By Marita Muukkonen

Source: frame-fund.fi

A cross, a nought, an empty board or a new beginning?

The flashing neon lights catch the eye in Tuomas Laitinen`s (b. 1976) new work, Wall Street (2009). Is that a cross or a nought drawn on a playing board, or is the board empty? The time and space in the work are both hectic and meditative at the same time. On the wall a sequencer from a “one-armed bandit”, those gambling machines familiar from shopping centre atriums, clicks incessantly into a microphone. Just a single part being sidetracked can change the direction of the game in totally unpredictable ways.

As in Laitinen’s earlier works that were frequently created in light boxes, in Wall Street the boundary between fiction and reality is blurred. But has the illusion been shattered, in any case? The artist reveals the “machinery” behind Wall Street, unlike in his earlier works, which have been more veiled and oblique. It is the raw material behind the work that is the object of the gaze, and not just the complete, “packaged” work. The illusion has been stripped away. Also visible is a poetic sym-phony generated by wires and cables. The noughts and crosses on the game board are reminiscent of the streams of digits speeding past in stock exchanges, digits that lost contact with reality. The bright neon lights offer something they have never actually supplied… Now that the neo-liberal bubble has burst, it is time to look at its contents. What are its real raw materials? Or was it just a bubble with nothing inside it?

One possible interpretation of Laitinen’s multi-layered work traces a picture of a neo-liberal finance game, whose yesterday’s consequences we are paying for today. The total unpredictability of the noughts and crosses game reminds us of the way that the financial world has not taken responsibil-ity for the game’s winners and losers. It serves as the world’s playing field, rule book, referee and ball.

This work, which Laitinen has created together with Daniel Richert of the Association of experimental electronics, is a poetic gateway for thought. It creates room for a multiplicity of meanings in place of simplification and levelling out. Politics and poetics are intertwined without pointing things out directly. Poetry contains the promise of a world in which people still dream, and there is room for illusions. This world is not polarised into winners and losers. It is time to bring out humanity. Otherwise, the world will become empty, echoing, hollow.

Wall Street is not just a story about the mysteries of games, lies and memory, it is also an invitation and a challenge to fill the empty board with new alternatives. It is time to envisage new outlines, alternatives and movements for the current structures of economics, politics and aesthetics. It is time to go beyond the ‘post-isms’ (such as post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-communism). The real game begins with an admission of defeat. Even though no one has found a scheme for global, universal happiness, the game is not lost. Is now the time of pre-universalism? The field is ours, in all its unpredictability.

Marita Muukkonen
Curator
FRAME Finnish Fund For Art Exchange

Translated by Mike Garner