Jaan Toomik
Father and Son
| Artist: | Jaan Toomik |
| Title: | Father and Son |
| Date: | 1998 |
| Technique: Material: |
video |
| Film/movie length: | 00:02:42 |
| Description: | In the video Father and Son we can see an empty ice field in bright sunshine. A naked man, Toomik himself, comes out of the horizon skating against the soundtrack of a clear voice singing a chorale. The camera lens and the Gregorian song performed by the artist's 9-year-old son accompany the diligent skating circles on the plain ice. The skater moves around his son whose singing we can hear, but who is not shown to us. The momentary insecurity of the skater when the singer's voice is about to break seems to be a culmination of physical tension. This tension continues to attract the viewer's attention until the skater has vanished over the horizon and the singer's voice has become silent. Father and Son marks the author's return to corporeality, the physical presence that came into his videos through earlier collective actions in free nature. Performances of endless circling in nature, form the background to which Toomik once again hooks up his naked body, surrendering it to a ritual, simultaneously wiping all traces of personality. Russian art historian Viktor Misiano has noted in his book “Fresh Cream" (2000) that Toomik's art is 'remarkable in its extreme scantiness'. In Father and Son he has “reduced the narration to a statement of a fact, documentation of visuality and self-evidence of conceptualism". Although Toomik feels more attached to the Buddhist idea of reincarnation, his system is wide enough to also accommodate Christian allegories. It is not the interpretation that is important, but the catharsis. 'The video with the skater' is the work by Toomik that is always mentioned first outside Estonia. Since the grand international exhibition of Eastern European art, “After the Wall", held in Stockholm's Moderna Museet in 1999, this video piece has been Toomik's ‘business card'. Hanno Soans |
| Related categories: | Contemporary Art |
| Copyright notice: | Art Museum of Estonia |
| AME collection: | Contemporary Art Collection |
| Collection number: | FV 69 |
| Accretion number: | EKM j 47626 |
| File info: |
File type: MP4 File size: 781.41MB Resolution: *px |
