Problem With Youth

View to Kamppi, shopping center in Helsinki Finland
Originally uploaded by reiskas

I remember when I was a teenager and we took the bus to Helsinki, we did not hang out in the cute little designer shops - we went to the shopping mall Forum and to the department store Stockmann. At that time I thought Helsinki consisted of the triangle Railway Station - Stockmann - Bus Station. And to be very honest, I was quite content.

Two years ago a gigantic mall called Kamppi was opened in the centre of Helsinki and today - as it would be a grand surprise - the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper writes about the way the teenagers have claimed it their space. They write about how these 13-17-year-olds hang out there every day. According to the article, teenagers come even from the neighbouring towns and municipalities to hang out.

The interviews with the adults really got me annoyed. You found shop owners and real estate maintenance people complaining that these teenagers are using this semipublic space. In the comments on the website under the article someone expressed their concern for the fact that teenagers hang out in a commercial space.However, in the pictures you saw not hoodlums but happy young people. The article described how the teenagers hug and high-five each other and how there seems to be a truly communal feeling.

These views by the adults are concerns that I hear in my work producing StrangerFestival often: public officials are extremely concerned that young people "don't realise" that there are so many services and places provided for them. That they just go and make their own things - a way of working boosted by the Internet.

I find myself often thinking that maybe the problem is that they actually do realise what is on offer but they do prefer spaces where no one tells them what they should be doing. Let's face it, It is guite human actually: none of us really enjoy being pushed around.

Most youth cultures have some sort of rebellion and DIY (Do It Yourself) mentality written into them. This seems very difficult for the well-meaning adults to handle who would rather wish to monitor and control the teenagers. The Kamppi shopping mall case reminds me of the fuss around the Main Post Office and Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA when a lot of babyboomers and pensioners expressed their great concerns that young skateboarders were using the squares around these buildings for their own use and "even skateboarding around the statue of our national hero Mannerheim". My head is about to explode in discussions like this: the same people who brand teenagers are passive and disinterested, are actually dissing every phenomena where young people are entrepeneurial, visible and creative.

The Artist Was There When Life Happened

samilukkarinen
Originally uploaded by amsterboy

"I don't want to present things like for instance Andy Warhol did by bringing Campbell's soup cans into an art environment. That is just changing the context. A regular thing does not turn interesting only by presenting it in an art gallery. (..) I don't want to make art that talks about art or raises discussion on art itself. (...) Sometimes people who demand more money, education and attention for art sound like those Formula 1 loonies who demand a Formula 1 track to every village."

These quotes from an interview with Finnish artist Jani Leinonen in VELI magazine were very much in line with my feelings today as I walked through the exhibitions of the Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA in Helsinki. I found myself being extremely moved by Nan Goldin's photography and one painting by Sami Lukkarinen (see pic). Let me try and explain why.

Goldin is a renowned American photographer who has made a career from documenting her own life and those usually considered to be on the downside: transsexuals, prostitutes, sexual minorities, victims of domestic violence, junkies and HIV positive people. Lukkarinen is a young Finnish star of the art world whose painting is part of a series where he worked with photos people used in their personal ads online.

Goldin's photos show people not at their best: with a bruised eye, sweaty and shiny forehead, bad hair day, in dirty underwear on a mattress that has turned brownish yellow surrounded by wallpaper that has lost its original colour ages ago. She shows people who look straight into the camera usually with a demanding look in their eyes, very seldom smiling. Goldin does not ask for pity for these people which a fresh and welcome take. She shows sex and life as they happen not in Hollywood but in cheap motels and run-down apartments. Her work shows human beings in full flesh, a bit scruffy but very present.

Lukkarinen's work then again shows people in the ways they see themselves at their best - often unconsciously reproducing common pornography and advertising imagery. They are not models but they push themselves out there, making themselves available for arousal and evaluation.

I found myself understanding and even supporting Leinonen's remark. I want art that makes me feel like something and says something about things that truly matter and which produces not just a new setting but a new meaning and an alternative way of looking. Goldin makes me face the side of our society not celebrated normally in the media and she shook a bit of my world. Both artists call for attention for life in its full which is what art should be doing.