PHILOSOPHY OF MONTAGE, MONTAGE OF PHILOSOPHY – Kimmo Sarje

Kimmo Sarje (b. 1951) started his career as a conceptual artist in the mid 1980s questioning the symbols of the sublime of the two superpowers of the time, the Soviet Union and the United States. In his simple montages he painted Barnett Newman’s stripes on official Soviet Lenin posters. Sarje continued producing a series of shows and art projects in which he deconstructed Lenin cult and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. A central issue in Sarje’s sots art is to juxtapose ideas and icons of Modernism and Socialism as he did, for example, in his series about Lenin and Kazimir Malevich. Sarje is also known for his multiple contacts with Russian and Baltic artists. When studying in the

Whitney Independent Study Program in New York 1986-87 Sarje became acquainted with the Russian emigrant sots artists Komar & Melamid who helped him to build contacts with the younger generation in Moscow.

The tradition of Modernism in Finland has also been one of the targets of Sarje’s work. To accept the conventions and hierarchies of the so called Nordic taste doesn’t respond to his critical standpoint. In a series of montage exhibitions in the late 1980s and early 1990s Sarje deconstructed the rhetoric of Alvar Aalto’s design by mixing parts of the architects’ original chairs and lamps plus his famous glass vases with the language of modernist painting and popular culture.

In the mid 1990s Sarje concentrated in the questions of the Finnish modernism before and after the First World War. He published a book about Sigurd Frosterus’ architecture and worldview. Frosterus was a leading rationalist modernist during the first decades of the 20th century in Finland. In Sarje’s “Dawn” exhibition 1999 in his photomontages he interpreted Frosterus’ aesthetics, too.

Questions about abstraction, decoration and monumental architecture have also been topics of Sarje’s art. In his New York -series as well as in his montages about Stalinist architecture he has mixed the dogmas of Modernist abstraction with classical architectural decoration. Cultural parallels are a stimulus of Sarje’s work. The analogues of Maya architecture in Mexico and the national socialist monumental architecture of Albert Speer in Nürnberg was a starting point of Sarje’s exhibition “Quo vadis monumentum?” in 1998.

Sarje is a member of two artist groups: Concept Konzert, a group of five Finnish conceptualists, and Elkida, a group of three Scandinavian artists. In many of his projects he has collaborated with his colleagues. For example, all his video works Sarje realized together with Kimmo Koskela, a well-known videoartist.

Kimmo Sarje works both as an artist and as an essayist and university teacher. He started his career in the mid 1970s as an art critic. He has published books about contemporary art and history of ideas in Finland. He wrote his academic theses about Sigurd Frosterus 2000. As an artist Sarje is self-taught, however, his work is well represented in many main art museums in Finland. His criticism and montages have been studied recently in two academic dissertations.

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