Exhibit #213: One Frozen Mozzarella Pizza, c. 2000 AD
We've been museumified! Our contemporary lives recorded for posterity
By Tommi Nieminen
Since this is a piece about history, let's kick off with a quiz question: which of the following six items is not to be found in the glass cabinets of the Finnish National Museum?
1. A Mesolithic stone carving of an elk's head, found originally in Huittinen, and dating from 6000-7000 BC.
2. A copy of the rock fanzine Sue, c.2000 AD.
3. A decorated gold scent box possibly belonging to Karin Månsdotter (1550-1612), Queen of Sweden, dating from the late 16th century.
4. A trunk possibly belonging to Bishop Johannes Gezelius the Elder (1615-1690, Bishop of Turku, 1664-1690), dating from the end of the 17th century.
5. A cardboard box formerly containing a Dr. Oetker frozen mozzarella pizza, c. 2000 AD.
6. The beaver-hide whip used by clergyman Mikael Agricola (1510-1557), the de facto founder of modern Finnish, as was used by the great man to chastise his worthless assistants in 1548, the year in which he completed his Finnish-language translation of The New Testament.
And the answer is: the National Museum does not have Mikael Agricola's whip among its collection, in part because such an artefact almost certainly never existed. On the other hand, you will find the rock fanzine and the frozen pizza, which have already been enshrined in the museum's collection for the delight and puzzlement of future generations.
Now to explain what this all means. The National Museum and the Helsinki City Museum are already collecting and recording the 21st century. They are museumifying the present. And what finds its way into the museums' glass cases says a good deal about our values.
"We have a great responsibility over what we choose to store. Later eras will be the ones to make their own interpretations on our selections", says National Museum researcher Antti Metsänkylä.
He is one of the National Museum staffers whose responsibilities include what is known in the house as nykydoku, the documenting of contemporary culture. It is a challenging task, as it is difficult to recognise what will be the truly significant phenomena of the here and now.
"Our starting point is naturally that the National Museum puts on show what is common and belonging to the everyday", says Metsäkylä.
This is evident from the collection. Last year a total of 56,730 babies were born in Finland, and they are an important component of the lives of many many Finns.
For this reason the National Museum's cabinets from the early years of the new century feature for instance the contents of the traditional maternity package given free to new parents: included in the list are disposable diapers, a copy of a magazine named Vauva ("Baby"), Suuri vauvakirja, a large volume containing everything you ever wanted to know about having an infant in the house, and a brochure on the importance of making sure a baby or toddler is correctly seated in the car.
Simply being in widespread use is of course not the only criterion. What also makes an item worthy of inclusion is its unique quality or what it manages to say about the themes of a particular era: the so-called China Syndrome affecting the job market, the recent boom in "big" weddings, or our consumer culture.
Our lives are being recorded specifically for future generations. So, let us boldly go a hundred years forward. What sort of things from our time will they be looking at under glass in 2107?
"The multiculturalisation of the Finnish streetscape is already beginning to show up. On a broader level, important topics include our worries about energy supplies and about the greying of the population", comments Ritva Wäre, the National Museum's Director General.
The glass cabinets of a century hence might therefore contain the baseball cap worn jauntily by a Kurdish youth from the Helsinki suburb of Kannelmäki (c. 2000 AD), a senior citizen's walker or rollator from Pälkäne, equipped with a handbrake (c. 1995 AD), or some energy-conserving special lightbulbs from Multia (c. 2000 AD).
As the society, for the 1960s onwards, has been built increasingly around the altar of consumption, it is only natural that middle-class everyday artefacts have come to prominence in museum collections. Even the National Museum is taking note and taking stock of the current daily round of the Finns.
The bulk of the contemporary objects in the museums have come from private donations, but the research staff also do make their own acquisitions.
"We go around the likely stores, for instance Pop-Antik on Iso Roobertinkatu in Helsinki. We pick a particular theme and then we carry out an offensive within the limits of our acquisitions funding", says Antti Metsäkylä.
At present, the National Museum has four large display cabinets containing artefacts from early 21st century Finland. One contains "youth items" - a Peak Performance rucksack, basketball trainers, a kick scooter, a pair of rollerblades... Another case is devoted to the packaging of current consumer goods items - Carte d'Or Ice cream, dishwasher powder, Weetabix, French lobster soup, and Earl Grey teabags...
"This could be straight from the refrigerator or kitchen cupboards of a young academic urban family. Over there, for instance, is the package for Mozzarella di Bufala Campana, buffalo milk cheese", points Metsäkylä.
A third cabinet contains items from the literary canon: a Finnish translation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Johanna Sinisalo's prizewinning Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi (2000, translated as "Not Before Sundown" and also as "Troll - A Love Story"), Ilkka Remes's thriller Ruttokellot (2000, "The Plague Bells"), Kjell Westö's Isän nimeen (2000, "Vådan av att vara Skrake" / "In the Name of the Father").
There are albums of strip cartoons such as the excellent Naisen kanssa found in Helsingin Sanomat's weekly supplement NYT or the hugely popular Viivi and Wagner strips by Jussi Tuomola, featuring a sometimes turbulent live-in relationship between Viivi (a woman in her 20s) and Wagner, an adult male pig.
Recordings on display include HIM's Razorblade Romance, Darude's Before the Storm, Bomfunk MC's In Stereo, and Mikko Franck conducting Jean Sibelius's Four Legends and En Saga with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
All are drawn from the cultural bestseller lists.
On the wall of Room 131 in the National Museum are photographs from the recent past. The heading above the images refers to "The Happy Everyday of the Finns".
There is not a trace of unhappy Finns to be seen anywhere, in spite of the fact that recent statistics indicate some 300,000 of us are downing mood-enhancing drugs, SSRIs, and anti-depressants. There is no sign of the deep economic recession of the 1990s, but plenty of coverage of the Finnish passion for taking exercise. In the basic exhibition there is a 12-minute video reportage on the banking crisis that hit the country in the early 1990s.
"All aspects of the social reality should by rights be on display at the National Museum. Right now this is not the case. To be quite honest, I find the energetically upbeat nature of the exhibits somewhat disconcerting", admits researcher Metsäkylä.
One of the buzzwords in the museum branch these days is "collection policy". At the National Museum, too, there are attempts made to collate the criteria under which items are added to the collections. One crucial factor in all this is the distribution of tasks among the various museums. In Sweden, from the 1980s onwards, this form of demarcation has been well to the fore. They have reached a decision on what themes which museums will concentrate their attention and resources on.
"This has been surprisingly difficult to realise in Finland. One problem has been the lack of a collecting programme for the national museums", notes Toimi Jaatinen, director of museum activities for the City of Tampere.
"Now that a new generation has come into the branch, it may be that we can make some progress on dividing up the responsibilities."
For instance, the National Museum and the Helsinki City Museum have to some extent been 'guilty' of collecting the same materials and themes for their exhibits from the 1990s and the current decade: children's toys, grocery packages, and teenage fashion items. It is not dangerous as such, but it is something of a waste of sorely limited resources.
The City Museum in Tampere has made more progress in this respect than its colleagues in Helsinki. There the items have been subjected to a system of value classifications, such that the more valuable an artefact is perceived to be, the better the treatment it receives.
On the other hand, we know just how difficult it is to put a definitive value on contemporary items, as their worth - if any - is likely only to emerge some decades from now.
"In addition to the 'representativeness' of items, in terms of how well they reflect the contemporary Zeitgeist, there is the unique aspect of them. To give you an example, we have the bright red 'USSR' guitar belonging to the late Juice Leskinen, which is afforded a rather high status in the collection", says Toimi Jaatinen.
This kind of classification may become necessary for the City Museum in Helsinki, too, as it facilitates the removal of museum items deemed to be at the lower end of the value spectrum. Shortage of space to store things is as much of a problem for museums as shortage of funds to acquire them.
The Helsinki City Museum has around 300,000 items stashed away in its storage halls. Among the more sympathetic artefacts in its display collection of contemporary objects is a sign - you've all seen them taped to telegraph poles and the like - directing visitors to the wedding of the unknown (except to their friends and relatives) Helsinki couple Sanna and Petri.*
The collection also includes a one-litre carton of organically-produced fatfree milk, a Koosh ball, a disposable cigarette lighter with a Tallink logo (from the ferry line to Tallinn so popular with "booze-cruisers"), a Palestinian headscarf similar to those worn by Yasser Arafat, a squeezable Teletubby doll, and metal badges from the 1994 Presidential Election campaigns of Martti Ahtisaari and Elisabeth Rehn .
"When the objects are increasingly often industrially mass-produced items, what becomes important are the authentic stories behind them", says City Museum Director Elina Kallio.
One object that gets you to stop in your tracks is a placard from a demonstration in the 1990s, delivering a message akin to "Hands off our Pensions!". Some indignant Finnish citizen has waved this above his or her head, possibly to a group of MPs on the steps in front of Parliament. The chances are that, encouraged by like-minded souls in the company, he or she may have underlined the message with a few good angry shouts and jeers.
Director Kallio recalls that not so long ago the City Museum considered acquiring for its collections one of the musical French Sanisette WCs or "superloos", which entered the cityscape during the Mayoral term of Raimo Ilaskivi in the 1980s.
"There was a lengthy discussion about it. But since they each weigh around 4,000 kilos, we wouldn't have been able to get even a forklift truck to lift the thing into place."
Shame, really. In all its pomposity, the pissoir would have been a fairly apt monument for the Ilaskivi era in the capital.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.4.2007
*Note: Amusingly enough, the couple spotted this article and rang in to the newspaper the following day to express their astonishment that the "Sanna and Petri" sign from 2001, made by Sanna herself, was a museum-piece. They kindly filled in the missing details of the provenance of the object, and confirmed that the signs had indeed worked - all 80 guests had made it successfully to the reception on a beautiful summer day. Better still, Sanna and Petri Pulkkinen are still happily married, and will be celebrating their sixth wedding anniversary later this year.
Links:
Helsinki City Museum
Finnish National Museum
TOMMI NIEMINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
tommi.nieminen@hs.fi
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| 11.4.2007 - THIS WEEK |
Exhibit #213: One Frozen Mozzarella Pizza, c. 2000 AD
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