We have not earned a thing
1.
In 2021, I received my first award. It was the Finnish State Prize for Media Art, €14,000 tax-free. Like most of the recipients, I was genuinely surprised by the attention and, of course, overjoyed by the jackpot.
My analysis of my reward settled, in time, as follows: The quality of art – the definition of which you may determine yourself – is so comically low in Finland that, in the end, almost any highly educated artist who has achieved some degree of prominence can get a state prize. Otherwise, there are not enough people to reward.
I myself have been involved in selecting the winners in many different juries. We didn’t choose the artist primarily because we were all impressed by their works, but rather because it was “about time” for that artist to get an award.
I am not aware of any discussions on the criteria for the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art. One of the first prizes was awarded in 2016 to Terike Haapoja, whom I admire. The jury was led by curator Eva Neklayeva, who in 2014 had been the director of International Theatre Festival Baltic Circle, where Oikeusjuttu (The Trial) by Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson had premiered. I was therefore not able to take the award seriously, because it just seemed like mutual backslapping amongst the Finnish art scene.
The jury and shortlist have become much more international in the ten years since. The part of ANTI festival's programme that is linked to the prize has – quite imperceptibly – become one of the most exciting aspects of the event. I have been impressed by the works of winning artists of recent years, such as Brian Fuata and Latai Taumoepeau. After seeing their work, I was not surprised to see them receive awards.
I don't think they feel the same way, because few artists are that egotistical. Artists generally find the hassle of awards embarrassing, even if it feels good to be recognised.
I was once talking to a shortlisted artist in a taxi in Kuopio. They were bothered by the idea of coming to Finland to peddle themself for a prize (shortlisted artists are now invited to present a work at the festival). Another artist had already experienced the whole rigmarole for the umpteenth time and was admirably stoical about such festivities while showing me how much they’d been using their meditation app.
2.
However, despite artists’ feelings, art can be awarded. There are good works and bad works. It’s difficult to reach a consensus, of course, and it is from this debate that our aesthetic space for discussion emerges.
In Finland, we have quietly decided that it is not appropriate to talk about the quality of artistic works, because someone might find it offensive. Instead, we argue that all artists are terribly interesting.
Of course, one might wonder why we want to reward artists. For this, we need to focus our attention on the funders. The Saastamoinen Foundation, which sponsors the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, probably employs people who love to see artists kowtowing to money and upward social mobility: many of the projects they support produce as a by-product a baseless image of artists as members of a respected profession, exemplary and creatively upper-class citizens.
This staid idea also guides Finland’s only master’s level art school, the University of the Arts. It is a vocational school in terms of content, but a university in terms of setting, so that rich people do not have to be ashamed of their unambitious children who became artists.
Institutions such as the above create the landscape against which the rewarding of artists in Finland must be understood.
It is gratifying that ANTI Festival’s programme is not driven by such hubris. The festival has seen artists from a wide range of backgrounds. The artists nominated do not represent a glossy sample of the “biggest names in international art”, as the Finnish art world used to write in press releases back in the 2010s.
3.
It is probably worth mentioning that I do not think that only artists working abroad are good and that artists working in my own country are automatically bad.
The fact is that there is no serious art scene in Finland in any field of art. Artists working in Finland become great artists in spite of the Finnish art world, not because of it.
Our art fields are based on two pillars: pity and confusion. By the latter, I mean the complete lack of historical knowledge and meaningful spaces for discussion within the environment in which Finnish art takes place. No one really knows why we maintain our art world. I guess you have to have one in order to pass as a democracy?
At this point, the most important task of Finnish art is probably justifying our current government, which punishes the poor and the immigrants and flirts with the far right; there they are, those darling artists, using the state’s money to make flimsy installations about the climate crisis. See, the freedom of expression and social democracy aren’t dead! There is no other societal meaning for art to be seen here in this miserable little NATO base that opposes desire and passion.
A conversation often recurs when I have coffee with my colleagues living in Finland. Both of us feel that our works disappear into a black hole here. The importance of the works is only related to their temporary visibility on social media. Public discussions of art are about mysterious “structures” and never, for example, about beauty or the continuities between different artists’ works.
The context for artistic thinking is completely absent in Finnish art culture. It is therefore probably safe not to talk about the quality of art, and that is why even the prizes seem so absurd and arbitrary.
The second of the pillars, pity, explains the kind of art that is maintained in Finland. The relevance of works is never the only criterion for awarding prizes or grants, for example, if it is a criterion at all – the pity caused by the recipient or a guilty conscience in the jury becomes just as important.
If I may exaggerate, it could be said that transgender people like me receive almost unsolicited funding for their muddled therapy projects. The associations that run the woefully inadequate group exhibitions year after year get their operating grants because, after all, you would not dare cut them off even if you had reason to. As if projects that make art about important subjects are rewarded with generous funding because the jury is ashamed of its own meat-eating and air travel, or whatever is topical at the time.
I have been invited by various foundations to award grants and have repeatedly come across pity as a justification. The Kone Foundation was, incidentally, a refreshing exception, as I had little need to justify my arbitrary choices; admittedly, for applicants, this arbitrariness is a bitter pill to swallow.
4.
Should an artist then be ashamed of receiving an award or a grant? Of course not. We artists are roving swindlers who take everything we get our hands on. I think that’s beautiful and funny.
Let’s use myself as an example: I’m an artist because I don’t want to work or explain my doings. Recognitions and such cheer me up, but they’re not the be-all and end-all. I don’t ask for anything, but I take everything.
But aren't awards a career-enhancing thing? I'm not so sure, due to the strangeness of the juries’ criteria (e.g. residencies, fellowships), as described above. Success can just as easily be punished by “they’ve gotten enough”. The desire for equalisation is one of the main social democratic passions.
One way or another: I have “earned” absolutely nothing, because I have chosen to stay outside the measurable world of work, doing my own thing. Perhaps the awards are an attempt to drag art into a metrics-loving society, and sometimes such efforts succeed: for example, a major literary prize can send a message to the public that this author is now a must-read.
If an artist's work goes unsubsidised and unrewarded, they have little to say about it because they try to get others to pay for the ideas they’ve come up with and which no one has actually asked them to do. The artist is like a shoplifter who, once caught, can only smile and move on to the next supermarket.
I have sometimes imagined the Finnish art world without grants and prizes. If all grants were cut from “professional” Finnish art institutions and artists, we would have to ask ourselves what we are actually doing and why. A proposal forced into an attractive EU project grant, which happened to pass and therefore now has to be implemented, would not be a sufficient reason.
The Finns seem to love self-induced pain, so the art scene could distinguish itself by spectacularly and voluntarily getting its ass kicked by collectively refusing all subsidies from the far-right government. That, if anything, would be a work worthy of an award.
But we won't do that. Instead, we’ll politely send our CVs out for more and more applications, we’ll demonstrate against the VAT increase on art in a civilised and calm manner, we'll create our works in a way that makes us look like mature professionals, and we'll learn the latest concepts so that foreign curatorial visitors don't have to be ashamed of us. Then we are moved to tears when someone acknowledges our hard work.
Kaino Wennerstrand
the author is not a victim
Translation by Essi Brunberg
Live Art Prize 10 Years Publication – Index:
Jennie Klien: The ANTI Festival International Live Art Prize: A Brief History in 3 Parts
The first 9 years of Live Art Prize in pictures
Anna Teuwen: The radicality of opening up – introducing Jota Mombaça, Joshua Serafin, Autumn Knight and Tiziano Cruz
Kaino Wennerstrand: We have not earned a thing
