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Article: Jaan Toomik and Timur Novikov at 1-20.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Art in America
- Article date:
- May 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The exploration of the theme of origins, spiritual or national, unified the visually dissimilar art works of Jaan Toomik and Timur Novikov, who hail from post-Soviet terrain. Toomik, from Estonia, presented a simple yet haunting three-minute video, Father and Son (1998), in which he ice-skates nude on the frozen Baltic Sea, accompanied by a soundtrack of his 10-year-old son singing 14th-century choral music with the angelic pitch of a castrato. The starkness of the white, icy landscape is made all the more barren by the camera's unchanging focus and the pale, unclad skater's seeming lack of emotion and purpose. Without making eye contact with the camera and without great ...