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Christoph Tannert
Tea Mäkipää herself does not
normally appear in her installations. But eight hours a day simulating
a suicide by hanging, with nothing under one's feet and exposed
to the stares of all visitors – she didn't want to ask this
of any actress, especially since the staging in London's Wapping
Project space in the fall of 2003 was to be at a height of eight
metres in an eight hundred square metres, dark hall. For the sake
of realism and to take the fatalistic dimension of her concept to
its logical conclusion, the artist eschewed all formalisms. This
had its fascination, even if it is terrible, because what is acted
out here is nothing more or less than the latent tendency to self-destruction
that is present in niches of society, lurking like an instinctual
fate in every Hollywood blockbuster. The audience displayed a strange
fascination. According to Bakunin, the pleasure in destruction is
a creative pleasure – but, as her other artistic works also
evidence, Mäkipää is not really an anarchist. Rather,
she is on the same wavelength as Sylvia Plath, who writes: “Dying
– is an art, like everything else, – I do it exceptionally
well. I do it so it feels like hell. – I do it so it feels
real. – I guess you could say I've a call.”
From two loudspeakers at ear level, one
hears spoken snatches of sentences (voice: Jennifer Walsh), interrupted
by sounds of breathing, weeping, sobbing, humming, whistling, and
an electrical crackling that filters out emotions. The eight-minute
sound track (by Kristjan Varnik) holds the form of the event together
like medical clamps hold a wound in an acute emergency. Tied to
a mixture of self-doubt and guilt feelings, Tea Mäkipää
interprets suicide as rebellion against the coldness of life and
simultaneously as the admission of a complete failure to fill one's
own emptiness.
Christoph Tannert, curator and art-critic. Since
1991, project coordinator at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien GmbH,
Berlin, where he became the managing director in 2000.
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