GALLERI SULT: THE MILK-METHOD MEN

Vernissage: SATURDAY, October 26 at 18:00 
Open: October 27 – December 1

Galleri SULT
Tue&Thu 12:00-19:00, Wed&Sat 12:00-17:00, Sun 12:00-16:00 
Strandkaien 61, 4005 Stavanger, Norway


www.gallerisult.no

artists: Erki Kasemets & Kaido Ole

The life of Fred Trumper, the main character in John Irving’s novel The Water-Method Man, which, in any case, was not the simplest due to significant shortcomings in his personality, was complicated even more by a certain urological problem. Namely, he had an extraordinarily narrow urinary tract. The doctor says that there are three ways to solve his problem: to give up alcohol and sex; to undertake a very painful operation to expand his tract; or to drink large amounts of water before and after having sex, in order to expel the bacteria that has collected in his urinary tract in an extremely painful way. Naturally, Trumper chooses the path of least resistance – the water method –, which is actually the most painful. In any case, when thinking about the work of Kaido Ole and Erki Kasemets in the context of this exhibition, this novel immediately came to mind. I don’t know if they are connected to Irving’s character by anything besides the systematic complication of their own lives, but the exhibition was named The Milk-Method Men in the spirit of this book.

Every day, for over twenty years already, Erki Kasemets has decoratively painted a milk carton. He is probably best known for such works that document his personal everyday life. He also has another project, in the course of which he has sewn a button onto his jacket every day. The installation exhibited in Galleri SULT is actually comprised of a microscopic part of his painted milk carton collection. In this regard, art critic Ave Randviir has pointed out that Kasemets is not motivated to create art from trash by the fear of an ecological catastrophe, or by the need to criticize consumer society and capitalism, but by a need to “celebrate” each day, to preserve time and memory, but also, to daily formally address and make a compulsory bow to the art of painting In other words, this is an attempt to get a hold of one’s life by some method – the milk carton method. He calls the entire project his LIFE-FILE, which is said to end only with the death of the artist.

In the context of the given exhibition, the connections between milk cartons and capitalism cannot be avoided. Namely, Kasemets was able to start painting milk cartons only under the enriching conditions of capitalism – because in the Soviet Union milk was only put into bottles, the English way. At that time, Kasemets would also not have been able to create his large murals out of tin cans, which he did in the 90s, because soft drinks and beer were previously sold only in glass bottles. Therefore, in some sense, it can be said that by celebrating each day, he also celebrates independence and capitalism, freedom and trash with the private painting ritual that he has invented for himself.

Kaido Ole is also represented at this exhibition with only a small part of the still lifes he has completed for his last solo exhibition called Handsome Hero and Plenty of Still-Lifes at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn. Of the 28 paintings, only a selected group of five is exhibited here. The entire series is pervaded by the image of an ordinary wheel from a piece of furniture or a shopping cart, based on which, all of Kaido’s fantastic objects, systems and abstractions seem to be barely staying together and upright. The fragility of the objects unavoidably projects as a metaphor of our world and our lives. It seems totally impossible that such combinations, which clearly ignore the law of physics, would not fall apart, and although the pictures do not allude to this directly, it seems like they will start to do so right after the artist has fixed them on the painting. The series of Ole’s still-lifes are like a balancing exercise, an attempt to somehow keep together a world that might crumble at any moment.

The artists are united by a methodical and strongly conceptual, in some sense even obsessive, approach to painting and the tools of painting. Neither of them wants to “create pictures” or “simply paint,” but rather to try and resolve the assignment of “Life” or “the World”, and they find that painting is the best available tool.