From Behind the Teeth

(Hampaiden Takaa, Mox Mäkelä & Mikael Fortelius, Finland, 2025)

In René Clair’s classic short Entr’acte (1924), Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray played a surreal game of chess – until they were swept away by a jet of water. If 2024’s 100th anniversary of surrealism still lingers in your cultural ambience, it’s a good moment to drop in on renowned Finnish artist Mox Mäkelä as she engages the scientific researcher Mikael Fortelius (they are credited as co-directors) in an even more bizarre and extended chess duel – using teeth as the board pieces.

In one sense, the personal identities of these players are unimportant; the camera deliberately shoots them from above or otherwise blots out their faces. The pair never stop talking, but it is not a sweet, filmed chat in the vein of Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981). It’s an improvised, ‘no rules’ exchange – a grand joke at the very expense of the notion of a codified game.

What matters here is the flight of stories, images, ideas and metaphors triggered by the improvised, meandering chess moves. Digital collages, snippets of footage and strange objects punctuate or illustrate the many themes that arise in the course of conversation: consumption, digestion, communication, rumination, war … and most of it literally surrounded and framed by a gaping, toothy mouth! Whether that dispositif has a cryptic, Matthew Barney-type resonance with Mäkelä’s larger œuvre, I do not know.

The effect palls at times, so it takes a bit of an effort to get through it all in one sitting. As frequently occurs in the 21st gallery/museum genre known (a little weirdly) as artists’ films (weird, because: aren’t there, actually, thousands of good films made by people we can unproblematically label as artists?), you sometimes wonder if you’ve been sadistically immobilised (as only the cinema situation can do!) before a wall-installation that, otherwise, you might wander away from, at least for a while.

Nonetheless, landing as it does somewhere between Monty Python and Pipilotti Rist, From Behind the Teeth is a hymn to absurdist creativity and free-associative fun.

© Adrian Martin 6 December 2024