The title of the exhibition is taken, albeit in a slightly modified form, from one of my 1992 gouache paintings “NEXT STOP – AMERICA”. The work depicts a scene from a station lounge. Since the title refers to America, it should probably be in an airport. However, the interior of the lounge, with its ticket counters, is more reminiscent of a small-town bus station or a provincial train station. The arched doorway behind the rubber tree is particularly homely. In itself, of course, a perfectly logical interior, given the world in which I had lived and travelled all my life. No glass, no concrete. No New York panoramas shining through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the lounge. The world I had just come from, which had just ended with a bang, was more like a world that smelled a bit of socks and was a bit 'comrade-like'. Glamour had no place there.

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But, yes, as already said, the world I had come from had ended with a bang. And the 90s had begun! And I was living the hectic life of a student of graphic arts at a school that is now called the Estonian Academy of Arts but has changed its name so many times that I can't remember what it was called at the time. When I entered, it was still the Estonian National Art Institute, or ERKI. My life as a student consisted of spending days and nights at school, and in my free time I printed my work on a lithography press. And when I wasn't doing that, I was making sketches for lithographs. Not all drafts turned into lithographs because some of them became too large to print, and the waiting room piece is one of them.

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The 90s have been studied quite a lot by now, and you can certainly find all kinds of discussions and analyses of the decade on the internet with the help of AI. For me, the 90s were just a reality I had to adapt to, and I adapted without thinking about it. I coped with the ration stamp economy and savage poverty, I coped with the fact that the auntie sitting behind the counter in the public restrooms would give you a small roll of toilet paper rolled with her own hands from a large roll of toilet paper to make your number two, which at least for me was usually never enough. (And you could also buy cigarettes from the same auntie!) I had to cope with the fact that a careless shopper could get wood spirit* instead of Royal Spirit, because the labels on the bottles were almost identical. I had to cope with the fact that every night there was a loud bang above Tallinn and a booth, a garbage can, a pizza restaurant or a café was blown up. Sometimes with people inside, sometimes without. My ears didn't even notice the gun shooting. Poverty, crime, anarchy and a wild euphoric optimism despite all this! Interesting cocktail!

At that time, the Academy of Arts was a great place to study, because no one was interested in the old ideas about art. There were no longer any ideological trends. The lecturers didn’t really bother us, and you could do anything. It was all big testing and experimentation. At the same time, I personally knew very little about what was going on in art abroad. And I didn't really care, because I had so many ideas that I didn't have time to put them all to practice. Ideas came out of the whole weird atmosphere that prevailed. And my sort of poster-like, pop-arty handwriting, which developed pretty quickly, fitted in well with my great interest in the 60s and 70s music at the time, and was also a great fit with lithography techniques. Flat colour surfaces, pure tones, etc.

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So I set to work, resonating with everything that was happening outside the window. Neon signs! English instead of Russian! Colourful things! Different clothes! The first tram running around the city, covered from head to toe with advertisements (Coca-Cola!)! Foreign car brands and so on! It was all so fierce and different, and I had no irony whatsoever in taking it all as fuel for my creation. Welcome to capitalism! Welcome consumer society and commerce! Welcome to advertising! I was, of course, only a mere observer in all this soup, and there was no question of any kind of consumption in my case, because money moved in other spheres. There where the pizza stalls that went flying and there where was haggling, scrambling, privatisation, appropriation, stacking, and where mega mansions with towers were being built. That's where the money moved. In my hands, it was a lithographic press that moved to record it all. And it was fierce!

There was only one thing to go to from there - America!

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*-Methanol

- Marko Mäetamm, May 2025