Efferent Verb Team:

Meet Jonanna Ruotsalainen, an accomplished Finnish composer, visual artist, and senior lecturer in music theory and composition at Oulu University of Applied Sciences. Hailing from the Arctic region, Johanna has collaborated with some of the world’s most renowned contemporary performers, ensembles, and festivals in recent years. These include the Ligeti Quartet from the United Kingdom, the Mise-en Ensemble in New York, the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Germany, and ToolBox Percussion from China. By embracing her Arctic roots, Johanna is striving to broaden the scope of high-arts culture by ensuring the inclusion of marginalized voices in a globalized, Western-centric, and historically colonized landscape.

Interviewer: Can you share some of your experiences collaborating with internationally renowned performers and ensembles, such as Ligeti Quartet and Gewandhaus Orchestra?

Johanna: I have had a great privilege to collaborate with some of the amazing superstars of contemporary music scene. For me, a true collaboration is a two-way process where both participants can learn from one another. Collaborating with renowned performers has helped me to understand that good music is not just unique ideas and polished aesthetics – it’s also great playability with deep understanding of an instrument, and space for a performer to bring their expertise and person in musical expression.

Interviewer: How has your background as a visual artist influenced your compositions, and how do you find a balance between your two artistic practices?

Johanna: For me the artistic and aesthetic process is the same regardless of the final product or the medium used. I often paint musical forms such as fugues and compose visual elements such as colors or shapes. My artistic process has a mystical phase based on inspiration, followed by a phase of very analytical and self-critical editing. In my opinion, creating art requires three skills: an understanding of aesthetics, craftsmanship and individual creativity. If any of the three is missing or deficient, the result is something other than art.

Interviewer: As a senior lecturer in music theory and composition, how do you incorporate your own experiences as a composer into your teaching methods?

Johanna: I always emphasize action over observation for my students. I often ask myself, can my students do something with this knowledge or skill, rather than just having the information. I also believe that by directing my students toward creative thinking, and encouraging and actively nurturing their creativity, we contribute to the welfare of society on a large scale – and I don’t just mean cultural or intellectual well-being, but also economic benefit and inclusion through, for example, new innovations and collaboration between seemingly distant industries. In my opinion, creativity is an undervalued asset and competence in today’s working life and in society in general.

Interviewer: Winning the Hanns Eisler composition Scholar of 2020 is a significant achievement. How has this recognition impacted your career and creative process?

Johanna: I think it is important for a young composer, especially from peripheral and geographically isolated areas such as Finland, to travel and gain experience from different cultural environments and diverse trends internationally. Eisler’s ideas on music have impacted my process, especially through his post-genre thinking and his idea of ‘useful music’. Eisler was influenced by Schoenberg’s atonalism but also jazz and popular music of his time. Eisler wrote scores for plays, films, cabarets, marches… because he wanted contemporary art music to also be useful. Eisler felt that modern music was somewhat elitist and difficult for listeners to appreciate and understand, so he had an inner conflict with this ideology and his musical aesthetics (being complex, serialist, and atonal). Composing for film and documentaries in the serialist style made his more difficult musical ideas also accessible for mass audiences. My music has no premises of being for mass audiences, and I’m not concerned so much about whether I’m in marginal or not, but I am very interested in applying music to film, animation, media art, installations… And a lot of Eisler’s ideas revolve around this applied music as well.

Interviewer: Johanna, as someone who comes from the Arctic area, what specific challenges have you faced in trying to increase the inclusion of marginal voices in the definition of high-arts?

Johanna: The historical colonialist approach has stigmatized the exchange of thoughts and artistic and aesthetic practices between the Central European art world of high-arts and the Arctic. In recent years, cultural operators and decision-making have identified and recognized this tradition of exotification and cultural appropriation in the Arctic, and it has had a positive impact on the collaboration between local professionals in the Northern areas and operators from outside of the culture. However, the Arctic and other non-Western cultures or peripheral areas are still seen as something that is outside. It continues the tradition, where people who are insiders in the legitimate system, in some sense, still think they are on a higher plane. The Arctic and its environmental challenges – especially since the struggle against climate change has become a global problem – have become trendy subjects and interesting themes for many international artists as well. When international artists from outside of the culture create art in the Northern or peripheral context, the tradition of one-way cultural exchange often still is a relevant problem. The risk is that the Arctic community will be viewed in a degrading way: The high-art community from outside of the culture will teach locals what art is, and the aim is to ‘fix’ or ‘school’ the broken and uneducated community. This could be seen as a modern exotification of the Arctic areas.

Genuine collaboration between operators from different cultural and linguistic communities is still a difficult question: How can we encounter otherness in art without succumbing to stereotypes or desire for the exotic? Even if it is impossible – due to deficiencies in culturally dependent knowledge – to interpret and appreciate the artworks of other cultures to perfection, mainstream operators should strive to increase inclusion through wider collaboration. Fear of being misunderstood and stigmatized as racist and the burden of colonialist history curb the willingness of the mainstream Western art world to cooperate with artists from the Arctic areas. Lack of collaboration leads to making false assumptions on how marginal art should be encountered: Compartmentalizing something as marginal art is harmful prejudice, if it is done without collaboration and from the outside. Compartmentalization produces otherness and exclusion, and non-Western artists should own their integrity to decide how their art is to be labelled, if at all.

Interviewer: Could you provide examples of how culture is used to perpetuate differences and give visibility and experience of belonging only to certain stories?

Johanna: Marginality and peripherality always depend on the point of view, but in the power relations of the art world, peripheral areas geographically and culturally far from decision-making are represented poorly or not at all. It is difficult to compare, for example, Arctic art to anything mainstream, but in cultural political decision-making processes, such as funding, it is important to be able to classify, compare, and evaluate art somehow. The key is not only to recognize but also to acknowledge that so-called ‘high-arts’ have a colonialized history; The reason for the invisibility of certain narratives is that people involved in decision-making often do not recognize their own privileged or mainstream position. Recognizing one’s own mainstream position leads to the understanding that there are stories beyond the reach of the imagination of a representative of the majority culture: If one is accustomed to the surrounding culture offering stories one can relate to, it can be difficult to understand why there would be a need for a different kind of narration. If the people involved in decision-making are unable to identify with the content of the presented art project, from the point of view of decision-making it often means that the artistic quality or assumed effectiveness of the project is insufficient – and if quality or effectiveness is a decisive factor in decision-making related to the distribution of resources, the work related to defining quality and developing evaluation criteria must be made equally accessible to all artists. The topic or the story itself in art cannot be a reason for exclusion.

Interviewer: In your experience, how do peer and expert evaluations of artistic quality contribute to maintaining inequality in the art world?

Johanna: The problem with expertise is that it focuses on those parts of the artwork in which the traditions that produce exclusion are most strongly present – that is, the interpretation and evaluation of the work. Expert reviews and traditional art criticism do not take into account the circumstances and context in which the artists operate and in which the works are created and presented. An assigned expert possesses the power to promote or limit equality in the arts, but often the experts are not aware of their own mainstream position from which the artworks or their quality are assessed. The definition of art alone may exclude people or communities from the discourse. Exclusion of some voices is inevitable and occasionally it may even be necessary, but it should always be done consciously. The structures surrounding the work of art should play a role in the critique, as art is an everyday practice. Otherwise, the ideals of art will turn into universal laws to which all art is subjected. To diversify art criticism from expert assessments alone to collectively produced critiques or peer reviews can produce new perspectives and values in the art world. Inclusion in the evaluation of art, therefore, translates not only as the inclusion of diverse artists and multicultural structures of the art world but also as the diversity of the experts and art critics.

Interviewer: Can you give us some insights into how the mechanisms that maintain inequality in the art world, such as exclusion based on place of origin, are obscured by the perceived universal artistic quality?

Johanna: Western definition has for a long time understood the products of art and design as items that cannot have any other purpose besides self-sufficient artistic identity; works of art have no use value, social function, or narrative meaning. Traditionally, the division of the artistic practices of Western and non-Western cultures into arts and non-arts has been argued with the separation into products of art and into products of crafts, non-Western art-like practices producing only the latter in this classification. During the nineteenth century, European artists began to establish their independence, and with this came the cult of authorship, as opposed to anonymous works. It emphasized originality and the idea that the artist is inspired and creative in ways that mere crafts-makers are not. Many practices and products of non-Western cultures, such as Arctic arts, have traditionally been categorized as crafts in the modern European system of high arts. In non-Western cultures, the conception of art and artists differs from the conception of central European culture. The artist, as a profession in the sense that it is understood in the Western world, is relatively new, for example, in the Arctic areas. In non-Western cultures, art is impossible to separate from social: culture is usually tightly interconnected with territory, kinship, community, ceremony, and cosmic order. The definition of artist and art practice has expanded in recent years to include, for example, the work descriptions and artist personalities of an artist-craftsman and a community artist, but it still struggles to appreciate art intuitively, in the absence of an artworld context.

Interviewer: What strategies or initiatives do you believe are necessary to overcome these barriers and achieve greater inclusivity in the globalized, Western-centered definition of high-arts?

Johanna: In the context of arts and in the cultural policies, comparative and evaluative work is by character challenging. More research and development are needed to widen the discourse on the definition of art and on the artistic quality criteria. The idea of performance and effectiveness in the cultural sector is often treated as self-sufficient, and there is no common understanding of the issues and phenomena to be assessed. Measuring the value of art is a case-by-case activity in which the evaluation criteria are not traditionally verbalized: evaluation is based on the tacit knowledge of experts. It is important to be able to critically examine the quality criteria and their applicability when evaluating marginal art. At the heart of everything should be the common goal for the future to increase the inclusion in the arts. We need more multicultural decision-making, decentralization of decision-making, and bolder experimentation by those in a decision-making position (e.g., curators’ selections of repertoire). We should not be afraid that new openings will not have credibility when old criteria cannot be used to evaluate their quality. Art can only renew itself through phenomena that are at first marginal and difficult to categorize into anything already known.

I am always open to all kinds of collaborations and joint projects. Naturally, I’m most excited about opportunities to have my pieces performed or recorded, or composition commissions for new works. But I am also open to collaborations including lectures, public speaking, writing articles, etc.

Contact:

Email: info@johannaruotsalainen.com

Tel.: 00358-46-5999-206

Website: www.johannaruotsalainen.com