Courtesy the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York

Erkka Nissinen, "Vantaa" (2007). Single-channel color video, 11 min 30 sec.

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Jeff Koons

Chantal Akerman

Painting: Now and Forever, Part II

There is No There There

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Armando Andrade Tudela

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

Paul McCarthy Cult of Personality L.A.’s Expanded L&M Arts to Open With McCarthy Show Paul McCarthy Yard The High Life The Manchester Tales: A Weekend of Performance Art Remembering Michael Jackson

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Cross Paul McCarthy with the beloved Scandinavian children’s character Moomintroll, and you might get something like Finnish artist Erkka Nissinen’s video Vantaa (2007), the centerpiece of his hilarious American debut. In it, a bearded dwarf named Arnold Schoenberg— played by Nissinen on his knees in a monk’s robe, floppy latex mask, and rubber feet— searches a digitally rendered neighborhood of brightly colored houses for his stolen yogurt. Past idiotic talking flowers, a cabbage-swaddled penis mistaken for a xylophone, animated twins literally head-banging, and a drum solo played with potatoes and a sponge, our protagonist finds his way to an Astroturf island where the thief, a foulmouthed Karlheinz Stockhausen, has an apoplectic fit and collapses while guzzling a bowl of viscous cream. If this sounds ridiculous, it is. But it’s also a funny, profane take on Beckettian absurdity and a blunt jab at avant-garde pretensions.

Two other videos find the artist in a track suit, curly wig, and fake mustache lecturing on subjectivity; in a blond wig and Union Jack tank top playing a drug-addled, semen-drooling prostitute; and as a young man having a heart-to-heart and then a painful breakup with a cartoon panda, which replies by means of Nissinen’s not-quite unnoticeable ventriloquism. Mashing up children’s television, soap opera, porn, and philosophy class, Nissinen invents a parodic world of engrossingly hysterical scenarios and somehow affecting pathos. "Erkka Nissinen" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.