Mateas Pares: Could you tell us a little bit about the background of the painting?
Jukka Korkeila - When I am talking about the Toivo painting, I have to go back to the year 1992. At that time I was applying to the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki for the third time and had just met Mikko Pursiainen (1972-2011), with whom I had a relationship until his death. That spring I also realized that I can't become an artist until I come to terms with my homosexual identity. This process of mine already started at the end of the 80s, during the AIDS crisis, and then Finland was a very different country than what it is now. In the spring of 1992, I took the Academy of Fine Arts entrance exams in Helsinki and got into the school. This started a process that culminated in the Toivo painting in 1995. Sexuality is a process, that changes throughout life.
The painting has a name, Toivo, which is also a name of a Finnish man and it means "hope". The painting has two parts: a black and white more photorealistic part with a frontal image of a man presenting his tricks with penis rings and another part more or less containing abstract painting gestures. I placed these two paintings side by side and declared them as one work. After seeing the painting, our professor Leena Luostarinen stated: ”now I have seen a castrated man and these two paintings cannot be placed next to each other”. This painting became my 4.2 meters wide artistic Coming Out work for the spring exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 1996. At that time in Finland we had a so-called solicitation prohibition clause that could have gotten me into trouble. (When homosexual acts were removed from the Finnish criminal code in 1971, the so-called solicitation ban was enacted, which prohibited public solicitation for same-sex fornication. The solicitation ban was repealed in 1999.)
Toivo by Jukka Korkeila, 1995
Presenting the Toivo painting was a heavy situation for me. Because of this, I drank too much during the after-party of the opening of the exhibition, after which I arrived home and passed out in the hallway with my pants down at my ankles, on my way to the bathroom. The next morning, Mikko told me that he had removed a piece of excrement from my ass and he had taken me to bed at night. That was an act of love on his behalf and an act of youth on my behalf. I was very ashamed of what had happened in the end and I have never told anyone about this before.
Thinking about the whole incident now does not make me feel ashamed any more, but I see the comical aspects of it now. It was all very human after all. Shit also resides in the taboo area, along with the penis, in our societies, where they are still both forced shamefully into hiding.
Photo of Jukka Korkeila
Coming out in Finland at that time was like penetrating through the layers of shame inflicted upon me by society. In the beginning, I knew no one who was gay and there were no public gay figures in Finland either. It was all very negative and invisible when it came to same-sex affiliations. Coming Out for me was like going through a long dark tunnel alone. At the end of the tunnel, there was light, when I gathered my strength and dared to tell my friends about my homosexuality and I started frequenting some student gay parties, where I met my first boyfriend Mikko in 1992. He liberated me and taught me how to fly and I started to paint the place for myself in the Finnish art world because there was no existing place for me then.
During the Coming Out process, the penis became one of the central protagonists in my work and it still has work to do in the present day society. For example, female sexuality is seen as something beautiful and empowering, but male sexuality is just seen as something ugly. Why is this? Partly my cock paintings are still received with repulsion. Major commercial social media platforms are actively diverting the public´s gaze from private images by censoring them and making them invisible on their platforms. You only need to censor something when it is hurting the profits. In this way, my cock paintings have become politicized. A visible penis has become an enemy of the corporate powers and an esthetic disadvantage.
Jukka Korkeila, 20.3.2023 in Glauburg-Stockheim.
Explore all artists and artworks from the exhibition COCKS!
Text by Jukka Korkeila.
