Rrose Editions
For the best part of a decade, Jaakko Pallasvuo has been posting short illustrated stories to Instagram as Avocado Ibuprofen. Running like comic strips over several panels, these witty and melancholy tales play on the difficulty of making art while also making a living. Although set in the artworld of a “minor capital city” on the edge of Europe, the nepotism and groupthink will be familiar to cultural workers everywhere, and so this highbrow meme account has amassed a following among those in the field who might reluctantly recognize themselves in a recurring character: “a modernist, a snob … someone who doubts.”
The first reaction of those followers to this paperback anthology might be disappointment, because the stories have been stripped of the marvelously uncanny, zine-aesthetic drawings and AI-generated images that are so integral to their effect. Rather than an experiment in hybrid literary formats for the post-internet age, the reader is left with a more-or-less conventional short story collection that must stand or fall on the quality of its prose. This is a risk, but it comes off: Amber conjures a rich fictional world colored by disgust at the venality of contemporary culture and punctuated by epiphany, as if Hamlet had got his MFA in the 2010s and was eking out a living as a freelance copywriter.
The prevailing tone is mourning for a time before the world was corrupted. “Theory,” which runs like most of these elliptical stories to just a few hundred words, reads like an elegy for the death of meaning. Its protagonists are unnamed but, like almost everyone in these pages, speak in what Pallasvuo describes in the preface as “slightly lumpen EU art school second-language English.” They hark back to an Adamic time in which “the language they used had been a small niche,” before “problematic” had come to be “a synonym for Bad. [Now] Critical meant Good. Radical meant Good and Cool.” Which is to say, the idiots have won.
Much of the book dwells on the consequences of that perceived decline. With the critical discourse having been hollowed out, contemporary art in these stories must take meaning from incontestable personal experience (“Trauma was trending,” one narrator observes. “Trauma was everywhere”), from consensus built upon nepotism (“in the inner circle people like each other’s work… It’s not a question of opinion”), from the ghost of ethics (“This is culture. It cultivates … something. It’s for your betterment”) or from tenuous attachment to other half-understood disciplines or philosophical concepts (“What is core accelerationism? Activists, artists, and influencers are buzzing with discourse about a hot new ideology”). Pallasvuo is very funny when satirizing the intellectual insecurity of curatorial statements or puncturing the art world’s delusions of grandeur, as in an extended riff on its increasingly desperate claims for relevance: “So there was this sense that civilization was crumbling. Mistakes had been made. The whole way they lived had to be reimagined… That’s where moss art came in.”
But what emerges from these stories’ republication as standalone texts is that they belong to a long line of disillusioned Romantic literature. Like the more splenetic novels of Thomas Bernhard, they are driven forward by frustration at the failure of the world to live up to its narrators’ idealism. Measured against these high standards, everyone must be judged mediocre and hypocritical, not least the self-lacerating narrators. That romanticism, that half-acknowledged commitment to the idea that art must seek after the sublime and beautiful (and that any art that fails to do so must be fraudulent), is the book’s great strength and weakness.
Because to satirize the artworld is to shoot fish in a barrel, and readers might become exasperated at the author’s inexhaustible surprise that the institutional merry-go-round is not a meritocracy, and by the occasionally overwrought self-doubt. But this is perhaps a side-effect of reading in succession 122 stories that were published over six years—better to dip in and out—and is compensated for by the many impressive passages of imaginative flight. Some of the best entries obey the logic of speculative fiction, establishing an absurd scenario (“Loneliness had stabilized”; “The whole planet was becoming a machine”; “It was the time of the plague and martyrs were being destroyed internationally”) and following it into dreamlike reveries.
In doing so, they refute the disenchantment that seems at first to be the void at the heart of these stories, but is more like their camouflage (Romantics, after all, must wear black). Amber offers its own proof that language has not been entirely corrupted, that the possibilities of art have not been exhausted, and that beauty is still possible. Indeed, the book is most successful when it moves away from diagnosing the familiar structural conditions of the artworld and expands its horizons, giving greater rein to the author’s considerable talents as a writer. The quandary is summarized by a line that might seem despairing but is better understood as liberating: “You have to give up on being an artist in order to not give up on being an artist.”
Avocado Ibuprofen's Amber is published by Rrose Editions. A revised second edition is forthcoming in fall.
