Peeter Linnap
Summer 1955
| Artist: | Peeter Linnap (1960 - ) |
| Title: | Summer 1955 |
| Date: | 1993 |
| Technique: Material: |
print resin-coated paper |
| Height (cm): | 89.0 |
| Width (cm): | 59.4 |
| Description: | The pictures of this installation are enlarged scratched black-and-white negatives, about one meter high, and show a summer's day back in 1955 when a dozen young men in uniforms are playing with guns on a grassy embankment. These photographs of the young recruits from Soviet Estonia were originally taken by Enn Kiiler and found their way half a century later into this work by Peeter Linnap who had “taken them over" as a conceptual gesture. Stolen from a family album, the photographs caused at the art hall a post-modern debate on documentation, fiction and cultural memory. English critic John Statathos has said that the militaristic poses begin to resemble a carnival: “Whatever it is, it is not an official training session: they are just randomly waving the guns, ‘hell knows how'. One of the figures is waving two guns at the same time in imitation of Clint Eastwood; another one has greedily grabbed three of them, two of which are tucked under his belt as if they were about to perforate the most tender part of his body at any moment." The ambivalent photographs showing “the age-old ritual of young males" remain somewhere between still-life, critique and parody of militarism. “In the early 1990s the Soviet Army uniforms worn by Estonian boys in the photograph very painfully opened an old wound, but Linnap seems to be absolutely nonchalant about this," writes art historian Mari Laanemets. The photographs do not however allow themselves to be unambiguously defined as comments upon the Soviet occupation. Rather, as Stathatos argues, “this work is about the infantile nature of power" and about the stereotypical image of our past. Hanno Soans |
| Related categories: | Contemporary Art |
| Copyright notice: | Art Museum of Estonia |
| AME collection: | Contemporary Art Collection |
| Collection number: | FV 61 |
| Accretion number: | EKM j 47369 |
| Muis reference | http://muis.ee/museaalView/1274217 |
| File info: |
Source type: digital photography File type: TIF Compression: Uncompressed File size: 329.65KB Resolution: 474*711px @ 301dpi |
