Writing Dancing

Writing Dancing is a mix of scholartist and artistic work par excellance. It consists of me writing philosophy (PC -> wall) and Tanja Illukka dancing - sometimes in dialogue, sometimes just working on our own ideas. The choreographer Ismo-Pekka Heikinheimo saw me doing a writing performance and thought my way of working could become a part of a dance performance. I was first worried that my work might here become 'art', but in the end, this is not what happened. Even critics seemed to think about this as a dialogue between dance and philosophy.

Writing Dancing (Finnish text version) is on Vimeo.
Max Ryynänen

Bye bye Gallery KLEIN

Gallery KLEIN was a project which started quite at the same time as we started to discuss scholart. I had been running two 'real' galleries in Kallio, the first one, ROR Gallery (with friends like Jiri Geller and Eva Neklyaeva) in the beginning of the 2000s and the second one, Kallio Kunsthalle, in the beginning of the 2010s (with Petri Saarikko and Sasha Huber). KLEIN happened, because I was running a course on galleries (White Cube) together with Pia Euro, and I realized that besides the big wooden gallery which we built as an experiment (before filling it with art), it would be fun to experiment with a really small gallery space. I went out and bought a small suitcase (meant for children).

Above: Elham Rahmati's drawing exhibition. Below: Jean-Francois Paquay's garden art in KLEIN.

This suitcase gallery which traveled with me wherever I gave speeches and lectures, was as real as possible with openings, artist statements and webpages. Most exhibitions are seen by approximately 100 viewers but the interesting thing with KLEIN was that people spent more time watching the art works. I remember from my old days as a ‘real gallerist’ that most visitors to ‘real’ galleries just walk in, turn their head and write their name in the guestbook, and then they go out, heading for the next one. Among many others, KLEIN exhibited Jean-Francois Paquay (Belgium), Elham Rahmati (Iran/Italy), Anna Korotkova (Russia/Finland), Sinem Kayacan (Turkey/Finland) and Melinda Abercrombie (US). Scholartist and urban scholar Taina Rajanti exhibited her series of park photos (parkart). With Taina we finished the gallery with a performance act: we left it in Berlin, in the park close to the angel, together with a message (please adopt this gallery if you feel like it).

I was lucky to be able to announce the existence of the gallery in Art Pulse, and the exhitions traveled to e.g. Riga, Saldus, Bratislava and Warsaw. KLEIN was also one of the official exhibition spaces showing the winners of the Nordic dance film competition 60secondsdance in 2015. Still I am not sure if the philosophical ideas I got from it should be written out or just used in exhibition planning.

See the video  here. More about KLEIN (webpages) here.

Max Ryynänen

Scholart Exhibition in the ARTS House

November 14, 2014, we opened the first (conscious) exhibition on scholart in the ARTS House Otaniemi (Aalto University). We had been planning to make it already in the spring (producer: Farbod Fakharzadeh), but because of some problems with gallery which stood up on us in the last moment, we finished the exhibition quite late that year.

The main question here was to discuss what it means to use artistic methods to discuss scholarly issues - when you are not an artist, or when you don't it as an artist.

Scholartists: Max Ryynänen, Taina Rajanti, Farbod Fakharzadeh, Eva Pavlic Siefert, Melinda Abercrombie, Sari Kivimäki and Andrea Coyotzi Borja.

Sentences on Scholart

When we realized that we have found a phenomenon, which is already quite old and which does yet not have any name, I wrote a manifesto to start the discussion with. Sentences on Scholart was published on this blog 12 Feb 2014, after a whole winter of discussions on how to proceed with our ideas.

SENTENCES ON SCHOLART

1. Scholart is not art.
2. Scholart is not research.
3. Artists cannot create scholart. A scholartist can have no identity as an artist, and cannot be taken seriously as one. Otherwise his/her scholart would be seen as art.
4. A scholartist uses contemporary artistic methods (installations, manifestos, etc.) to conduct theoretical discourse.
5. Scholart is always situated between art and theory.
6. Works of scholart cannot be explained in words only.
7. Scholart is outlaw, underground and outsiderish. If it ever becomes mainstream, serious-minded or codified, scholart has died.
8. Objects of scholart can include text, but the text shouldn't function as an explanation.
9. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
10. These sentences comment on scholart, but are not scholart.

Sentences on Scholart is an attempt to catch in a playful way what scholart is about. It refers to the following chain of artistic manifesto work:
Sol Lewitt Sentences on Conceptual Art
John Baldessari's comment on Lewitt's sentences
Bumsteinas' musical comment on Lewitt and Baldessari

(See also my tribute to Baldessari and Bumsteinas: I sing the sentences on scholart, filmed by Andrea Coyotzi Borja.)

Max Ryynänen