Lecture by Tanel Veenre at the Koru2 International Contemporary Jewellery Symposium

Tanel Veenre gave a lecture about his entire work, and send us a small text and Postfact Scenario from his master-project that describes pretty well all his jewellery-works.

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A Postfact Scenario

Decadent jewelry revives the beastly urges hidden beneath the cultural lacquer?

In decadent jewelry, false diamonds sparkle more genuinely than real ones?

Decadent jewelry has banished idealism?

Decadent jewelry is urban to the core?

Decadent jewelry surrenders to the moment, redefines the past and dreams of twilight?

Decadent jewelry must love itself in its corporeal omnipotence?

Decadent jewelry is taboo less?

Decadent jewelry is fanciful in its prodigality?

Decadent jewelry is supernatural in its formality?

Decadent jewelry simulates emotion with pageantry and is extremely abstract in essence?

Decadent jewelry perceives an order in the endless chaos?

Decadent jewelry strives to soothe the misgiving with myths, devoured like fast food?

In decadent jewelry, the blood of entertainment runs in streams?

Decadent jewelry strives to bring closer the ending by a final sprint?



Summary
One of the motives behind the master’s thesis “Ecstasy, Suffering, Ennui” was outlining the meeting points between barbarity and culture. During the process of study it was rather the common and distinctive traits of barbarity and decline that became relevant. Culture is present in both – in the first, an implicit aspiration, and in the latter as a historical inevitability. Both the barbarian and the decadent are in the same position to the high culture – at the foot of the mountain. Only the direction, nature and speed of the movement differ. Whereas climbing implies sweat and the sweet taste of blood in mouth, careening downhill is much more reckless and high-speed. Or vice versa, since the division between tragedy and comedy is a matter of habit rather than necessity.
The threefold parable described in the preamble gained relevance to more and more different moves and states in life. The perception of the personal creative process as a coherent system of discrete states became increasingly crucial. Despite the obvious disarray, the creative process usually has an observable structure!

Most certainly, jewelry precedes the word for me. I can say that the problems that I have tried to answer in my thesis have been present in my work, in a more or less tacit form, for the last ten years. And still I feel that interpretation will not change their meaning.

Looking for verbal equivalents to the jewelry taught me to know and apprehend the engines that drive creation. The first pieces of the series of jewelry were predominantly abstract and allusive in their visual language. Further ones took on more surreal and fairy-tale shades but they were still observable in terms of the threefold parable. In this paradigm of the threefold parable, the evolution of a distinct idea, the keynote of the whole collection becomes visible. However, the evolution of this idea can also be noted in the separate pieces.

I have attempted to place myself on a map in both time and space. I have attempted to see qualities that were lent to my works by the moment of time that conceived them, as well as the aesthetic inspired by cultural memory. In the process it began to clear upon me that today the whole conscious production of art has been transformed – and in this sense the whole contemporary secularized art can be called decadent mannerism, since awareness precludes spontaneity. At the same time doubt and the sense of chaos leave a mark of culpability and responsibility to the creative process, adding a religious touch to mannerism. Self-discipline is not enough to protect art from depletion of meaning – but it may help in finding a dignified posture.
The journey through the mountains and valleys described in the thesis made me verbalize many things that were elusive at first, and helped me explore the roots. Creative reflection helps me feel serviceable and integral – a fragment in a bigger picture.

The thesis contains no judgments – rather it is an attempt to retain honesty against the inevitable. In the course of the work more and more relied on the strength and scope derived from ‘toppling the bowl’ – turning the parabolic notion around on its axis. A mountain becomes a valley after a while. A crest of the wave is an abyss when surveyed the other way round.

A lot depends on the eye that you view your time with – whether to be dignified, pessimistic or to close your lids (as if this would change the course of culture)? This thought incited the question marks after the claims at the end of all chapters. These claims that stemmed from the project sum up my thesis in a distilled form. It thus found itself a backbone, a post fact scenario, that gives an aerial perspective of the work.

Probably the most important helpful reference in writing was the actual series of jewelry, the first pieces of which are dated three years back and which mainly emerged while I was writing. My method is indeed synthetically – on the one hand, the word served to explain the matter, on the other, the jewelry guided and resisted. Sometimes it also pointed to the glitches in the work. In the process, jewelry became a bridge between the self-image and culture, with its four roots in empathy, wisdom, self-preservation, and love of fellow man.

Tanel Veenre, born 1977, jewellery artist. Lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. Jewellery and fashion artist, editor and freelance fashion photographer, Veenre is one jewellery artist in group of seven OhuLoss (Spatial Palace). M.A Estonian Academy of Arts.