Nr. 21
EESTI ELU reedel, 27. mail 2022 — Friday, May 27, 2022
Art Through Layers – Thoughts on artist Britta Benno’s virtual presentation, May 15, 2022
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ wizardry due to arrive for the first time in Estonia on August 18th
Valmar Kurol
Vincent Teetsov The arrival of a band or artist in Estonia for the first time ever is always a cause for celebration, on multiple levels. It’s a pleasure for those fans in Estonia who have waited a long time to see one of their favourites in the flesh. Fans who, as a result, don’t have to travel to another country, such as Sweden or Poland, for a concert. It also stands for the continued recognition of Estonia as a place of culture, for its ability to exchange culture on an equal level as the rest of the world. Many big-name artists have made this inaugural visit to Estonia before. Madonna performed in Estonia in August 2009. Sting first visited in 2001. Megadeth played in July 2010. Andrea Bocelli has performed here several times. Now, on Thursday August 18th, 2022, the kings of Australian alternative rock, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, are performing at Haapsalu Castle. For those who have maybe only heard his name in passing, it isn’t easy to summarize the saga of Nick Cave’s rumbustious artistic career. If forced to, one should outline it in a few stages. Born and raised in the Australian state of Victoria, Cave took an unconventional path early on, briefly studying
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Photo: piletilevi.ee
painting and forming the incandescent post-punk band The Boys Next Door with his best friends from secondary school. This band in turn became The Birthday Party. After leaving a mark on the scene in Mel bourne, Australia, they left for London, England and then West Berlin. This stage is defined by Cave’s fervent poeticism and the infernal grinding of the band’s instruments; drawing from what he has since referred to as “Old Testament” themes. In comparison, from the dissolution of The Birthday Party in 1983 and onward, with the founding of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave gradually took on “New Testament” ideas. As the years passed, his songs still acknowledged the brutality of our world, but came around to forgiveness, tenderness, faith, and love. All wound up in a ball that feels so true it will make you sit pensively, smile, even laugh. It certainly did that when I was first introduced to his music as a teenager. Any new listeners in Estonia will certainly have an appreciation for the band’s caustic sense of humour and the willingness to not shy away from heavier subject matter in a free thinking manner. There is much to admire in the literary grounding of the music, too. Beyond singing and writing songs, Nick Cave is a
novelist, a screenwriter, a striking thinker and wordsmith in many forms. To this day, Cave has con tinued to tour the world and record albums with a band of charismatic musical sidemen (maybe “warlocks” is a better descriptor) who you won’t forget. Having seen Cave perform on three occasions – a solo piano/voice performance in Montréal as well as the full band at what was then the Sony Centre in 2014, and again at Scotiabank Arena in 2018 – I chalk the fandom up to the ability to craft a good story. Cave and his collaborators, including Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld, and Warren Ellis; they know how to recreate the places, people, sounds, and actions of each song’s story to the point where you lose track of the venue or place where you listen entirely. What’s most exciting about this concert in Haapsalu is the anticipation of how Estonia may seep into the band’s compositions. Autobiography found its way into the prose and poetry of Cave’s book The Sick Bag Song. Places find themselves whisked into songs, like Geneva in “Higgs Boson Blues”, Brighton in “Jubilee Street”, and Elvis’ birthplace of Tupelo, Mississippi in “Tupelo.” The band interpolated parts of the hymn “Foi na Cruz” into a song of withering love when they recorded in São Paulo, Brazil. This is no guarantee, but knowing Estonia’s rich body of legends, traditions, music, and history, compounded with the fact that the concert is taking place at a castle and cathedral from the 1200s, Estonia may find itself part of a song. Even more so if the famous apparition of the Valge Daam shows up in the chapel at the time of the concert.
The winners of the Canadian Brewing Awards for 2022 were announced recently in Calgary at the Canadian Brewing Awards. Kalev Nisbet (33) just won 2 golds, a silver and a bronze. Last year, he also won awards at the Canadian conference in Quebec City and then again at the Ontario awards. He works at Shacklands Brewery Co. in Toronto, a very small operation. There is an owner, a salesperson, plus Kalev, who is the only brewer. They work on a shoestring budget. So these awards are solely for Kalev and his brewing achievements. This year, his entries swept an entire category, which is very rare and which earned him a standing ovation at the Gala Awards Ceremony. His wife, Ashley Lennox, who is an illustrator at Bitstrips (owned by Snapchat) has done the bottle/ can artwork. Shackland’s owner Dave has been quoted saying that ‘Kalev puts the art inside the bottle, while Ashley puts the art outside the bottle.” In the photo with Kalev is Don Tse, famous beer writer.
Readers should consider watching the documentaries 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), One More Time with Feeling (2016), and the most recent film This Much I Know to Be True to get a deeper sense of the band’s legacy. The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds from 1998 is a pretty definitive starting place musically, after which recent side projects, sound tracks, and more recent albums can be enjoyed. A thriving artist will absorb their surroundings and make something new, like an alchemist, out of what they perceive. For bands touring across Europe, Estonia is a long time coming.
The Society of Estonian Artists in Toronto (EKKT) and Museum of Estonians Abroad (VEMU) recently co-hosted an English language virtual talk and pictorial pre sentation by Britta Benno, an Estonian-based artist, print maker, teacher and researcher. Benno is currently working on her doctorate, titled “Thinking in Layers, Imagin ing in Layers, Posthumanist Landscapes in the Extended Field of Drawing and Print making”. As a member of EKKT and having an interest in landscape painting and geography (par ticularly polar), I watched the virtual presentation with great interest to discover how Benno works with her artful dystopic landscapes, as she has described them, in a world where human centeredness has been abandoned. A disruptive heterotopian world? Whether in science, business or the arts, the limit to creativity is the human imagination and nature has been one of the important guiding forces. What proceeded was a downto-earth introduction by Benno of her art stylings, during which she provided examples of drawings, prints, 3-dimensional installations, and video animation of layered found objects. The materials Benno used varied from bed coverings to stones. Commenting on her Tartu exhibit (Of Becoming a Land(scape), Benno said that “Tectonic layers are alive, moving and breathing, forming mountains and flooding continents. The layers arise from above while shaking and cracking holes and fissures to the earth’s crust. In order to imagine the future, one has to look at the past to form a better understanding about the present. Through imagining the Earth’s layers, I am also working with layered approaches to art. In a way, working in layers can be also called a method of piling up. Materials, traces and images cover each other just like the layers of Earth form a huge globe. Poetically flowing mountains can be discovered in the heap of blankets on my bed, on a topographic map or in an atlas of imaginary beings.” Layers are the essence of our globe. Earth is a restless planet, perpetually in motion, from inner core to crust. Since the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago, drivers of the universe have been the forces of time, change and gravity. Our planet’s history is in the construction of layers, similar to the proverbial onion that is peeled, and entails the stories of chemical reactions, atoms forming minerals, then rocks and life itself. Layered deposits of rocks
tell the story of earth, epoch by epoch from its beginning 4.5 billion years ago, through five mass extinctions to the present Anthropocene. Glacial ice drill cores from Greenland and Antarctica have revealed up to 2.7 million years of ice accumulation with their stories of atmospheric contents and temperatures. Benno’s transfor mative art creates its own layers for her posthumanist landscapes. With regard to artist residencies, it is only in recent decades that science-focused artist residencies have been initiated by the science establishment in a few countries, to help increase public awareness of science and to encourage private and institutional donors to support research. Scientists are notoriously bad at explaining the results of their research to the public. Benno’s multi-faceted artistic ideas and use of multi-media would seem ideally suited for interdisciplinary collaboration with the scientific community, in addition to her arts world relationships, which she is keen on further developing. The video of her virtual presentation is available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi3zs8gieeE
Russia’s long… (Continued from page 10)
How did we get here? Sauli Niinisto, President of Finland, provided a simple answer suggesting that the Russian President Vladimir Putin should simply look in the mirror. A business-as-usual relationship with Putin’s Russia is over. The west must stand firm and united against Russia’s un acceptable behavior and brute force. The aggressor, Russia, must face justice and pay the price for the crimes and atrocities committed in this war. Standing against Rashism and for Ukraine is to stand for freedom, democracy and moral values.
