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94 PAJ 98 (2011), pp. 94–106. © 2011 Jennie Klein BREATHING, LYING, SITTING, STANDING, AND WALKING Finland’s ANTI Festival Jennie Klein S ite-specific artwork developed out of the art world’s reaction against self- contained modernist sculpture as a means of acknowledging the factors that are extraneous to the work of art, including environment, history, memory, and geography. Performance, which appeared in the art world at around the same time as site-specific art, was also concerned with reintroducing the extraneous into the hermeneutic environment of modern art through the agency of the artist’s body. Although site-specific art and performance share an intellectual and ontological genesis, there has been very little attempt to link them conceptually until recently. I propose to explore the implications of site for the performing body and vice versa in order to make a case for the centrality of the body as carrier, interpreter, and transformer of the meaning of the site through an examination of work made for the ANTI Festival, an annual event of site-specific time-based performance art that takes place in Kuopio, Finland. e ANTI Festival (Anti means “gift” in Finnish) is a unique festival that is premised upon site-specific performance art made outside of traditional institutions and spaces. Audience members who come specifically to attend the ANTI Festival become performers themselves as they traipse through the city and its environs in the wake of the performing artists. At the same time, the site marks the body of the artist in some way, so that there is a mutual exchange between the artist and the site. e first ANTI Festival, sponsored by the Arts Council of North Savo, took place in 2002. is festival was such a success that it has subsequently been held annu- ally, with the most recent festival taking place in late September 2009. e ANTI Contemporary Art Festival was founded in 2005 and the organization of the festival transferred to the association. at same year, a seminar entitled Talks and Deeds, was held in April outside of the festival. Talks and Deeds was subsequently incorporated into the festival program itself, which has allowed for presentations by academics and artists to expand upon the theme of the festival that year. Although sited in Kuopio, which is about four hours north of Helsinki, the ANTI Festival has become an international event. e ANTI Festival was originally co-directed by Johanna Tuukkanen, a dancer and resident of Kuopio, and Erkki Soininen, a visual artist based in Helsinki. In 2007, Gregg Whelan replaced Soininen as co-artistic director. In the past three years, Whelan, a member of the successful British duo Lone Twin,

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94 PAJ 98 (2011), pp. 94–106. © 2011 Jennie Klein

BREATHING, LYING, SITTING, STANDING, AND WALKING Finland’s ANTI Festival

Jennie Klein

Site-specific artwork developed out of the art world’s reaction against self-contained modernist sculpture as a means of acknowledging the factors that are extraneous to the work of art, including environment, history, memory,

and geography. Performance, which appeared in the art world at around the same time as site-specific art, was also concerned with reintroducing the extraneous into the hermeneutic environment of modern art through the agency of the artist’s body. Although site-specific art and performance share an intellectual and ontological genesis, there has been very little attempt to link them conceptually until recently. I propose to explore the implications of site for the performing body and vice versa in order to make a case for the centrality of the body as carrier, interpreter, and transformer of the meaning of the site through an examination of work made for the ANTI Festival, an annual event of site-specific time-based performance art that takes place in Kuopio, Finland. The ANTI Festival (Anti means “gift” in Finnish) is a unique festival that is premised upon site-specific performance art made outside of traditional institutions and spaces. Audience members who come specifically to attend the ANTI Festival become performers themselves as they traipse through the city and its environs in the wake of the performing artists. At the same time, the site marks the body of the artist in some way, so that there is a mutual exchange between the artist and the site.

The first ANTI Festival, sponsored by the Arts Council of North Savo, took place in 2002. This festival was such a success that it has subsequently been held annu-ally, with the most recent festival taking place in late September 2009. The ANTI Contemporary Art Festival was founded in 2005 and the organization of the festival transferred to the association. That same year, a seminar entitled Talks and Deeds, was held in April outside of the festival. Talks and Deeds was subsequently incorporated into the festival program itself, which has allowed for presentations by academics and artists to expand upon the theme of the festival that year. Although sited in Kuopio, which is about four hours north of Helsinki, the ANTI Festival has become an international event. The ANTI Festival was originally co-directed by Johanna Tuukkanen, a dancer and resident of Kuopio, and Erkki Soininen, a visual artist based in Helsinki. In 2007, Gregg Whelan replaced Soininen as co-artistic director. In the past three years, Whelan, a member of the successful British duo Lone Twin,

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has used his considerable resources and contacts to work with Tuukkanen to expand the festival into a week-long event, which in 2009 included an art opening, a two-day seminar, and twenty-six artists performing at twenty-four sites around the city.

Every year, the organizers of ANTI negotiate with local businesses, schools, hospitals, libraries, restaurants, and parks in order to arrange for new and interesting sites where artists might perform. The artists, half of whom are Finnish, are permitted to choose from a list of prospective sites. They are then asked to conceptualize a performance/site-specific piece that engages with both the site and the theme of the festival. Kuopio, a grid-like city designed in the eighteenth century by the architect Perr Kjellman, is surrounded by spectacular scenery consisting of lakes, mountains, and primeval forests. The city itself is fairly typical of most mid-sized, northern European cities. The center of the city is the Kuopio City Hall, a nineteenth-century neo-classical building that stands opposite a large brick plaza surrounded by department stores. The style of architecture is the post-WWII international modern, with blocky profiles and a surprising amount of windows given how cold it can get in Finland. These modern buildings are interrupted by a few remaining eighteenth-century wooden buildings, most of which are well preserved. Due to these buildings, Kuopio has a unique feature that has survived to this day: every other street is reserved for pedestrian and bicycle traffic. These pedestrian streets were originally designed as fire barriers for a city built mostly of wood. The ANTI Festival has been able to make use of many of these streets, which allow an artist to perform without fear of being run over or injured by automobiles. Kuopio has several technical schools and universities as well as a large park/playground that surrounds a pond. All of these sites have been used at some time or another by the ANTI Festival.

Kuopio is the ninth largest city in Finland, the headquarters of the Finnish Ortho-dox Church, and the cultural center of Eastern Finland, with a number of festivals besides ANTI. It is best known, however, for its location on Lake Kallavesi, which surrounds the city on three sides. The center of Kuopio is partially ringed by a footpath that travels along the lake shore, an irresistible location for many of the artists who have come to Kuopio and performed on or near the path. Kuopio is partially built on some of the islands that lie just offshore of Kallavesi. For the past several years, the offices of the ANTI Festival have overlooked Vasikkasaari, a small island with a windmill in the Kuopio passenger harbor. In 2007, two artists—Simon Whitehead and Aaron Williamson—were permitted to perform there. Kuopio also has the Puijo Hill, a rocky incline formed by the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the ice age and still blanketed by a primeval forest. Tourists who visit Kuopio can hike up the path to Puijo Tower, an edifice that looks like a water tower and slowly revolves so that visitors can experience a 360-degree view while eating in the restaurant. Puijo Hill is the most impressive remainder of the prehistoric ice age. The landscape of Kuopio itself, once one leaves the city center, is dotted with large boulders that were displaced by the flow of ice.

The designation of the event as a “festival,” as well as the bucolic environment of Kuopio preclude the kind of aggressive public intervention that has characterized

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Top: Aileen Lambert, Breath, Kuopio Airport, 2006. Bottom: Pentti Otto Koskinen, Do You Wash My Feet, Kuopio Post Office, 2003. Photos: Courtesy Pekka Mäkinen.

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art done in large urban areas like New York, Los Angeles, and London. The ANTI Festival is well publicized. People expect performance art to happen in the streets, parks, and on the lakefront. The work that is most successful is subtle and quiescent. Over the years, artists invited to participate in ANTI have made interventionist pieces that are an homage to Guy Debord and the Situationist’s notions of derive (a mode of experimental behavior linked to urban society) and détournement (a turning around of pre-existing conditions). But ANTI has also included work by artists who are less interested in politics than they are in bringing the audience—and themselves—into a new state of consciousness that has much in common with Zen Buddhism. This work is about slowing down and learning to pay attention—to the site, to the artist, and to oneself. Like Zen Buddhist art, it can be quite humorous, although in this case humor is a vehicle to a heightened awareness rather than an end to itself. The pace of the festival, which is considerably less jam-packed then the typical live art festival, encourages the participants/audience to slow down as well. As with any festival of live art, particularly one that has been in existence for so many years, there are many works that are not successful for various reasons. What follows, however, is a discussion of several pieces that have been successful, in part because the artists have a real sensitivity to the relationship that their piece has to the site in which it is performed, and in part because they are skilled in using the actions of their body to both transform/activate the site and raise questions about what it means to be embodied in Kuopio.

The ANTI Festival operates on a small budget that until 2009 precluded long-term residencies, elaborate props or constructions, and extravagant performances seen at Fringe Festivals and well-funded contemporary art events such as Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and Art Fair Basel. The artists who perform at ANTI receive very little remuneration. By necessity, much of the work is very simple, using little more than the Kuopian site and the body of the artist. One of the most beautiful pieces at ANTI, performed by the Irish artist Aileen Lambert for the 2006 Festival, involved only the body of the artist. In Breath, performed at the Kuopio Airport, Lambert methodically and carefully marked the glass walls of the terminal with her breath, making a perfect circle and then moving to make that circle once again. Like much of Kuopio, the terminal is a monument (on a very small scale) to post-WWII modernist architecture—an impractical glass cube situated in the middle of a country that is very cold for much of the year. Moving first around the exterior and then the interior of the building, Lambert, with hands clasped behind her back and mouth in the shape of an “O,” leaned in to mark the glass windows. In so doing, Lambert re-inscribed her breathing, living, and gendered body onto the impersonal modernist grid of the airport terminal. Lambert’s performance at ANTI reprised an earlier performance, done in conjunction with the 2005 Excursions performance festival in Limerick, Ireland, during which she occupied a space in front of the double glass doors at the Limerick City Gallery of Art and breathed upon them. In this performance, the condensation from Lambert’s breath gradually caused droplets to trickle down the glass door and form a puddle at the juncture of floor and door.

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In the ANTI performance, as with subsequent performances of Breath including her video Snow Breath (2006), Lambert was more concerned with using breath as a means of marking a large area of her environment. For Lambert, the breath is a product of the necessary activity of respiration that can be seen as a metaphor for one’s engagement with the surrounding environment:

Performance begins with a private personal experience, an expression of my relationship with my body, and the body’s relationship with its environ-ment. As a performance activity, I attempt to use breath to leave a trace of myself in a particular place and time. The personal, visceral, intimate gesture of breathing and creating breathmarks is a metaphor for life and the continuous attempt to make your mark on the world—a vain attempt to leave something behind.1

The mark made by Lambert is just such an outline—the other of the Lambert’s other-gendered body, the moist, rapidly evaporating circle of corporeal existence—the sign that the body that made this mark is living and breathing.

Over the course of various incarnations of the ANTI Festival artists have chosen to lie down in order to reorient the vertical body and to call attention to the site in which that body is now placed. As with breathing, lying down is an action that is deceptively simple, yet signifies very different realities depending on the context in which it takes place. Such was the case with two horizontal pieces by Pentti Otto Koskinen and Simon Whitehead. For Do You Wash My Feet performed in the courtyard of the Kuopio post office during ANTI 2003, Koskinen challenged the Kuopian audience to address homelessness—a sight that is much more common in Helsinki than in Kuopio. Barefoot and garbed in a nondescript black trench coat and pants, Koskinen, appearing confused and disoriented, stumbled around the courtyard of the post office, staggered across the street, and carefully lay down on the cold sidewalk, exposing the soles of his dirty feet.

The full title of the piece, Do You Wash My Feet, is of course a biblical allusion that is today closely associated with respect and caring for those who are homeless and destitute. Koskinen, whose studio is in the working class district of Kallio in Helsinki, is himself a product of a destitute background. Since the 1970s, when he began performing, his work has been concerned with redemption and forgiveness. For the most part, Koskinen’s performances have taken place outside of the art gal-lery and university in the streets where he feels his constituency is most likely to be found. Do You Wash My Feet placed a silent and supine body where that body was not supposed to be and allowed events to unfold from the radically simple yet disruptive act of lying down in the street. People who passed by reacted in various ways: some ignored Koskinen, some were good Samaritans, crouching down to see if he was alive and stroking his feet, and at least one called the police, who came and escorted him away, thus ending the piece.

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Four years later Simon Whitehead also performed while lying down. Asked to give a talk at the seminar that accompanied the festival, Whitehead projected a video of his work, walked outside, took off his shoes, and lay down face first in the grassy courtyard. After approximately thirty minutes, the time allotted for his talk, Whitehead returned to the lecture room and turned off the video. The following day, Whitehead began his two-day piece Burn on the island of Vasikkasaari, a small fragment of land with an anachronistic windmill situated in the passenger harbor. For two days, Whitehead collected passengers at the edge of the lake, transporting them via rowboat to the island. Passengers brought with them sticks and pieces of wood; on the evening of the second day, a bonfire was lit from the offerings of the passengers. Burn also involved the act of lying down—prior to making their offering, the audience/passengers were asked to lie down on a large rock and look at the sky. Conducted in almost total silence, Burn thus became a whispering journey through water that culminated in the quest for fire.

Whitehead has long been interested in using walking and other simple actions as a tool for meditation and a vehicle for heightened consciousness. Lying down, an action that was forced upon Whitehead at the age of thirty-seven due to a spinal injury, has become yet another means of bringing himself in touch with the landscape and the locality in which he works. Unlike Koskinen, who forced the place to react to the site/sight of his displaced body, Whitehead brings bodies—his own and others’—into sync with the landscape/place in which he performs. Thus although most of Whitehead’s work takes place in Wales, where he lives and teaches, his work is just as successful elsewhere because of his sensitivity to place. Whitehead’s work is never that of a solitary endeavor. Rather, as Heike Roms suggests, “it is increasingly not just for the artist who takes a walk but he invites others to walk with him or even take the walk in his place. Here is a so-called ‘solo’ artist whose practice is in fact deeply collaborative and relational.”2 Burn was Whitehead’s gift of Vasikkasaari to both himself and to those travelers who wished to join him. It was a re-organization and re-mapping of a space that is more usually looked at than traveled through. The bonfire at the end of the piece can be read as a metaphorical process of alchemy, one that makes something new through the process of fire.

Many of the sites for ANTI are located indoors. In 2003 the sites for the ANTI Festival included the nursing home Sunnen koti located on the outskirts of town. Nursing homes, whether in use or not, are spaces that are haunted by their past inhabitants. Walking through the nondescript, hospital-like halls and rooms of a nursing home, one is all but overwhelmed by the weight and significance of the lives that been in the care of this institution. Nursing homes are secret, sad places in which the waning of identity transpires in a fog of medicine and forgetfulness. Very few performers can compete with such a place, and it is to the credit of Eve Dent, who selected this site, that she didn’t try to do so. Dent’s work is characterized by its relationship with architecture. Since 1999, when she began doing performance work, Dent has performed in a fireplace (Fireplace, 2000), inserted her head into the floorboards (Just Below the Surface, 1999), hidden behind a radiator with just

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Top: Eve Dent, Anchor Series: Last One Home, nursing home in Sunnen koti, 2003. Bottom: Simon Whitehead, Burn, performed on Vasikkasaari Island in the Kuopio Harbor, 2007. Photos: Courtesy Pekka Mäkinen.

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her toes protruding (Radiator, 2005) and inserted her hand through a door (Anchor-age, 2002).

In all of these performances, Dent is scarcely visible. Her body exists in fragments—two slender legs and feet, dirty toes, a headless body, and a disembodied hand. Dent’s piece for ANTI was part of the Anchor Series, based on the idea of the female anchoress, or medieval female hermit. The anchoress willingly chose to be shut up in a small chamber attached to the church so that she might pray and fast with no distractions. In her statement, Dent writes that “this act of living entombment and incarceration, I find both deeply fascinating and disturbing, mirroring my artistic concerns: the housing of the body in site; the rite of disappearance and loss; a vision of the sanctity and strangeness of bricks and mortar, anchored by and mediated through a human presence, animating the hidden poetic life of a space.”3

Dent’s work is generally intended to be photographed, and despite their odd appear-ance, the photographs are not manipulated. For her performance Anchor Series: Last One Home, Dent crouched inside a kitchen cabinet. Visitors were invited to enter the nursing home three at a time but given no directions as to where Dent might be located. Daniel Brine recalled that he first went up the stairs, into a chapel, and then across the hall into the kitchen. Suddenly he noticed a row of fingertips and toes at the top and bottom of a very small cupboard. Slowly the toes withdrew while the fingers wriggled.4 Dent’s almost invisible presence illuminates the secrecy and intimacy implied by a space such as a cabinet. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests that “wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life.”5 Dent’s subtle performance hints at the intimate hidden life of the nursing home, as well as the fascinated but useless mimicry performed by certain insects in their environment.

Dent’s work—so appropriate for a nursing home where dementia is common—speaks to a spatial psychosis in which the subject no longer recognizes the boundaries of skin but instead views herself as part and parcel of the environment in which she resides. In Dent’s performance, the self is porous and open, merged with the environment in a manner that while viewed as psychotic today, would have been seen as a realization of a spiritual vision in the medieval period. Unlike Chris Burden’s Five Day Locker Piece (1971), which was about duration and intense physical deprivation (Burden remained in a small locker for five days, sustained only by a jug of water situated in a adjacent locker), Dent’s Anchor Series: Last One Home is about redemption at the end of life, both the life of the former inhabitants of the nursing home and the nursing home itself.

To stand still can be both a meditative act and a subversive act, an action that requires an intense amount of concentration and an action that in its quiescence makes people nervous. Surprisingly very few artists involved with ANTI either stood in one place or gave the audience the opportunity to engage in active standing (as opposed to passive standing while viewing the performance). One exception was

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an installation by Annette Arlander entitled Trees Talk, which took place in Minna Cantha Park during ANTI 2004. Arlander, a native of Finland, was influenced by the idea of different types of landscapes, including that of the primeval forest, one of which still exists on the edge of Kuopio today. The primeval forest, with its tall and mysterious trees, its uneven terrain, and its mythological space in which plants and animals become like humans, is a romantic landscape. For her installation, Arlander re-located this literal and psychic terrain from the margins of Kuopio (the Puijo Hill) to the center of town. Arlander allowed five trees—oak, maple, linden, Siberian pine, and Black spruce—to tell their “stories” to anyone who cared to listen. Arlander’s installation, which intentionally evoked Norse mythology and magic, was decidedly low tech—consisting of CD players with earphones. Nevertheless, it was unfortunately plagued by vandalism, as several children, not understanding that the headphones should be attached to something, cut them off within thirty minutes of the opening of the installation. Still, the trees did talk in the end.

The structure of the ANTI Festival, in which sites are located all over the city of Kuopio, lends itself to performances that are concerned with walking. Many artists, interested in subverting or circumventing the art market/gallery system have turned to walking performances and the theorization of walking as a way of doing something very simple that can also have radical implications. Walking, as Michele de Certeau suggests in The Practice of Everyday Life, is about much more than pleasure, although it can be pleasurable in a way that running or crawling is not. Walking has the power to re-map the hegemonic geography of the city, to pose an aesthetic or political intervention to business as usual, and to reconnect the body of the walker with the landscape in which it moves. It can be revolutionary or merely restorative, a time when productive thinking and reflection can occur as a result of moving through space.6 Every ANTI Festival has included several walking performances. The theme of ANTI 2009 and the accompanying seminar were on walking and contemporary performance practice. Although the walking performances at ANTI have been very different over the years, what they have had in common is their ability to engage the spectator actively so that the line between spectator and performer blurs into nothingness. Walking performances, which generally take place outdoors in the fresh air among a like-minded group of people, are relational and generous.

Two of the most interesting walking pieces performed at ANTI were executed by Essi Kausalainen. In 2002, the first time ANTI was held, Kausalainen performed Untitled in the War Hero’s Cemetery. On the day of the first snowfall of winter, Kausalainen carried people of all sizes and shapes on her back through the cemetery. Kausalainen’s gesture is reminiscent of O. Henry’s story “The Gift of the Magi,” in which a young couple sacrifices a great deal to give each other the perfect—yet completely useless—Christmas gift. No one needed to be carried the short distance that they were by Kausalainen. Her willingness to take on the burden of others, however, was a real gift to the spectators, most of whom had braved the cold and inhospitable Finnish weather to follow after the artists who had assembled for the first ANTI Festival. Kausalainen’s performance, which took place after a day of sleet and rain, was a way of thanking the audience.

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Seven years later, Kausalainen was asked to do another walking performance. By 2009 the ANTI Festival had expanded considerably, with a gallery show and twenty-eight artists. ANTI also instituted an artist’s residency program. Kausalainen was asked to be the first artist-in-residence. In the spring of 2009, Kausalainen spent four weeks in Kuopio with her travelling garden, which became the title of the first part of the piece. For Travelling Garden, Kausalainen walked around the city with her plants and asked people to draw plants for her imaginary garden. In return, Kausalainen gave people seeds and asked them to grow the plants over the summer. When Kausalainen returned in September she installed the drawings and the mature plants in the hospital, where she performed daily for the duration of the festival. The September performance/installation, entitled Greenhouse, was installed in the demen-tia wing of Valkeinen Hospital. A patch of brilliant green in what was otherwise a rather sterile environment, Kausalainen’s installation included a carpet of fake grass, a camp stool, lighting, a tape of bird sounds that she held when performing, and all of the drawings and plants grown from seeds that she had collected. Kausalainen’s performance, in contrast to the riotous green installation, was minimalist. Carefully and deliberately she went from lying down to sitting, to standing, to walking, and then back to lying down again. The entire piece was focused and meditative. For the duration of the installation, the residents and employees of the dementia wing would pause at the installation, taking a moment to enjoy the unexpected sight of Kausalainen performing among the plants and drawings.

Those who came to ANTI 2009 experienced Kasalainen’s performance as an indoor piece, the archive of her journey around the city. Most of the work included in ANTI 2009 covered more ground, both in virtual reality and in real life. Several of the artists at ANTI decided to engage with the history of walking and the neo-avant-garde. In the spirit of derive, Stephanie Nadeau created a path of desire—a short cut through the grass to the path that ran next to the lake—by walking over and over the same area until the grass was completely worn away (Anonymous Col-laboration). BodyCartography (Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad) performed an improvisational work through the streets of Kuopio, challenging the meaning of space and place through corporeal actions that responded to the shape of the architecture and the response of the audience, many of whom were not aware that this was a performance. Stephen Hodge created a virtual walk in second life that mirrored the reality of the harbor (SLaaristokaupunki). For his piece The Red Carpet Treatment, Vincent Chevalier turned the idea of walking the red carpet into a durational and physically exhausting piece by walking along a six-foot length of red carpet that he laboriously repositioned each time he walked the length. Esther Pilkington gave a lecture performance about her reenactment of Richard Long’s Crossing Stones, which proved to be much more arduous and time-based than Long’s terse description had implied. Pilkington developed blisters, was rained upon, became very cold, and was altogether much more uncomfortable than she thought she would be based upon Long’s rather terse description of the piece.

As Pilkington’s experience suggests, the site through which the artist moves is as likely to mark itself upon the body as the body is to modify the site. Stephanie Nadeau

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trampled a path through the grass so that pedestrians could get to the lakefront more quickly. She also exhausted herself in the process, walking the same path for hours each day as she made her shortcut. Like flâneurs, performance artists move through the city, observing and reacting to its rhythms. But unlike the nineteenth century flâneur/artist, they both mark the city and allow it to mark them. For ANTI 2007, Claire Blundell Jones performed Introducing Tumbleweed to the Finnish Landscape. The description of Blundell Jones’s piece sounds innocuous enough: wearing a leaf blower, she would walk around Kuopio, propelling a tumbleweed. Blundell Jones has performed the piece in various locations in the UK and Finland. In the pictures of the piece at her website (http://www.claireblundelljones.co.uk/tumbleweed.html), she appears calm and relaxed.

The experience of the performance was much different than its documentation, however. The leaf blower, a European model, was heavy and very, very loud. Blundell Jones had to wear heavy duty earphones in order to prevent hearing damage. The roar of the motor, the stench of the gasoline, and the bouncing tumbleweed announced the artist’s presence even before she came into view. Her perambulations through the city rendered her as spectacle rather than spectator. More to the point, the city, and not Blundell Jones, dictated her movement. The tumbleweed, responding to both the propulsion of the blower and to wind patterns created by the architecture and movement of the city, would suddenly veer off into the street, become stranded against a wall, or blow into the doorway of a shop. In each case Jones was forced to follow the tumbleweed to a place that she had not intended it to go. The entire experience, which lasted eight hours a day for three days, was exhausting. Even the participants/viewers who followed Blundell Jones were exhausted.

In One Place After Another, Miwon Kwon concluded her discussion of site-specific art by warning her readers not to fall prey to the nostalgic construction of place that characterizes both site-specific art and the writing about it.7 Although much of the work done for ANTI is quiescent, requiring an extraordinary level of attention from the viewer, it does not fall prey to romanticizing the site. If anything, the work represents and questions the site and our relationship to it. Blundell Jones’s piece is a perfect example of this sort of deliberate estrangement. Both the tumbleweed, which she has to mail-order from the U.S., and the noisy leaf blower, which estranges her from other pedestrians, make it manifestly clear that she is displaced or un-sited. The tumbleweed, an unmoored plant if ever there was one, is doubly displaced, removed from its roots and its context. Blundell Jones might mark and be marked by the cityscape of Kuopio, but she doesn’t “belong” there.

ANTI, as I noted earlier, means “gift” in Finnish. The “gift” of the ANTI Festival is in a questioning of what site might mean to artists who don’t have a particularly longstanding relationship with that site. Is it possible not to intimately “know” a place and yet engage with that place in such a way that it is subtly changed? Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan, the co-directors of this festival, feel that it is. What is more, they feel that this engagement between time, body, and site is one worth exploring for artists and audiences alike. Publically sited art is an unexpected and

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Essi Kausalainen, Untitled, War Hero’s Cemetery, 2002. Photo: Courtesy Pekka Mäkinen.

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sometimes unwanted surprise/gift for those who encounter it. It is an opportunity to rethink the relationship of art to its audiences for those who are members of the art world. The work in the ANTI Festival lays bare the interdependence of audience, performer, and site by asking the residents of the city to engage with this process. The work in ANTI is very different work from the large scale objects made for biennales and festivals in Europe and the U.S. It is also different from the aggressive social interventions that were documented in the exhibition The Interventionists, curated by Nato Thompson for MASS MOCA in 2004. Whereas The Interventionists was an exhibition with a big budget that could support artists’ residencies, the ANTI Festival is produced with very little money. Artists receive a précis of the site but do not necessarily see it before the festival itself. The artists who participate engage with the site in a manner that is almost improvisational. The ANTI Festival thus lives up to its name in English as well as in Finnish, for it is an atypical festival that sponsors work that asks the artist and the viewer/participant to reach a heightened awareness.

NOTES

1. Aileen Lambert, “Statement,” http://www.aileenlambert.com (accessed February 18, 2010).

2. Heike Roms, “Footnotes: Four Walks in the Company of Simon Whitehead” in Walk-ing to Work, Simon Whitehead (Abercych, Pembrokeshire: Shoeless, 2006), 5.

3. Eve Dent, “Anchor Series,” http://www.navigatelive.org/evedent.html (accessed Febru-ary 22, 2010).

4. Daniel Brine, “Views of Kuopio,” in Mirka Niskala, ed., ANTI-Contemporary Art Festival 2002–2006 (Kuopio: Savonia University of Applied Sciences, Series D 2, 2007), 33–34.

5. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classical Look at How We Experience Intimate Places (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958), 78.

6. Michele de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

7. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 156–67.

JENNIE KLEIN is an associate professor of art and art history at Ohio University. She is a contributing editor of PAJ.