TYPE: Review
HEAD: Weegee Centre
AUTHOR: Javier Pes
STANDFIRST: Javier Pes explores the Weegee Centre in Finland.
BODY: Helinä Rautavaara was 25 years old when in 1953 she packed in her job as a
teacher and headed for Morocco, leaving anxious parents and an ex-husband behind.
She called herself the “hitchhiking reporter”, subsidising her journey across North
Africa by selling articles to the Finnish illustrated magazine Seura. With her blond
hair and fashionable clothes, Rautavaara must have made an exotic first impression on
her travels.
Her next adventure was to follow the Silk Road, through Iraq, Afghanistan and across
India. Travelling the Pan American Highway by bicycle in the late 1950s, she met
revolutionaries in Bolivia. Her parents took an especially dim view of friendship with
their guerrilla leader, and the flattering articles she wrote. Next stop was Brazil, then
in the 1970s her focus moved to Africa. Following the African roots of reggae and
Rastafarianism, she headed for Jamaica, where she attended the musician Bob
Marley’s state funeral.
Next stop was Haiti to research voodoo. She continued to travel up until her death in
1998, amassing a collection of notes for an anthropology thesis that was never
completed, together with photographs, sound recordings, films and over 2,500
objects.
Rautavaara’s collection is displayed in a small museum found in the far corner of the
cavernous Weegee Centre, Espoo, Finland. The former printworks of a company
called Weilin & Göös (hence the familiar form, Weegee), the building now houses
five museums in total as well as colleges of music and art and a secondary school.
The Helinä Rautavaara Museum is the most unconventional, and as colourful as the
collector.
The collection is arranged in five pavilions. These are simple boxy constructions of
raw and stained plywood, suggesting oversized packing cases. The museum’s simple
furniture is made to match, with colourful cushions adding a touch of comfort.
The pavilion nearest the museum’s entrance faces outwards, just like the roaming
collector. The visitor is confronted by a room-set recreating Rautavaara’s living room
in Helsinki: a combination of gilt and zebra-print furniture, Turkish carpets and the
souvenirs of her many travels crowding every surface. On a side table there is an array
of her many spectacles, ringing the changes in fashion: cat’s-eye shapes from the
1950s and bug-eye ones in the 70s.
Text panels on the outside to the pavilion, illustrated with images of the collector,
describe her life and travels. An only child, she seems to have struggled to win the
respect of her parents. Her father was a distinguished scientist. As much a participant
as a reporter on her many travels, she became an idiosyncratic anthropological fieldworker with a magpie’s eye for material culture. Her museum is all the more
interesting for that.
Beyond the first pavilion there is a cluster of four more pavilions looking inwards on
each. The array of colourful objects within is all the more striking after the blank
exterior walls of utilitarian plywood. In the centre of each space hangs a single object
on a bare structural column. Both the concrete of the column and artefact are
dramatised by spot lighting. The museum designer was inspired by the layout of
traditional houses in North Africa, which are windowless on the outside, with all
rooms facing an internal courtyard. The column acts as focal point. Because the
reference is not overt, the layout works just as well for the pavilions devoted to
Central Africa, Latin America and Asia as it does North Africa.
The casual looking placement of the boxy display units that make up each pavilion
and its colour-coded entrance passage means the modular layout avoids monotony. It
is as if the visitor has found themself in a village.
Written interpretation is in Finnish, with Swedish and English hand-held guides.
Texts focus on the rituals and ceremonies that most interested Rautavaara, explaining
when and where she collected the objects that she shipped home to Helsinki. Films or
sound recordings that she made animate the spaces.
Beyond the cluster of pavilions are two more spaces that are flexible. These are used
for performances, education workshops and other activities. Rather than a dedicated
space for temporary exhibitions, these are installed on the outer walls of the museum
that wrap around the pavilions. This means that when left blank between shows, these
walls complement the bare outer walls of the pavilions themselves. The museum’s
design strikes a clever balance between permanence and flexibility, open and intimate
spaces, all achieved in a highly economical way.
The no-frills approach of this museum within a museum complex is reminiscent of the
imaginative Teatteri Museo (Theatre Museum) in Helsinki (see MPxxxx). Like the
theatre museum, which is one of three museums in an industrial building, the Helinä
museum is one of five in the Weegee Centre.
Emma, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, is by far the largest tenant, occupying
5,000 square metres of space within the Weegee Centre. A collection of collections, it
was founded in 2002 on the move to the former printworks. The Helinä Rautavaara
Museum was the first to move in, when the rest of the building was an indoor sports
centre. Emma’s collections include those of the city of Espoo, which had a modest
start in the 1950s to collect art for the walls of the new garden city’s schools. Much
public art followed, for city offices and outdoor spaces, the maquettes for which
increased the collection further.
A wealthy family of industrialists created the Saastamoinen Foundation Art
Collection, with a focus on Finnish artists. It provides Emma a survey of art at of
early- to mid-20th century art. There are the landscapes in sombre tones of the
November group founded that month in 1917 on the eve of Finnish independence.
The October group of the 1930s also favoured a dark palette for their figurative
canvases. Their chilly atmospheres are heightened by being hung on white walls.
Brightly-coloured abstract paintings of the 1950s are followed by minimalist, kinetic
and conceptual sculpture as Finnish artists found inspiration beyond the Baltic in the
prevailing artistic movements of the day.
Two recently donated collections of abstract sculpture and kinetic art feel especially at
home in the former printworks. The widow of Raimo Utriainen (1927-1994), a
Finnish abstract sculpture, has recently donated a collection of his hard-edged,
geometrical sculptures, many made of stainless steel. And in 2008, Emma acquired a
large collection of Osmo Valtonen’s (1929-2002) playful kinetic sculptures. Sand was
a favourite medium. In one, a mechanical grab endlessly scoops sand and then
deposits it in a heap. In another, a pointed stone hanging from a system of pulleys
draws endless spirals.
These two collections of sculpture are installed in a remarkable space that runs the
length of the north wall of the building. Entirely glazed, the north wall is a remarkable
architectural feature in its own right, providing over 150 metres of uninterrupted
views of the surrounding woodland, a natural backdrop for print workers in the past,
and now modern art.
The geometry that forms the basis of many of these works of art means they suit the
architecture of the Weegee building. The printworks was constructed by repeatedly
multiplying a basic square unit. This grid is expressed in its massive supporting
columns, some of which are three metres in diameter, and its pattern of roof beams.
Approriately, an inaugural loan exhibtion in the modern art museum was of the
Russian early 20th century avant garde artist, Kazimir Malevich. Also at home is a
collection of 1970s minimalist art, much of it by US artists, that was collected by a
Finnish economist and businessman in the 1980s. When Pentti Kouri went bankrupt
his collection was sold, some of it bought by a bank that he had at one point
unsuccessfully tried to buy out.
In another part of Emma an artist had created a large, monochrome pointillist canvas
in situ, and then hung works from the collection that are predominantly black and
white around it. The title of this thematic installation was a reference to the fading
light at dusk. The pulling power of changing installations of modern and
contemporary art from these collections, supplemented by loan exhibitions, no doubt
accounts for the majority of the 370,000 annual visitors to the Weegee Centre. To put
these visitor figures into perspective, the population of greater Helsinki, including its
neighbouring city of Espoo, is only about one million. The population of Espoo itself
is about 240,000.
For the E10 admission ticket, visitors to the Weegee Centre get an eclectic choice of
museums. If they choose to visit just one, the cost is E5. Although united under one
roof, there has been no attempt to merge organisations or collections. The museums
are each tenants of the city of Espoo, which owns the building. Individual museums
each have their own clearly defined entrance, reception desk, even a small shop,
duplicating the main shop in the centre’s foyer.
Emma, the largest museum, sets the tone of the building, with sculpture in the
forecourt but does not over dominate. Rather than a miscellany of museum logos and
branded signage that would have made the centre look like a shopping mall, the
original Weegee logo has been left in place. All the museums benefit from joint
marketing of the centre, its shared facilities and opportunities for corporate hire.
Undoubtedly, they get more visitors than they would in their own separate buildings.
For example, about 67,000 people find their way to the Helinä Rautavaara Museum,
whose space is the furthest from the main entrance.
The Weegee Centre is one of several museum complexes in Finland, where other
large industrial buildings have been successfully converted to house several cultural
institutions. In Helsinki, three museums can be found in the Cable Factory. Also in
the capital, the Helsinki City Art Museum and the Museum of Cultures share a
palatial former car showroom. In the industrial city of Tampere the Vapriikki
(Factory) museum complex has been created in an old engineering works. There,
large-scale history and ethnographic exhibitions are organised alongside a shoe
museum and ice hockey hall of fame.
The smallest museum in the Weegee centre, the Suomen Kellomuseo (Finnish
Museum of Horology) probably benefits the most in terms of visitor numbers. It
occupies a space on the ground floor of the centre in a prime location between the
cloakroom and the cafe. In a neatly arranged corridor gallery, there is the clock that
kept Finland’s official time, and more portable timepieces, such as the first wristwatch
made in Finland. Instead of the thousands who now visit, the museum used to number
its visitors in the hundreds before it relocated.
Just as neatly arranged is a series of wall cases with a brief of history of Espoo itself
in the introductory gallery of the Espoo Kaupunginmsueo (Espoo City Museum),
which is also found on the ground floor of the Weegee Centre. Other branches of the
city museum occupy historic houses, such as a villa and a farmhouse.
In time-honoured local-history fashion, the gallery narrates in chronological order the
region’s history from prehistory to the present day. Largely forest and farmland until
the 1950s, it was a summer retreat for wealthy residents of nearby Helsinki in the 19th
century. Espoo it is now Finland’s second city, built on garden city lines to make the
most of its woodlands and lakes.
While informative, the four walls of tightly-packed displays in the gallery give little
sense of place or atmosphere. It feels as neutral as one of the white-box spaces in
Emma on the floor above and has none of the quirkiness of the Helinä Rautavaaran
Museum. The small toy museum next to Helinä’s museum also has nice touches of
quirkiness. Next to a model railway there is a miniature station building. Inside lives
Ursus Museorum, a Steiff teddy bear found under the floorboards of an old railway
station. The museum mascot, “like children, tolerates adults”.
Like Emma, and unusually for a non-art museum, the majority of the historical
museum’s space is devoted to large-scale temporary exhibitions. The current
exhibition, Smoke and Fire has a year-long run. It has certain topicality: the Finns are
generally safety conscious, but the number of fatalities caused by fire stays stubbornly
high. The most common cause of fatal fires tends to be smoking in bed or while lying
on a sofa under the influence of alcohol. Among the fire engines and fire fighting
equipment of different vintages, the Finnish flair for model making is on show in the
form of a doll’s house. Made by local craftspeople, in each room careless members of
the same family leave saucepans boiling, a towel left drying in the sauna, and the
youngest play unsupervised with matches.
A large-screen interactive video display produced with the help of the emergency
services challenges the visitor to find their way to the fire exit following the green
illuminated signs. The screen fills with smoke if you delay. On leaving the burning
room, firefighters give the visitor the thumbs-up sign. Apparently a contributing
factor in fatal fires was the victims’ unwillingness or inability to exit fast enough. As
a strategy to get visitors into the historical museum, it makes sense to organise such
temporary exhibitions rather than rely on a permanent gallery.
Museums often share larger buildings, typically with theatres, libraries and conference
centres. Bringing several museums under one roof is a distinctively Finnish
experiment. It avoids the awkward dance around different opening hours when one is
a daytime attraction, the other an evening one, that happens when the visual and
performing arts cohabit in the same building. The Weegee Centre is a convivial
setting for visitors and organisations. It will be interesting to see whether these
museological neighbours will collaborate more closely as they get to know and trust
each other. At the moment the relationship seem more cordial than close.
An artist such Jussi Kivi, the Finnish representative at the 2009 Venice Biennale,
could be an ideal go-between the different collections. Since childhood, Kivi has been
obsessed with firefighters, misspending his youth hanging out at the local fire station.
He crammed the compact Finnish Pavilion in Venice with a collection of firefighting
ephemera and equipment, toys and clothing, creating an installation called the Fire &
Rescue Museum. The artist’s “museum” seems tailor-made as an acquisition for the
Weegee Centre and its assorted collection. MP