A Life Story as a Work of Art
By Erkki Pirtola
The most important task is that at least one centre of knowledge would be saved in the world, HUMANITY.
A person's story of life is his work of art. Individual deeds and works are set within the frames of this entity like parts of a plant. Every human being has a very specific work of one's life story and these are gaining a hold of each other creating variety of human history. As it comes to Aleksanteri Ahola-Valo, who was born in 1900, we can stop at a breathtaking phenomenon which rises to the history of our souls like a tree with strong runners. One branch is living in different forms of graphic art and picture printing techniques he developed, another one in paintings which reflect phases of his whole life, the third one in the whirligig and the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Practical inventions, architecture, sculpture, theatrical experiments form a network of branches, through which is breaking the lofty, bright pillar of the "science of progress".
The strongest trunk of the tree is Ahola-Valo's doctrine of AE-evohomology, with which a person gets possession of the use of time. This is branched into a new system of pedagogy, in which Ahola-Valo had his heart. "The beginning of pedagogy as such as it ought to be will take place only in the next century. This century has been sacrificed to murders and violence."
Ahola-Valo has painted a coat of arms of his own with a big source of light, the sun, upon which there is a palm-tree growing. Its roots penetrate through a heart like a vein and a pulse into the globe itself. Out of the protuberances of the sun is volcanically written the word VALO, light. A high-minded image of the world's breathing and of consciousness of the cycle of this dualism.
A century of darkness and light
If one could think of some kind of absolute archives of memories of mind, which would include all sensual experiences, thoughts, emotions and deeds of all men as three-dimensional visualizations, it would be a marvellous living network, the true history of mankind, where one could see how everything has influenced upon everything. In that there would be reflected the phases of a private person in relationship with time, society and one's neighbours. It would be possible to research seriously effects of thoughts and deeds. The trees and their fruits could be seen. How a wrong reaction, a selfish emotion or utilitarian thinking have destroyed human life, possible new stages of civilization and species. One could also notice how a word said in a right moment or an idea just invented have created cultures, given people the right to exist in a creative way. Particularly one could notice how the rich move money to the pockets of each other and how wealthy institutions support their own stagnation and how capital is never there where it is a question of some fresh idea concerning mankind. New things come always through the needle's eye of pennilessness. This is due to the fact that new things rise from the unknown, void, something experienced never before, which some individual sees and gives shape to it while the rest of the community sees only the old.
Specially our century seems to be a chaos of such negative and positive life stories. There have been struggles of life and death about man. Seen from the perspective of a thousand years of peace this sort of an era would certainly seem tragicomical, so many absurd swings of the pendulum there have been between the most brilliant progress and the deepest destruction and lowness.
Pedagogically, this age will in the future be seen as a mob on a reform school level messing about, with a few geniuses, whose inventions caused more confusion than spiritual enlightenment. Also the superficiality of the period would be noticed, its obsession to raise nonentities to be its heroes and spiritual leaders and systematically pass by those who bring the light.
The temple of violence of mankind
Aleksanteri Ahola-Valo was this kind of a light-bringing person passed by, whose marvellous life story includes exactly the century we are living in. It would have been interesting if one could have been transferred into the mind of Ahola-Valo, or Ali, as his friends called him. If one only had seen with some "mind-scope" into this person's storage of memories. How he was present when Rasputin's corpse was lifted up from the Neva and saw this corpse also at the stake. Or how he remembers having been five meters from Lenin in Smolny when he gave Svinhufvud Finland's independence : "Yeah, yeah. It's been already decided." Or building a miniature of the battleship Potemkin in order to market Eisentein's ingenious film, in which he appears himself in white dress in the celebrated scene at the stairs in Odessa. These images are just like taken directly from a pop panorama from the beginning of our century.
Imagine Ahola-Valo painting a huge six meters high portrait of Lenin after his death in 1924, which was illuminated from the inside and was exhibited in Vitebsk and maybe started the tradition of gigantic Lenin sheets. Or see this versatile man and busybody in early 30's as a manager of the ideological and scientific work of the Society for improving ways of life, developing his educational ideas, and then in the Institute for Protection of Motherhood and Children building crawling-troughs with objects of observation for babies in a project that was aimed to "change the whole realm". And because the revolution had to be continued all around the earth, Ali thought that he was taking part in an educational event concerning whole mankind. A fact that describes Ahola-Valo's powerful movements of soul is that before these immediate pedagogical projects he had designed and constructed the Pavilion of the sufferings of mankind in Minsk in Belarus in six months in 1930.
On the walls of the pavilion this Finnish "Michelangelo of Communism" painted with his assistants methods of torture of brutal rulers of mankind ; Chinese water torture, Polish torture in which hot oil was poured into the victim's bowels, or death in an electric chair in America. In the middle there stood a gigantic six meters high sculpture of wood, "Goliath", "The Armed Tyrant of the World", on whose back there was an illuminated signboard out of which a visitor could pick up the fates of well-known martyrs like Bruno or Hus. Light from the giant's monocle illuminated the whole exhibition area.
The temple as itself looks even today like an amazing creation, and no Dokumenta in Kassel with hundreds of artists of the day can make the same striking impression. Even as an idea, constructing such a temple like this just before Stalin's terror, is compared with Pablo Picasso's Guernica. No wonder, when the Germans came to Minsk during the World War, they blew up the temple immediately. An outrageous work as this must have been seen as a disturbing portrayal installation by the Nazis, especially because this sturdy character held a Mauser pistol and a cross in his hands ...
It happened naturally so that when the temple was completed, Soviet comissars cancelled most of Ali's wages. Ali lost his temper, left his then domestic Belarus for ever and threw the money he was given to people out of a window of a train. This series of events is directly from a spectacular cultural historical film with Ali starring.
One stunning project was his work as an architect planning "The green urban circle around Moscow" , where almost a million people could have lead a sober and many-sided life. It reminds of Leonardo da Vinci's plans to change Florence of his time into a system of man and nature embracing each other. But, as in Leonardo's time, the money was transferred to arms industry, and Stalin started manufacturing his organs of destruction. The Green Moscow was never realized and the conflict between nature and urban man has not been solved in a satisfactory way anywhere on earth.
A school system as art
When Ahola-Valo was born in 1900 there was no idea of the revolutionary events, which would change completely all relationships within human community from the practice of power to everyday work, motion and the media. Nevertheless, something has remained untouchable. The nucleus of man and the process of its growth.
It was just this theme that was burning in Ahola-Valo's heart : the human child of our time has been educated on a primitive moral, aesthetical and philosophical level, and instead of a man-centered culture it has been made an immense mountain of garbage, under which the Creation is buried and man, too.
This basic thing little Aleksanteri fully understood at the age of seven: a human being is not only the seat of physical growth, but above all, of spiritual growth. The pedagogical wonder-child noticed this already as he became of school age and found out that the frames of education were not as many as necessary. He made children to learn from each other. This was influenced by the notice that every man had an immense desire to learn himself, and this was suppressed by the school. A teacher must be an inspiring arouser, who opens a child's hidden capacities, not a suppressor. All his observations he wrote down in a surprising premature way with accurate drawings, which are not at all made by a "child's" pen. Little Ali was like an old, wise soul in a child's body.
Time = Capital = Human capacities
Joseph Beuys, the most important artist-philosopher-speaker since the 60's, developed the operative system of "expanded concept of art", with which art was set to be an organism of freedom giving form to whole society, where "every man is an artist". Beuys's doctrine, as Ahola-Valo's, is based on reforming education, "social sculpture", separate from the government's goals, with which a person's soul and spirit are educated. Ahola-Valo's AE-evohomology is related to the Beuysian method of liberation and his sentence : "The only capital of man is time" responds Beuys's celebrated line : "The only capital of man are his capabilities."
These questions are very actual today. There is talk about that a person ought to be creative and have control of his own life, but the structures are just getting stiffer and stiffer. The structure of education has been multiplied, but the teaching situation is still the same. The teachers deliver ready-made information packages in a stupefying atmosphere aiming at tests and extensive studies. Not only that lessons in the arts, sports and handicraft are being reduced, let alone that pupils would be taken to living situations, but because of the increased automation the basic observations are forgotten, in which one's soul could clang. Then a teacher would be a true artist, who would take his work with fiery enthusiasm and "anarchism" , which feeling would, of course, infect to children.
The co-operation inspired by the information material itself could lead to an endless adventure, which would take both the teacher and the pupils to completely new waters and the discovery of new knowledge. (It is a fundamentally false notion that science ONLY exists at the top of science. A little researcher, as well as a little artist in man can be closer to reality than a highly educated scientist. The questions that lead to a new view of the world are often childish, as Albert Einstein has pointed out.)
This is naturally a risky thought concerning the organized society, but it is the only real way to create a new society with new contents of information, handled by fresh, independently inventing minds. "Those people who work for a little child, the pedagogues, are the most important people in the world. But they do not recognize their own dignity. Why is that so ? They do not yet know that one who educates and trains people, is also directing the realm. So will it be in the future world."
The revolution of the concept of man
It is surprising that Ahola-Valo's ideas were well received in newly born Soviet Union. We can not at all imagine the enthusiasm caused by Lenin's revolution, because "Communism is bad". Psychologically, it must have been a moment of outburst of deep traumas among both the common people and the intellectuals. The spirit of time was crying for a renewal on all levels. New isms were rising from the depths of the Russian soul like flowers in the springtime and the people found its own dignity.
The history of the world was otherwise rewritten at the time. Inventions in psychology, philosophy, physics brought a new image of man and a new idea of society. The leading star of all was finding new dimensions, which broke the ancient model of superiority of one point. The splitting of perspective, inventing depth psychology and the theory of relativity were reflecting the fact that man as a spiritual-physical creature had many more dimensions than one could even anticipate. In Russia, "God's death" hardly caused the Czar's death, but hunger, and in the same time a thousand years old authoritarian madness came to an end. This happened only in the name of a new madness, a new doctrine of perspective, Communism.
The boundless ecstasy of freedom nevertheless created art and theories as if they had come out of nothing, and in this atmosphere a soul of fire like Ahola-Valo enjoyed himself as a fish in water. In that time FREEDOM of mankind was born in a general and an individual sense. This was in a severe conflict with the obligation of collectivization. The individuality that was born was and still is between the desires of the masses and the authorities directing them.
Ahola-Valo saw with his own eyes the Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg in 1905, when the Czar's troops shot at demonstrators and dead children fell around him from a tree like innocent victims of the new change, which blind butchery went on in the reign of Stalin, the new Czar. In a sort of a way the revolution did not come at all, and this whole era, as the rest of European fascism, can be seen as the anti-idea of our century, as an exact, distorted black picture of what should have been.
Ahola-Valo worked as a skillful and versatile artist in the new Soviet society. It is bewildering to watch his posters, caricatures, sketches of medals from that time. How the letters CCCP, which only a short time ago aroused antipathy, now look like nostalgic treasures to us from the age of propaganda. He is not joining abstract space odysseys of the extreme avant -garde, the least its mysticism, but combines modernistic inventions with strong realism always in an educational way. In his self-portraits of that time one can see a firm and bright, clearly drawn young man, who believes in ideology and enlightenment, but not as a Party propagandist.
Ahola-Valo was as late as at the age of ninety-seven ready to distribute his doctrine again, and was in Finland diligently preparing the premiére of his play in five acts, "Adults and Children in the Whirls of Education", which he wrote at the age of fourteen.
The history of madness
"My soul strives to go forward and the madmen try to stop it." Thus said Ahola-Valo about a water-colour he painted during his imprisonment in Finland with three colours he was given. In that a blue man is rising towards the eternal light on the stairs of time. Stalin's paranoia drove Ahola-Valo to Finland, where, of course, the corresponding insanity put him into the prison as a "Russian Communist." Of his prison cell in Tammisaari Ali has painted a painstakingly detailed picture, in which one can almost see the dust on a lamp wire. Ali remembered a horse-headed, cruel warder called "Hoppa", who shouted at these "political prisoners" from the door after bombings, which they were afraid of, sheltering under their beds : "Look now, what horrible things you have caused."
One can have only a vague idea of Ali's pain and disappointments and the extremely bitter thoughts caused by the political imprisonment. A universal Finnish person of fiery spirits in a cell in his home country as a "cultural criminal", obliged to give up all his general human plans of changing the world.
These are just those points, where one would like to have a peep at the archives of images of human history I earlier mentioned. What is the history of madness, which drives people from common cultural efforts to destruct everything that is living and valuable ? Man is by nature just a nice being, who does not want to get in trouble by any means, and only sick individuals cause pain to other people.
However, there has never been so much killing and torture going on as in the modern times. Is it collective madness, which periodically gets loose in us, or is it certain individuals' terrible insanity that made friends to kill each other in Bosnia ? Or is it this market economy paralyzing everything and packing people into limited lockers and the media putting the masses to sleep : Don't talk, don't think, don't act - we'll do it for you, sit down and rot. "It took a short time for man to develop a technology for flying to the Moon, but it will take 4000 years more to understand Jesus' doctrine. No God is needed for that."
A prophet without a home country
In Ahola-Valo's hierarchy of functions art is only in the eighth place. In the first place come AE-evohomology and its applied parts for changing the world. Amidst all phony radical modern art the ideas of this eternally old man were pointing to the future, where art and moral activities are one. Art in its narcissistic isolation of today is only a part of the modern, disfigured civilization and definitely doomed to die, unless it settles down in some relationship with the surrounding life. What the world expects of art is a message from Messiah of everyday.
But Ahola-Valo's pictures include elements, which cause changes in the history of the Finnish art. Akseli Gallen-Kallela understood well Ahola-Valo's artistic endeavours and tried by all means to help him. Gallen-Kallela introduced Ali to his friends : "Here is a young man, get to know him. He will continue my tradition and that of the Finnish art !" Particularly as a graphic artist he has been ahead of his time. There is an embarrassing "postmodern" lino-cut with many colours from 1947, "The world of reasons and consequences". There black Adam takes an apple from white Eve in the fumes of Hiroshima. In a lower corner a father is bashing his child. Above everything there is the organic lyre of hope ringing as a wish of finishing the circle of punishment and revenge.
Ahola-Valo, however, had to escape from Russian-hating Finland to Sweden. At this point Ali's wanderings resemble characteristics of a persecuted biblical prophet, specially when he first could not work as an artist even in Sweden, because of some ancient law. In Sweden his ideas reached listeners anyway, and his AE-evohomology pictogram mandala resembles an occult circle by the Swedish medium artist Hilma af Klint.
In the 80's he returned to Finland and Hämeenlinna, but not as a celebrated hero mistreated by history, but as an eccentricity, whose special qualities were understood by very few people. At the age of ninety-seven Ahola-Valo was more and more like the meditating prophet by Rembrandt, who finally had found out the endlessness of having no home country. Ideas have no home country, their value is just in freedom, and no power structure supports those, who could lead people from the darkness of entertainment and political manipulation to the light of using one's own brains.
As if destiny had dictated, Ahola-Valo lived a life of a century, and his own character bore us the light, which his work of art of his whole life is beaming.
Published in the catalogue Aleksanteri Ahola-Valo 1900-1997,
City of Helsinki Museum of Art, 1998.
Erkki Pirtola is an artist and an art critic living in Helsinki.
English translation by Kai Kyösti Kaukovalta (c) 1999
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