linear, made up of ruptures and allegories and, by its very definition, it resists essentialism, constantly producing new expressions. ⁸

"The expanded Karelian house can in a way be compared with a biological cell formation. The possibility of a larger and more complete building is always open." ⁹
Alvar Aalto

In addition to Baroque, Minimalism and the heated discussions it generated, are well suited when looking at Planet Korkeila’s flora and fauna. In order to see more clearly into an artist’s practice, it is sometimes good to go back in time. The discussions around painting have not really progressed very far from those in the heyday of modern painting and certain, almost rustic, concepts, ideals and values still hold for some. Examining just one of them, art historian Michael Fried’s concept of theatricality is useful in relation to Korkeila’s works. Fried’s ideals and opinions about the position and role of painting could seemingly not be further from those shared by contemporary painters. But, his categories and criteria can be employed in reverse. The things he regards as most abhorrent are in fact the most apt when discussing Korkeila’s art in general and his wall paintings in particular.

‘Art and Objecthood’ was first published in 1967 in Artforum. In the article, Fried attacked Donald Judd, Robert Morris and the other Minimalists for being too ‘literalist’. According to Fried, the decadent literalist, i.e. Minimal art, theatricalised the relationship between the artwork and the viewer. For him, the experience of true and authentic modernist artwork involved the suspension both of objecthood and any sense of the duration of time. One of the cardinal sins for Fried was the time-based quality of literalist works: the experience of such works persisted in time. Literalist art was essentially a presentation of endless, or indefinite, duration. The literalist preoccupation with time – more precisely with the duration of the experience – was paradigmatically theatrical. This preoccupation marked the profound difference between literalist work and modernist painting and sculpture. It was as though one’s experience of the latter had no duration because, at every moment, the work itself is wholly manifest. It was this continuous and entire ‘presentness’, amounting to perpetual creation itself, to instantaneousness, that, for Fried, was the virtue of modernist work in defeating theatre. ¹⁰

Multifarious techniques, as well as an opposition to preconceived ideas about painting – such as the only acceptable or relevant way being an easel format – come across in Korkeila’s works. To him "the idea to execute a wall painting came out of a bunch of random impulses that set me thinking about whether painting directly onto a wall is at all possible. The answer wasa positive experience. I got sufficient distance from conventional rectangular painting, which often incorporates an element of that feeling of anxiety linked with the shape. At the same time, the painting process reverted to its original model. It was an action that happened directly in the space.The underlying reason [for doing this] has been the constant urge to push the boundaries of painting in general and my personal limitations in particular. This questioning is very much at the core of the politics of [my] painting, and always has been. Painting for a specific space brings the painting back to its original situation, when works were executed in situ. Painting is still both a viable idea and a way of working. Site-specific painting highlights the medium’s special characteristics and gives a different insight into its relationship to other media. I also like the disturbing effect that wall painting has on the object-like character of easel painting. The large format is an invitation to the viewer to become a part of the work. A large wall painting alters the viewer’s experience of the space and brings in corporeal sensations. This experience is one possibility among many in a painterly kaleidoscope. In a way, painting comes close to the physicality of the art of dance."

Fried did not share this belief. For him, the work of art was supposed to compel conviction and the central character of non-art was its relation to theatre. Literalist sensibility was theatrical because it was concerned with the actual circumstances in which the viewer encountered literalist work. These instances were situations which included the beholder, where physical participation became necessary. Writing about Minimal works, Fried pointed out the distancing character of the said pieces, whereby works confronted the viewer, were an obstruction. The instance became a total situation containing even the viewer’s body. ¹¹

The presence of literalist art was a theatrical effect, or quality, a kind of stage presence. It was aggressive and obtrusive. Something is said to have ‘presence’ when it demands that the beholder takes it into an account and takes it seriously, when the fulfilment of that demand consists simply of being aware of it. For Fried, this situation was akin to that of being in the presence of another person. ¹²

This disturbing interdisciplinarity is also at the centre of Baroque, which is never fixed or permanent but constantly changing and elusive. A pivotal component in this flux is time, whether in the narrative of a novel or of a painting. In relation to painting and its reception, the immediacy revered by modernist theorists is utterly alien to Baroque (or Neo-Baroque) beliefs. Robert Storr has written about the temporal speficity of painting: "the fact that the image is static is among its defining characteristics – and its prime virtues – in a culture where most other images move. It is the form that grants the viewer the greatest autonomy, the form in which the viewer controls time rather than the artist. When you’ve had enough of looking at static images go to the movies or watch TV. When you’ve had enough of those go and look at a painting. There’s room for both, appetite for both, need for both." ¹³ According to Mieke Bal we have options and should not uncritically submit to the cult of speed. According to her: "visual culture today is not locked up in speed and continuing to believe this deprives us the ability to slow down and intensify the experience of time. The negative characterisation of our time as a visual overload is rather nostalgic paranoia that is essentially modernist and harks back to the fifties and the early days of television." ¹⁴

Temporality, then, is an important, if not the major, instrument for the production of correlative engagement. Zygmunt Bauman saw dangers in the "production of moral indifference" through the instantaneity of contemporary media, its temporality of a "self-consuming present."15 Bal sees that the "contemporary Baroque aesthetic [...] can explore the possibilities of an alternative temporality in which the past is subsumed but not lost in the present, because the present itself, its pace and instantaneity, is called to a halt, slowed down, and made an object of reflection." ¹⁶

Paintings can provide sites for this reflection. But, as Bal so astutely states in her book Quoting Caravaggio, the reflection of the past in the present should affect not only today’s world, but also the past, reflected one (and its artworks). For Korkeila "painting is a pretty slow and inefficient medium when it comes to affecting dominant discourses or modes of thought. The effect is never immediate. You can spend years looking at the work. It’s a cumulative process and the interaction between the work and the viewer requires certain modes of presentation, which many people consider to be out of date. Painting is an intimate medium, which has the capacity to change and enrich the viewer’s perspective on the world, but it takes time and openness from the viewer. The work as a physical object talks to her, to her alone, in a certain space and time. In a sense, painting as a medium has its limits. The encounter occurs in a specific situation and a reproduction can never replace the actual work."

"The painter’s vision is not a view upon the outside, a merely physical-optical relation with the world. The world no longer stands before him, through representation, rather it is the painter to whom the things of the world give birth by sort of concentration of coming-to-itself of the visible. Ultimately painting relates to nothing at all among things unless it is first of all autofigurative. It is a spectacle of something only by being a spectacle of nothing, by breaking the skin of things to show how the world becomes a world."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

So far, I have scratched the surface of Korkeila’s practice, considering his works as greater than the size of his frames. The majority of his works are undoubtedly paintings and it seems appropriate to discuss them in a climate where paintings are either seen as redundant or too controversial. Hubert Damisch has identified a few pivotal facts about paintings and painters and is relevant to this discussion: "…it is still necessary that the painter succeeds in demonstrating to us that painting is something we positively cannot do without, that it is indispensable to us, and that it would be madness – worse still, a historical error – to let it lie fallow today."¹⁷He continues: "…the problem, for whoever writes about it, should not be so much to write about painting as to try to do something with it, without indeed claiming to understand it better than the painter does […] to try to see a little more clearly, thanks to painting, into the problems with which the writer is concerned, and which are not only, not even primarily, problems with painting."¹⁸

For Korkeila, a somewhat hostile environment seems to be ideal: "Being on the margins gives me the possibility of developing my medium in peace. The idea of the marginality of painting is connected with boring, endlessly repeated declarations about the death of painting. The vitality of painting becomes clearer with every deathblow and denial. There’s not much use repeatedly flogging a dead horse. This horse is, so it seems, so dangerous that the attacks keep on coming. If the attitudes and reactions were indifferent and low key, I might start believing in the idea of its death. Whenever paintings are presented in a contemporary context, you hear muttering about the futility of painting. It’s all very cliquish and boringly one-sided."

In relation to this dead horse and its artificially extended field Robert Storr has written: "…what good is there in painting pretending to be something else, in painting competing – and invariably losing – with other media? Meanwhile, painting by other means – computers or photography – is not painting but painterly computer art or painterly photography – while painting proper need only measure up to the challenges it poses itself that is sufficient – and exceedingly difficult." ¹⁹

The theme of XXVI São Paulo Biennale is Image Smugglers. According to Biennale’s main curator Alfons Hug "...the no-man’s land of aesthetics begins where the normal world ends. Artists are the border guards of the realm that lies beyond reality, where the power of interpretation is no longer a sovereign right of politicians or economic gurus.[...] Artists create a power-free zone, and as such, a counter-world running opposite to the existing one: a land of emptiness, of silence and respite, where the humdrum life that surrounds us is brought to a standstill for a moment. But it is also a land of riddles where the flood of images surging in on us from the breeding grounds of kitsch are encoded. By blazing a trail through the barriers of the material world, the artist becomes an intercultural smuggler of images." Korkeila’s art is (in its Baroqueness) a manifestation of such sentiments. In their form and content, their ‘syncretism’, they delineate a territory for the individual as is the case with Brazilian Candomble or Capoiera. To put it briefly, they create possible, not fictional, worlds. For Mieke Bal "Possible worlds are based on a logic of ramification determining the range of possibilities that emerge from an actual state of affairs; fictional worlds are based on a parallelism that guarantees their autonomy in relation to the actual world.[...] Possible worlds, however, despite being distinguishable worlds, do not share this logical autonomy." ²⁰ Korkeila’s oppositional stance, his own version of a (sub)culture is made flesh in his Baroque artefacts. One is even tempted to read too much of the Baroque into his works and to regard, for example, Eye of the Needle (2004) or Red Shift (2004) as direct paraphrases of Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas (1601–1602). Luckily, Korkeila does not quote or appropriate (at least not as blatantly and tediously as some of the heroes from the ‘canon’ of postmodernist painting). His semi-fictional paintings "are neither parallel, nor, consequently, autonomous from, the actual world. In fact they militate against such autonomy, precisely quoting the way Baroque art militated for an enfolded, entrapped relationship with the real world." ²¹

According to Korkeila: "the visual arts are among the counter-strategies to the ever-present, dominant culture of corporate capitalism. An artist can optimally act as a one-person terrorist cell resisting mediocre tastes, which try to negate the existence of contemporary art. Art is a tool against all kinds of prejudice, from xenophobia to fatophobia. Market forces enforce this racistic thinking because fat doesn’t sell. Anybody can mock a fat person and still retain her political correctness. Fat people are the last niggers in the western world. And this all crystallises in meetings between individuals. Think of being an overweight, coloured gay guy in the Bible belt of Finnish Ostrobothnia."

He continues: "Art offers possibilities for un-hierarchical worlds, but we should not forget the inherent capitalist ‘dog eat dog’ mentality in the artworld. The silent and the weak are easily forgotten. The solidarity of the artworld is flimsy and opportunistic. You have very little time for introspection and reflection. In Finland the artworld is largely left wing, but the actions and ideology behind it are very much those of neo-liberal capitalism. It’s not enough to be talented; you need both social and marketing skills. It makes me wonder when the new solidarity will emerge, and when we will start to share. The Internet offers some small shreds of hope. The four-million-strong rebel hordes of Kazaa Lite are one example. A total of 700 million files of music, images and software free for downloading. I hope some of this mentality will also seep into the artworld." And it surely will, in the curvaceous sweeps of Jukka Korkeila’s ‘mannerist’ images.

1 Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edn.
2 See f.ex. Mika Hannula, Kolmas tila, väärinymmärtäminen eettisenä lähtökohtana. (Third Space, misunderstanding as an ethical principle), Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, 2001, pp. 71-77 (in Finnish).
3 Markku Paasonen, ’Laskosten taide’ (The Art of Folds), Nuori Voima, No. 2/02, 2002, pp. 3-6.
4 Ibid.
5 See also, Kari Immonen, ‘Painting as a Tool against Prejudice’, framework, No. 1/04, 2004, pp. 52-53.
6 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 31.
7 Ibid. p. 136.
8 Katya Garcia Anton, ‘Beatriz Milhazes: Towards a Tropical Syntax’, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting Hybridity, Hegemony, Historicism, Tate Liverpool and Liverpool University Press, 2003, pp. 171-172.
9 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture a Critical History, Thames and Hudson, 1992, p. 192.
10 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967), Art in Theory 1900–1990, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, p. 832.
11 Ibid. p. 825.
12 Ibid. p. 827.
13 Robert Storr, ’On Painting’, M’ARS, No. 1-2, 2001, p.15.
14 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 175.
15 Ibid, p. 64.
16 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1999. p. 65.
17 Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model, MIT Press, 1993, p. 255.
18 Ibid. p. 257.
19 Robert Storr, ’On Painting’, M’ARS, No. 1-2, 2001, p.15.
20 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 24.
21 Ibid.