Finland Museum Tour 1/??: Tampere Art Museum
I haven’t really been to museums as an adult; not because I’d have been particularly Anti-Museum, but just because museums never happened to become a Thing That I Do. I vaguely recall having been to a few museums with my parents when I was little, an occasional Japan exhibition as a teen when Japan was a Thing, and a few visits to various museums with school. I think my overall recollection of those visits afterwards could be summarized as being around 5.5 on the BoardGameGeek rating scale grade of “5/10: Slightly boring, take it or leave it” and “6/10: Ok - will play if in the mood”. (The BGG rating scale is my favorite of the ones that I’ve seen, but I digress.)
So I’m not sure, but it’s at least possible that between becoming an adult and yesterday, I didn’t visit a single museum.
For the last year or so however, I’ve had a definite feeling of being stuck in a rut, life-wise. Up until summer last year, I used to have a lot of anxiety; I’m still not totally free of it, but I’ve reduced the amount of it enough that escaping from it is no longer my main driving motivation, the way that it used to be. Meaning that I’m more free to focus on things that I actually enjoy.
But once you have spent most of your adult life feeling a desperate need to escape from a constant level of background anxiety, anxiety which was preventing you from doing anything slow-paced as that would have been insufficient to drown out the suffering… then it’s hard to know *what* you really enjoy anymore. Because you haven’t really been looking for enjoyable things, you have been looking for things that would make the pain go away.
What I was left with, even after getting rid of most of the anxiety, was some level of anhedonia - a difficulty deriving any pleasure from something. And most of my old routines were built around doing things that were mainly palliatives for anxiety, rather than being particularly enjoyable.
Then one day, I happened to see a news article saying something about how the national Museum Card - a single card that you can buy for a year, that gives you free access to various museums around the country - had brought more visitors to museums. And it crossed my mind that visiting museums is a Thing That People Do, which I wasn’t doing, and that I probably hadn’t been able to properly appreciate museums as a kid.
Also, that it would be a fun adventure to go around the country and visit all the various museums that the card gives you access to (currently 278 of them). That kind of an adventure was also Something That People Did, but which hadn’t really been the Kind Of Thing That I Would Do.
So I happened to mention this idea in a conversation with my good friend Tiina, who then mentioned that she also had a museum card, and that company would be welcome. That wasn’t quite an agreement to visit *all* the museums in the country, but still good enough to get started!
Our first visit, today, was to Tampere Art Museum. I had no particular reason for picking this place in particular: me and Tiina would be traveling elsewhere later in the day, so I let her as a Tampere local choose a place from which we could easily get to the bus station afterwards. I also found the notion of starting out with an art museum intriguing. Some of the other museums in Tampere, such as the Espionage Museum, Game Museum or Lenin Museum had topics that were intrinsically interesting. But just a generic “art museum” was probably closest to my inner stereotype of the kind of a dull museum that I wasn’t really able to appreciate as a kid. This time, I was determined to have an open mind and enjoy my experience, whatever it might be.
And I did.
The museum had two exhibitions. The first, Tuomo Rosenlund and Mika Hannu’s “Paikan muisti” (“The Memory of Place”) consisted of black-and-white drawings of different places in the city of Tampere, together with poems and writing about the history of those places.
I feel like I have recently done a number of things to help me connect with more intuitive parts of my mind, ranging from various psychotherapy-style practices like Focusing, to shaman drumming and mild vision trances. Looking at the various drawings, the thought came to me to let my subconscious complete them. I asked it to do so and it obliged, and in my mind’s eye, the black-and-white drawings were flooded with color and texture and depth, and I could experience myself standing in the depicted places, imagining myself into locations that I had never seen before. Not as vividly as actually being there, but as strongly as in a particularly vivid memory.
That felt enjoyable, like a pleasant meditation exercise.
And then there was the exhibition by J.A. Juvani, a visual artist who - as I learned - is the national Young Artist of the Year.
The essence of his pieces, as I experienced them, was that of pure, raw, unashamed sexuality; lust and desire shaded in colors of queer and kink. Furthermore, it was an obviously personal essence; an expression of the artist’s own sexuality, an expression of intimacy that drew you in, erotic even to someone like me who doesn’t ordinarily think of himself as being physically attracted to men.
One of his displays was a looping video, on a large screen right in front of the stairs leading to the second floor, placed so that you couldn’t avoid seeing it when you came up. At the end of the very suggestive video, he would be staring you right in the eyes; and as I stared back, I felt my breathing growing deeper and faster, as if he was propositioning to me in the flesh right there, me finding him too appealing to say no to.
What probably got me was the rawness - this was not the nice, unreal kind of erotica where everything is pink and nobody’s position ever feels uncomfortable, but the kind of primal lust that felt real and totally uninterested in Photoshopping any aspect of the experience. It was much more interested in just having a good, visceral, _physical_ fuck right then and there.
And it brought up partially forgotten memories. Memories of a same kind of pure, two-sided lust between people, with a force that I realized I probably hadn’t experienced since my teen years, in that roller-coaster relationship with my first girlfriend that was all shades of dysfunctional but never lacking in intensity.
There was a book on Juvani’s work on sale; I skimmed it, and his descriptions of his life, the casual sex, the friend who had visited “for a tea and a blowjob” further brought back memories of those first teenage sex experiences, when everything was novel and exciting and innocent and powerful; before I had accumulated the sexual traumas and problems that sometimes make me almost averse over the thought of having sex, even with a willing and desirable partner.
And there was a sense of catharsis, feeling somehow more *pure* as a result; the same kind of feeling that I may get from writing something that I’ve managed to really immerse myself in, or from really intensive fiction. A feeling of having connected with deeper, more emotional parts of my mind, and becoming more whole as a result.
It was a good experience. I’m glad that I went.
Originally published at Kaj Sotala. You can comment here or there.