Illegal Aesthetics: blowing the art out of Tallinn.
Explosions, photo credit: Mari Keski-Korsu Hijacking the Ptarmigan practice over the first quarter of 2013 is Illegal Aesthetics, an ongoing laboratory executed within the Migrating Art Academies framework www.migaa.eu, purse-snatching for interrogation the very scope of art’s social domain. How far can critique be constrained by the laws and principles of its victim? Must the creative...
Tallinn: Ptarmigan, the art in social
A line of thought recently kicking round my head has been the characterisation of disciplines according to the manner in which they express experience of reality – dance through movement, philosophy rational argument, music sound and so on and such. As a strict categorisation the notion is overtly simple (I would suggest as any...
Tallinn: Lugemik, the paper cutting-edge
The visual of the word, interplay between story and form, structure and sentence, regularly harnesses my attention. See Mark Z. Danielewki’s architectural metaphysical rom-horr narratives, the typographic experimentalism of Blast – Lewis Wyndham and the Vorticist’s brief foray into manifesto-shing – Lewis Carroll, George Herbert… Or simply read the Library of Babel (Borges) for no...
(Tallinn) Rakvere city blog: Balto-scandalous
Out the city again, accompanied one time with mini-mass exodus of theatre patrons, performers and proles. This, as I’m led to understand, small sampling of the Tallinn cultural glitterati do not as such travel east in my lap – rather it’s an artfully staged movement – more mobility than Moses – towards the Bi-annual theatre...
Not-Tallinn city blog: Into South Estonia
Surprisingly fast the city (to be fair remarkably green in summer) gives way to silver birch and pine forest. Slim trunk dark walls line either side the road, for long periods the world beyond the northern country’s forests just disappears. We could easily be in Finland, Canada or probably Siberia – until the trees part...
No truth’s a panacea
Just sometimes the big questions turn out not to be all that important. One such issue to get my goat lately is the battle between absolutists and relativists, each a pejorative from the opposite perspective each accusing the other’s epistemology of ushering in untold injustice, social harm and moral degradation. It is thinking about this...
Tallinn, Estonia – a swift 100 years by way of introduction
Tallinn, capital city, population 392,331. Language, Estonian and Russian. Independence stated 24th February, 1918. Handed back, by pseudo-authoritarian Konstantin Päts in a shady May protection pact, 1940. The red bear swallowed the country whole by June. For 50 years, Tallinn was the evil empire’s frontier (communist or capitalist depending on your perspective). Under Soviet yolk, but...
