On the bright and radiant, crispy and warm Finnish Summer of ’96, I received one of the most peculiar Birthday presents, honestly among the best I had ever got, before and ever since. I owe this to a lady, Kati, she as well a radiant and bright soul whose company so much fitted the atmosphere of those days as we were together, as a couple, in what I called “the short and happy season of a functional deaf”. My functional deafness was simply due to the fact that in the less than two years of our relationship I never mastered Finnish properly. Sorry, I never mastered Finnish period. I was fascinated by the 15 cases (which feel as 15! that is factorial 15) by which a name can end and its complexity also gave me the note to even start inventing some Finnish grammar on my own, such as new declination endings dependent on the weather, the time of the year, day of week or proximity to geographical districts, to animals or to particular pieces of furniture, or even depending on the initial of the person you’re talking to (now guys, that’s complicated).
This detailed lingual inventive trip must have intrigued Kati somehow… Be that as it may, Kati got straight to my heart when she lovingly packed the book that, once later unveiled, made me feel like an Eureka “So I am not alone !”. That book was a commemorative publication of the first hundred years of Bonk Industries: “Bonk Business Inc. 1893-1993 – Bonk 100 – Suomalainen menestystarina – En saga om finländsk framngång – A Finnish success Story” (Otava Publishing Company, 1993).
Now a rarity, to be found only by some online auctions or art selling ads, mostly used, the book illustrated in Finnish, Swedish and English the story of an enterprise born by the inventive spirit of Pärre Bönk, with his first sagacious observations of the behaviour of the Giant Anchovies he imported from Peru that allowed him to discover the peculiar “Anchovy’s effect” and exploit it as marine dynamo that could be used to power the whole Island of Helgoland, not the larger German island, but a small island not far from Uusikaupunki, Finland. Initially just straight forward attempt at revitalising the Baltic fishing industry, overburdened by years of overfishing, the Peruvian giant anchovies were observed to have a peculiar behaviour: when in a pool, if waters were crossed by a very light, non-lethal electric field, they ordered themselves in a school and started swimming synchronically along a vertical circle, causing a powerful stream that could work as a dynamo producing electric energy, hence multiplying the feeble electricity initiating their vortex and the relatively cheap fodder to keep them alive.
The small fisherman’s family could then start an enterprising venture that led to further inventive breakthroughs initially based on the most refined ways to exploit those prodigious anchovies. They could recreate the famous Roman gravy, the Garum, exported all over the world, along other anchovy derivatives, such as oil. Bonk, after dropping the “umlaut” for the comfort of foreign tongues, embarked in a saga of engineering explorations that led to a wonderful number of inventions, the Garum distiller (one exemplar had been possessed by Vladimir Ilic Ulianov, Lenin nonetheless) the Paranormal Cannon, and many more, based on even more enthralling observations that pushed the boundaries of scientific observation and imagination (quite more at ease with the latter, of course), giving us principles that we cannot forget (“It’s all waves!”) along with engineered creations we can hardly imagine our modern world without: the machines of the “Raba Hiff®” series, ADS (Advanced Disinformation Systems) and LBH (Localised Black Holes).
Lenin’s Garum Distiller.
If this fascinates you, be then aware that all this is just the creation of the prolific and eclectic Finnish artist Alvar Gullichsen, which in 1988 started developing the idea for a sort of post-modernist, Duchamp-like (but one should now say Duchamp-like-like) project that ended even into a museum and an exhibition in Finnish Uusikaupunki, the Bonk Museum, and obtained a success that simply asked the thing to live on further. In particular the defunctionalized machinery is a concept that de-structurized engineering in the same way that Dada and Duchamp de-contextualized art with their pissoirs and bicycle wheels stuck on a bar stool and other amenities, so original that after a century most modern artists still copy its essence, apparently not really getting the joke yet.
But Duchamp and Dada had been followed by their post-modernist legacy, which seemed to enjoy the ease, which became cheaper and cheaper along the decades, of simply telling what art is not, rather than what art is or should be, and created a plethora of delusional artists thinking that their non-art could be seen as art in itself and kept pushing forward (or at times literally into a can) their excremental productions.
Gullichsen’s story of Bonk Industries becomes an ode to machine beauty versus art, which is also a joke making fun of the post-modernist “look-at-this-piece-of-art-and-take-it-seriously-even-if-it-is-patently-painfully-excruciatingly-irremediably-nonsense”. The genius relies in not doing this in conventional areas, such as paintings and sculptures, but where the modern ever spreading functional analphabetism (which is not a painful form of phabetism) sees no art: machine engineering. Which, as we know from the Greek teaching of the word for art,τεκνη, is wrong.
But there is more than just a mere new context in the pointing out of the “kitsch” of art, or more, of modern art (hence the Duchamp-like -like, added extension I proposed before): there is really an homage, a celebration of the aesthetics of engineering, of Machines, of what Robert Pirsig might call the “underlying form” and its intrinsic underlying beauty of classical nature that machines, as all human creations can have, and often do have.
Indeed, Gullichsen’s creations are meant to move us with a laugh, but they indulge in the intrinsic beauty of the underlying form of classical nature, in Pirsig’s sense, and as such they do please our eyes and our senses and do not just make us laugh about or against anything or anyone. Especially they don’t make us laugh about the art and work of other people at their expenses, which instead was the result of Duchamp’s moustache on Leonardo’s Monna Lisa, in the same way as it’s probably on you the joke of exposing some canned faeces “produced” by some artist claimed to be sold for millions.
Therefore, Sir Roger Scruton’s epitaphic sentence “Real art is a work of love; fake art is a work of deception” might fly past by the Bonk Industries seemingly at a near distance, but does not cross their path and does not land on their premises in Uusikaupunki.
– (…I had a mail contact, over 20 years ago, with Gullichsen himself, but by the time he answered I had left my laboratory in Genoa and never got to read his answer. Let me see if I can get back to this whole Bonk Business again…)
Alvar Gullichsen
The Bonk Museum
The Great Swindle (By Sir R. Scruton, on Aeon.co)
A Review of Pirsig’s “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” by R.C Zaehner.
TERRÆ INCOGNITÆ 