INSTALLATION 9 – JÜRI OKAS
The Tallinn-based artist Jüri Okas (b. 1950) seeks to have his work experienced primarily as an abstract state of mind. However, this state of mind also functions effectively as a metaphor for the local reality where he has operated as both an architect and artist since the mid-1970s. At the same time, it conceptually presents a fragment of the experience shaped by our technological era’s veneration of utility and efficiency.
Okas’ working method reflects the foundations of his art. The initial concept for a piece is typically extremely minimalist. As the design process progresses, layers are added, and the final execution expands into a realm of ironic playfulness and absurdity. Paradoxically, the true insight and reduction are hidden in a detail or component of the whole, which invites contemplation of what is essential: the values of our time and the possibilities of beauty and justice.
The progression of his work from the whole to the details—a kind of deconstruction to uncover meaning—reconstructs nature and the environment. Humanity is present only indirectly, through “acts” in the built environment. His work continuously navigates a borderline, a razor’s edge, where the contrasts, contradictions, and multilayered interplay of signs, materials, forms, and space create the foundation and tension of the piece.
The subjects and tools of Jüri Okas’ work, including industrial materials and “ruins,” are grounded in a concept of perpetual incompleteness, conveying a vision of societal failure. Yet it is precisely these manifestations of failure—totalitarianism and anarchism—that have given rise to the distinctive language of Okas’ art, imbued with humor and absurdity, capable of transcending everyday reality. In this anarchistic composition, destruction and construction exist in symbiosis: the ugly becomes beautiful, the meaningless meaningful, and the small monumental.
Installation 9, created for the Pori Art Museum, is not Okas’ ninth installation. The title is simply an abstract marker, much like the work itself. It represents a kind of systematically militaristic and industrially masculine strategic field, constructed in the museum space with hundreds of hay bales, gravel, asphalt, neon light, and steel plates.
The hay does not appear in its natural state but is geometrically packaged. It is not used as animal feed but transformed into art. Natural stone has been crushed into gravel, and soft asphalt hardened. Green neon light serves as a metaphor for “artificial” nature. The museum’s open, minimalist space and the structural elements created by its ventilation systems engage in their own dialogue with the installation’s construction.
Just as nature for Jüri Okas is irrational yet governed by rules, so too can a work of art—through its contrasts of life and death, utility and futility, beauty and ugliness—produce a metaphysical aesthetic experience. By deconstructing the layers of the work, it becomes possible to uncover the ethical demands that form the essential foundation of Jüri Okas’ art.
Publication:
ISBN 951-9355-33-2 Jüri Okas: Installaatio 9/ Installation 9
Pori Art Museum 25.10.-1.12.1991
Articles: Sirje Helme, Marketta Seppälä
Finnish translations: Eve Lille
English translations: Krista Mits, The English Centre
Photographs: Jüri Okas, Erkki Valli-Jaakola
Lay-out: Hilkka Kuusijärvi
Nelostuote Ky, Pori 1991
Pori Art Museum Publications 16
Translated with ChatGPT