Jaan Toomik
Encyclopedia
Jaan Toomik is a video artist and a painter, often described as the most widely acknowledged Estonian
contemporary art
ist on the international scene.
__FORCETOC__
mainly due to his short video works that have received wide international acclaim (e.g. Father and Son, 1998). He has participated at the São Paulo Biennale (1994), ARS ‘95 (1995), Manifesta
1 (1996), Venice Biennale
(1997; 2003), 4th Berlin biennial of contemporary art (2006), etc.
Most frequent misspellings of the artist’s name: Jann Toomik, Jaan Tomik, Jan Toomik, Jan Tomik.
for two years, as every male citizen of the Estonian SSR back then had to. From 1981 to 1983 he served his military service near Volgograd
in Russia, guarding a huge bomb warehouse and loading ammunition onto the trains bound for Afghanistan
, but also drawing dozens and dozens of portraits of his fellow soldiers.
Shortly after his army experience, Toomik enrolled in the art academy in Tallinn, where between 1985 and 1991 he studied in the faculty of painting. Some large-scale paintings with openly Neo-Expressionist
brushwork have survived from that time (Menstruation, 1989; Dancer, 1990). The artist described himself as being heavily influenced by Carlos Castaneda
and Jorge Luis Borges
in those days: “the perception of identity was different during the Soviet era. /…/ We all lived in some other world. Even geographically we transferred ourselves somewhere else. /…/ However, during the Singing Revolution
(1988) you started to identify with this land and nation.” A good example could be Toomik’s temporal installation Bed 75 (1993), located in the centre of Tallinn for one month, which consisted of 75 iron beds, bought by the artist from the Russian military bases – then still located all around the newly independent Estonia. Through painting, Toomik had gradually found his way to performance art
and then to installation art
and site-specific art
, actually abandoning painting altogether, albeit just for a short period. His interest in installations marks an important move in his professional career. Estonian art historian, artist and curator, Hanno Soans, has even suggested that “many of Toomik's fans among foreign curator
s have not properly digested his early development story, the way the Neo-Expressionist painter converted himself to a modern Post-Conceptual
installation and video art
ist.”
The start of his international career was somewhat “symptomatic” to an artist from post-Berlin Wall
generation. Estonia regained its independence in 1991; Jaan Toomik has participated in different international art events since 1993. During the first part of the 1990s, he began to create simple conceptual actions that he usually videotaped. A performance and installation video Way to São Paulo (1994), prepared the background for Toomik's eventual breakthrough on the international art scene. First presented in 1994 in Brazil at the São Paulo Biennale, it depicted a peculiar cube mirror floating on three rivers in Tartu
, Prague
and São Paulo
– all cities geographically on the same line. This was followed by Dancing Home (1995), first presented at ARS ’95 in Helsinki
, where the casually dressed artist is seen on the rear deck of a ferry dancing to the hypnotic rhythm of the engines. In 1997, Toomik represented Estonia at La Biennale di Venezia with another of his site-specific installations, a “view corridor” made of bottomless/topless coffins. With Truck (1997), he projected a bright sunny video image taken from the highway in the San Antonio, Texas
desert onto the back of a truck driving from Tartu to Tallinn in the darkness of the autumn night. The 200 km drive on the trail of the “video-mobile” was documented from the following car. Among other things, on the video documentation of this work, Sirje Helme (the then head of Estonia’s Contemporary Art Centre) can be briefly seen explaining the art project to the traffic police.
In 1998, Toomik’s most celebrated video, Father and Son was completed and first presented at City Gallery in Tallinn. In this short video (2 minutes, 35 seconds) the artist is skating naked across the icy cold Baltic Sea
, continuously circling the viewer. Accompanied by a religious choral sung by his ten-year old son, he finally disappears into the white radiance from which he came. The video belongs to numerous collections (Art Museum of Estonia; Courtesy Nicole Trussardi Foundation; Erika Hoffmann collection, Berlin; Stedeljik Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet
, Stockholm; Ludwig Museum, Budapest). Even ten years later it was still circulated in prestigious international contemporary art events (4th Berlin biennial of contemporary art, Berlin
, 2006) and the artist frequently receives requests from different collectors and institutions about the possibility of acquiring a copy even today.
Toomik has had more than twenty noteworthy solo exhibitions at different venues around the world since 1997, and is considered one of the few contemporary Estonian artists who can be discussed from two distinct angles – the domestic approach and the international reception. For example, the video, Untitled (Man) (2001), displays a certain homage to the themes related to Vienna Actionism, which were important to Toomik in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It shows a man (an amateur actor and performance artist Alar Sudak a.k.a. Elaan) in the middle of the muddy field whose genitals are tied to a stake or a rod through a long piece of white bandage, making him look “castrated”. It is also one of the earliest examples in Toomik’s video art when he turns the camera away from himself and experiments with documentary approach. Peeter and Mart (2001) is a dialogue between two artists, a discreet, yet honest interview with a painter (Peeter Mudist) suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Invisible Pearls (2004), made in collaboration with Jaan Paavle and Risto Laius, is really a short documentary film about ex-convicts who have free-willingly gone through genital mutilation. Liina (2003) and Jaanika (2007) also vividly demonstrate the documentary side of Toomik’s art, which contrasts with his usual artistic signature – universally laconic, short video images and sounds such as Jaan (2001) or Waterfall (2005).
However, in most cases Toomik’s video pieces have a deeply personal background and explanation, as in the case of Untitled (2002). It’s a documentation of a performance dedicated to his deceased brother. In the video, the artist falls freely from a height of 9 meters as if diving or jumping into water, but instead of water it is the earth that “swallows” the artist. Dancing with Dad (2003) is executed in a similar vein: the artist is dancing on the grave of his father, whom he never had the chance to dance with in reality because of his father’s early death. Insinuatingly, Toomik shares his full name with his father who was also Jaan Toomik.
The motive of cycle within the family bloodline often reoccurs in Toomik’s art. By entitling a short film piece Father and Son 2 (not perhaps without a certain sense of self-irony) in 2007, the artist makes a reference to his “hit” video Father and Son from 1998. The camera captures the artist when he’s driving his car and “raging like a maniac” behind the wheel. Like in 1998, the voice of the artist’s son is used in the soundtrack of the film work but this time it’s a newborn baby, whose loud cries are juxtaposed by the abrupt “tantrums” of his middle-aged father.
Jaan Toomik continues to live in Tallinn, Estonia. He works at the Estonian Academy of Arts as a professor in the Chair of Interdisciplinary Arts. In 2005, he received the Konrad Mägi
Medallion – once-in-a-lifetime award and considered quite prestigious, especially among painters – from the Estonian Artists' Association. As Toomik is considered to be primarily a video artist internationally, his paintings have been received with greater enthusiasm in Estonia than abroad. According to art historian, Eha Komissarov, “these works by Toomik provide a good example of the influence of the manipulation of the body that characterises his video art. They include a self-portrait of the artist /…/ and accommodate both the origin of the interpretation of aggressively psychoanalytical surrealism and the story of that generation.”
One of Toomik’s recent solo exhibitions took place at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn in 2007. Alongside his newest paintings and video works, it featured his first attempt as a filmmaker: a short film Communion (2007, 12 min) shot with a 35 mm
camera. His long-time friend and (sort of) alter ego Alar Sudak plays the protagonist of the film where almost no dialogue is used and atmosphere of Toomik's earlier video installations is clearly present.
Estonians
Estonians are a Finnic people closely related to the Finns and inhabiting, primarily, the country of Estonia. They speak a Finnic language known as Estonian...
contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
ist on the international scene.
__FORCETOC__
Status
In the Estonian art world Toomik received recognition as a painter from the late 1980s and from the early 1990s as an installation and video artist. The critics often refer to him internationally as the most well-known contemporary artist from EstoniaEstonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
mainly due to his short video works that have received wide international acclaim (e.g. Father and Son, 1998). He has participated at the São Paulo Biennale (1994), ARS ‘95 (1995), Manifesta
Manifesta
Manifesta, the , is a European pan-regional contemporary cultural biennale, described in 2010 by the as "stunning in its scope and uncompromisingly experimental in its approach".-Manifesta History:...
1 (1996), Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
(1997; 2003), 4th Berlin biennial of contemporary art (2006), etc.
Most frequent misspellings of the artist’s name: Jann Toomik, Jaan Tomik, Jan Toomik, Jan Tomik.
Biography and art
Jaan Toomik was born on October 2, 1961 in Tartu, Estonia (then under Soviet Occupation). His father died in 1971, when he was 9 years old, leaving him and his older brother to the care of their mother who was a doctor. Toomik remembers that some time in his late puberty, he became a highly sensitive young man, only taking an interest in deep philosophy and the beautiful arts. After graduating from secondary school in Haapsalu town in 1980, he joined the Soviet armyRed Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
for two years, as every male citizen of the Estonian SSR back then had to. From 1981 to 1983 he served his military service near Volgograd
Volgograd
Volgograd , formerly called Tsaritsyn and Stalingrad is an important industrial city and the administrative center of Volgograd Oblast, Russia. It is long, north to south, situated on the western bank of the Volga River...
in Russia, guarding a huge bomb warehouse and loading ammunition onto the trains bound for Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
, but also drawing dozens and dozens of portraits of his fellow soldiers.
Shortly after his army experience, Toomik enrolled in the art academy in Tallinn, where between 1985 and 1991 he studied in the faculty of painting. Some large-scale paintings with openly Neo-Expressionist
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
brushwork have survived from that time (Menstruation, 1989; Dancer, 1990). The artist described himself as being heavily influenced by Carlos Castaneda
Carlos Castaneda
Carlos Castaneda was a Peruvian-born American anthropologist and author....
and Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
in those days: “the perception of identity was different during the Soviet era. /…/ We all lived in some other world. Even geographically we transferred ourselves somewhere else. /…/ However, during the Singing Revolution
Singing Revolution
The Singing Revolution is a commonly used name for events between 1987 and 1991 that led to the restoration of the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania...
(1988) you started to identify with this land and nation.” A good example could be Toomik’s temporal installation Bed 75 (1993), located in the centre of Tallinn for one month, which consisted of 75 iron beds, bought by the artist from the Russian military bases – then still located all around the newly independent Estonia. Through painting, Toomik had gradually found his way to performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
and then to installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
and site-specific art
Site-specific art
Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork...
, actually abandoning painting altogether, albeit just for a short period. His interest in installations marks an important move in his professional career. Estonian art historian, artist and curator, Hanno Soans, has even suggested that “many of Toomik's fans among foreign curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
s have not properly digested his early development story, the way the Neo-Expressionist painter converted himself to a modern Post-Conceptual
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
installation and video art
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
ist.”
The start of his international career was somewhat “symptomatic” to an artist from post-Berlin Wall
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...
generation. Estonia regained its independence in 1991; Jaan Toomik has participated in different international art events since 1993. During the first part of the 1990s, he began to create simple conceptual actions that he usually videotaped. A performance and installation video Way to São Paulo (1994), prepared the background for Toomik's eventual breakthrough on the international art scene. First presented in 1994 in Brazil at the São Paulo Biennale, it depicted a peculiar cube mirror floating on three rivers in Tartu
Tartu
Tartu is the second largest city of Estonia. In contrast to Estonia's political and financial capital Tallinn, Tartu is often considered the intellectual and cultural hub, especially since it is home to Estonia's oldest and most renowned university. Situated 186 km southeast of Tallinn, the...
, Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
and São Paulo
São Paulo
São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...
– all cities geographically on the same line. This was followed by Dancing Home (1995), first presented at ARS ’95 in Helsinki
Helsinki
Helsinki is the capital and largest city in Finland. It is in the region of Uusimaa, located in southern Finland, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic Sea. The population of the city of Helsinki is , making it by far the most populous municipality in Finland. Helsinki is...
, where the casually dressed artist is seen on the rear deck of a ferry dancing to the hypnotic rhythm of the engines. In 1997, Toomik represented Estonia at La Biennale di Venezia with another of his site-specific installations, a “view corridor” made of bottomless/topless coffins. With Truck (1997), he projected a bright sunny video image taken from the highway in the San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States of America and the second-largest city within the state of Texas, with a population of 1.33 million. Located in the American Southwest and the south–central part of Texas, the city serves as the seat of Bexar County. In 2011,...
desert onto the back of a truck driving from Tartu to Tallinn in the darkness of the autumn night. The 200 km drive on the trail of the “video-mobile” was documented from the following car. Among other things, on the video documentation of this work, Sirje Helme (the then head of Estonia’s Contemporary Art Centre) can be briefly seen explaining the art project to the traffic police.
In 1998, Toomik’s most celebrated video, Father and Son was completed and first presented at City Gallery in Tallinn. In this short video (2 minutes, 35 seconds) the artist is skating naked across the icy cold Baltic Sea
Baltic Sea
The Baltic Sea is a brackish mediterranean sea located in Northern Europe, from 53°N to 66°N latitude and from 20°E to 26°E longitude. It is bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, the mainland of Europe, and the Danish islands. It drains into the Kattegat by way of the Øresund, the Great Belt and...
, continuously circling the viewer. Accompanied by a religious choral sung by his ten-year old son, he finally disappears into the white radiance from which he came. The video belongs to numerous collections (Art Museum of Estonia; Courtesy Nicole Trussardi Foundation; Erika Hoffmann collection, Berlin; Stedeljik Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet
Moderna Museet
Moderna museet, the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden, is a state museum located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, that was first opened in 1958. Its first manager was Pontus Hultén...
, Stockholm; Ludwig Museum, Budapest). Even ten years later it was still circulated in prestigious international contemporary art events (4th Berlin biennial of contemporary art, Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, 2006) and the artist frequently receives requests from different collectors and institutions about the possibility of acquiring a copy even today.
Toomik has had more than twenty noteworthy solo exhibitions at different venues around the world since 1997, and is considered one of the few contemporary Estonian artists who can be discussed from two distinct angles – the domestic approach and the international reception. For example, the video, Untitled (Man) (2001), displays a certain homage to the themes related to Vienna Actionism, which were important to Toomik in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It shows a man (an amateur actor and performance artist Alar Sudak a.k.a. Elaan) in the middle of the muddy field whose genitals are tied to a stake or a rod through a long piece of white bandage, making him look “castrated”. It is also one of the earliest examples in Toomik’s video art when he turns the camera away from himself and experiments with documentary approach. Peeter and Mart (2001) is a dialogue between two artists, a discreet, yet honest interview with a painter (Peeter Mudist) suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Invisible Pearls (2004), made in collaboration with Jaan Paavle and Risto Laius, is really a short documentary film about ex-convicts who have free-willingly gone through genital mutilation. Liina (2003) and Jaanika (2007) also vividly demonstrate the documentary side of Toomik’s art, which contrasts with his usual artistic signature – universally laconic, short video images and sounds such as Jaan (2001) or Waterfall (2005).
However, in most cases Toomik’s video pieces have a deeply personal background and explanation, as in the case of Untitled (2002). It’s a documentation of a performance dedicated to his deceased brother. In the video, the artist falls freely from a height of 9 meters as if diving or jumping into water, but instead of water it is the earth that “swallows” the artist. Dancing with Dad (2003) is executed in a similar vein: the artist is dancing on the grave of his father, whom he never had the chance to dance with in reality because of his father’s early death. Insinuatingly, Toomik shares his full name with his father who was also Jaan Toomik.
The motive of cycle within the family bloodline often reoccurs in Toomik’s art. By entitling a short film piece Father and Son 2 (not perhaps without a certain sense of self-irony) in 2007, the artist makes a reference to his “hit” video Father and Son from 1998. The camera captures the artist when he’s driving his car and “raging like a maniac” behind the wheel. Like in 1998, the voice of the artist’s son is used in the soundtrack of the film work but this time it’s a newborn baby, whose loud cries are juxtaposed by the abrupt “tantrums” of his middle-aged father.
Jaan Toomik continues to live in Tallinn, Estonia. He works at the Estonian Academy of Arts as a professor in the Chair of Interdisciplinary Arts. In 2005, he received the Konrad Mägi
Konrad Mägi
Konrad Vilhelm Mägi was an Estonian landscape painter. He was one of the most colour-sensitive Estonian painters of the first decades of the 20th century, and Mägi's works on motives of the island of Saaremaa are the first modern Estonian nature paintings.Mägi received his elementary art...
Medallion – once-in-a-lifetime award and considered quite prestigious, especially among painters – from the Estonian Artists' Association. As Toomik is considered to be primarily a video artist internationally, his paintings have been received with greater enthusiasm in Estonia than abroad. According to art historian, Eha Komissarov, “these works by Toomik provide a good example of the influence of the manipulation of the body that characterises his video art. They include a self-portrait of the artist /…/ and accommodate both the origin of the interpretation of aggressively psychoanalytical surrealism and the story of that generation.”
One of Toomik’s recent solo exhibitions took place at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn in 2007. Alongside his newest paintings and video works, it featured his first attempt as a filmmaker: a short film Communion (2007, 12 min) shot with a 35 mm
35 mm film
35 mm film is the film gauge most commonly used for chemical still photography and motion pictures. The name of the gauge refers to the width of the photographic film, which consists of strips 35 millimeters in width...
camera. His long-time friend and (sort of) alter ego Alar Sudak plays the protagonist of the film where almost no dialogue is used and atmosphere of Toomik's earlier video installations is clearly present.
Further reading
- Jaan Toomik. Tallinn: Art Museum of Estonia, Kumu Art Museum, 2007
- Files. MUSAC. Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, 2004
- La Biennale di Venezia. 50. Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, 2003
- Fresh Cream. Contemporary Art in Culture. 10 curators, 10 writers, 100 artists. Phaidon Press Limited, N.Y, USA, 2000
- New Media in Late 20th Century Art (Video Installation Art). Thames and Hudson, London 1999
- After the Wall. Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden,1999
- Site Santa Fe. Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions, The New York Times Company, 1997
- La Biennale di Venezia. XLVII Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, 1997
- ARS 95. Private / Public. Nykytaiteen Museo, Valtion Taidemuseo, Helsinki, 1995
- Manifesta 1. Catalogue of the first edition of a new European Biennial of contemporary art, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1996
- Container ‘96. Art Across Oceans. Europaesk Kulturby, Kobenhavn, 1996
- Lapin. Toomik. 22nd International Biennial of São Paulo, Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, Tallinn, 1994