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Tanel Rander, Aarne Ruben was quite lately understood as “extraterrestrial”. THE POWER OF Mass culture embodied the geopolitical turn and empowered itself through everlasting NOSTALGIA contemporaneity – the era, where ideology and history had ceased to exist. A new subjectivity Tanel Rander started to sprout everywhere – millions of people with identical desires, millions of new global citizens had emerged. For them globality started WHO OWNS MY SUBJECTIVITY1? from the first border control between the East and the West. Last autumn I participated in the conference “Communist Nostalgia” in the University of I was one of such subjectivities. To me the 90s Glasgow, where, during public discussion, an meant teenage – the most receptive age of being American lady made a remark like this: open to ideology. Music defined my relation with the world outside. Music was like a protective “It would be really bizarre if East layer that saved me from the brutal reality that Europeans would be nostalgic like I could never identify with. I lived deep inside of us, for the late 80s and early 90s, my imagination, as teenagers often do. My long I mean grunge music, Kurt Cobain, etc. hair made me withstand constant harassments It would be really, really bizarre!”. that came from everywhere, except my family and few friends. I spent a lot of time watching I felt personally touched, as precisely this era MTV and playing Nirvana songs on guitar. and these keywords played important role in I used to daydream of Seattle – I imagined the formation of my subjectivity. Nostalgia is rather Annelinn block houses into Seattle skyline. For temporal than spatial kind of longing. Space long years I used to fill empty copybooks with might denote and embody time, but territory my quick and restless drawings – always about and ownership might come along with it and my two imagined characters living their lives. claim their part of time. For sure, the centres of One of them was a bearded musician with long alternative culture of the 90s are the States and hair, grey face and cigarette constantly in his Western Europe. But the development of mass mouth. He had concerts all over the world and media separated culture from land and made it got constantly hospitalized because of drug flow through cables and air. The total sense of overdoses and suicide attempts. The other guy culture and its intensive noise in the middle of no was a vital businessman with short oily hair and man’s land appeared as power of nature. They Latino look. He was rich and he got constantly seemed like inexhaustible natural resources, hospitalized because of assassination attempts. open for anyone, as in socialism there was no I enjoyed inventing company names for him property in nature – there was nothing, but and draw schemes of his businesses. But he tribal order and ancient rules. Piracy played the wasn’t just a one-dimensional, half-criminal great role in distributing Western mass culture East European tycoon. He had links with Edgar and this created an interesting link between the Allan Poe’s short story The Business Man and East and the West – from one hand, piracy was also with an evil genius Jim Profit, known from same natural as hunting, while from the other an American TV series. But still he related to the hand it was theft. For sure, the outbreak of self- local reality around me, at least much more than organized piracy was the greatest marketing the suicidal musician. Maybe because his main strategy. Maybe this is the reason, why the features were all material – cars, suits, villas, culture of the 90s has such a natural taste of life guns. And my society was full of masculinities – as we all were personally engaged with global who pretended to be like him. The musician’s culture. But this engagement was followed by identity was directly linked to Kurt Cobain, who the usual process of alienation that is based had already passed away. Listening to Nirvana on the fact that the materials and means of coincided with cynical, passive and negative production are owned by someone else. Already attitude to life. For me Nirvana had nothing in the era of piracy it was clear that “the original” to do with original cassettes and CD-s or live is more authentic than “the copy”. The original concerts. Cobain’s suicide seemed like a radical always seemed to carry the scent of the real – confrontation against this material world. And something that existed in the distance, far away a radical step towards my imagined world. Heroin from our East European hell. Live concerts that addiction was part of rebellion against life and were supposed to be the climax of authenticity I found it attractive. always had intoxicating and traumatic effect. Standing by “the source of your identity” as My characters were part of one and the same one of the millions lost in the crowd can destroy authority that functions through the production the magic and glory of singularity. Measuring of contrast, such as mainstream and alternative, and distributing the right doses of attachment regular and special, material and spiritual. is what mass culture is about. Especially in They were like two pills with different color, Eastern Europe, where the notion of “foreign” both covered with the binder of my subjectivity – a sweet layer of drugs, money and destruction. SEPARATING HEADS something underdeveloped and depreciated. status of avant-garde art in Soviet Estonia – Of course these characters were random, but FROM BODIES The load of Western mass media was swallowed artists had no chance to visit the West, so they behind them were whole cosmologies that from space satellites – it designed and shaped had no direct contact with Western art and were formed the future of teenagers like me in the Individualism and singularity are the strategic human desires and consuming habits already influenced by it only through art magazines. 90s. Musical taste and subcultural option could partners of a guillotine. Even if grunge nostalgia before it was possible to fulfil them. A huge This is how Estonian artists, living in this affect your hierarchical position in the society, of the 90s would make sense in Eastern Europe, market opened to Western products and giant isolated piece of land inside of a totalitarian as well as your gender and sexual identity. as we witnessed, there is still alienation and mass of cheap labor reached the West. The superpower, established their unreflected and I always had the feeling that I could become a injustice, where human head is going in one international body business that had started fetish-based relation with Western art. This real (successful, powerful, sexually active) man direction, while body goes in the other. Origin off was like a masquerade of white masks. An reminds me myself behind the TV in the early 90s. only if I would forget the band guy and stop and location decide over us – the geopolitical East European cannot be happy without being listening to music or only listen to what they play insects. The American lady in Glasgow probably a migrant – this is the only way how a head The guillotine blade that was sharpened by in radio – as would do the businessman. But in meant collective, not individual nostalgia, would meet its body again. Most of my friends in Soros investments cut off the heads of artists, mass culture such controversies between these although I cannot imagine any collective grunge Eastern Europe, who haven’t left yet, would run who had established themselves in the socialist role models were taken care of. As the famous nostalgia, especially because popular culture for the West at first chance – for several decades system. It was sort of a revenge for the burden song Loser of Beck was pointed towards global is based on individualism. The only explanation they’ve been living with such mentality. The of socialist realism – executed in the similar audience, a local band Agape came out with the that makes sense here is the ongoing “geo- tension between centre and periphery is not an total manner without mercy. As democracy song Grungeman that was played in local radio political turn” that makes people shut doors in adequate way of describing and understanding knows no censorship, other ways were found so often that all these muscular and aggressive front of the weird, the foreign and the bizarre. what is going on inside of millions of us. to perform necessary cuts. Serbian art theorist guys who had previously called me “girl” and Miško Šuvaković coined the term “Soros- “trans” could patronize me, saying “now we The term “geopolitics” creates an illusion that realism” to re-politicize contemporary art that know you”. This is how another subordinated politicians are able to move mainlands and THE ARRIVAL OF pretended to have no political sense in the masculinity was recognized in the form of a continents, while they are actually moving and CONTEMPORARY ART post-ideological era. In his essay The Ideology weirdo. The whole 90s could be characterized destroying massive amounts of our lives. As of Exhibition: On the Ideologies of Manifesta by production of weird things – weirdo was location means body, geopolitics means body The symbolic revolution produced the display (2002) he wrote, how financialization of art taken as symbol of the new desireful system. politics. “East European” means being subject to of a struggle between communism and enables executing censorship in hidden mode. A weirdo was accepted to the certain extent geopolitics that people may not notice at all. But capitalism, where victory was given to the He also wrote about the emergence of similar – as an amusement – and couldn’t cross the awareness about it is necessary, when you live in latter.
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