Dr. Suneel Mehmi
NB: For non-commercial public discussion of the artwork as an independent researcher and volunteer, quotations from sources are intended as ‘fair use’. My interpretations are to be freely shared but to be used with credit as my intellectual property. My interpretations do not reflect any consensus or any other person at any of the places that I work or volunteer. They are my own views.
Summary and Ways of Introducing the Themes of the Exhibition
Horizontal–Vaakasuora offers an awe-inspiring portrayal of a 30-metre-tall spruce in Finland’s boreal forest. Complete with the sounds of a creaking trunk and birdsong, this living portrait captures the majesty of this ancient tree while challenging our perceptions of the natural world.
Accompanying the installation are Ahtila’s preparatory works, Anthropomorphic Exercises in Film, making their UK debut at Kew.
(Kew website)
Global warming inspired her to move from making human dramas to portraits of the trees: ‘Changes in the environment and nature’ (Note: the whole exhibition is about change and transformation – nature changing into the human – as global warming makes the human change into nature. It is an environmental reversal. In Creating Character/With Rain, this is emphasised since ‘the trees are gradually transformed into anthromorphic figures using small deliberate changes’ (exhibition curation label). In the last still frame, the character appears to hold a small gun – she is transforming the tree into a violent character and a killer – a reversal of roles since we are the killers of the trees. In Action: Stumble – the tree falls over like it is dead – the trees are facing extinction.)
The installations included in Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Ecologies of Drama traced a central question posed throughout her work: how have drama and narrative historically been constructed, and how might we envision their new forms?
Many of Ahtila’s most recent works, including Studies on the Ecology of Drama 1, directly investigate how humans could move away from an anthropocentric perspective and suggest that our narratives about the world around us may be powerful tools in that effort.
“How to depict living things? How to approach them? How to convey a different way of being, another being’s world? How to make it into a continuous event that becomes part of our idea of reality?”
Most video works by Finnish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila take place on multiple screens, producing different vantage points of a story simultaneously. She intentionally floods or overwhelms the viewer’s senses in order to produce a strong emotional impact. Instead of following the traditional moving image script, Ahtila explores and innovates on modes of presenting a state of mind or other condition.
Interview with the Artist: Relevant Quotes with Notes
I am questioning what can be done with moving image, and what characterizes this specific medium (Note: the focus is on exploring film through the trees, not the trees through the film, perhaps. Although there is, of course, both).
Moving image also presents itself as the language of our global culture (Note: Film is described as a language – an analysis of language is the foundation – see notes below on Horizontal. It is interesting therefore, the piece where the trees are conversing in the film stills – Conversation Edit 1. It is almost as though she is saying that the trees have their own language. See Horizontal again – she says the tree is breathing and is therefore linked to language – the trees are seen as actors with lines and this may reflect that she is trying to show us the hidden language of the trees, some awareness of the recent scientific suppositions that trees have a language. Conversation Edit 1 is splitting up and bringing together the two trees in conversation – about the connection and disconnection that language imposes, the difference between a dialogue and a monologue. In the last shot, when we confront the tree, is there an implication of the language between humans and the tree and the language of film? Are we talking to the tree and it is talking to us? The language in the piece is entirely invisible in each scene – it is the table that gives the indication that the conversation is happening, so it is not implausible to think that we are talking to the tree and the tree to us).
The moving image has become the most popular means of representing our surroundings and society. It has become our central medium of presenting the world. But to the same degree the medium shows the world to us, it hides other parts. A specific perspective and a particular version of looking at the world are imposed. It is inevitable to ask: Who should be allowed to perform in this image of our world that we create? Who can be a protagonist? To whom/what do we grant the status of an actor? (Note – She is questioning why we humans should be the actors and our particular vision of the world should be imposed).
How do we picture the world around us? And on a bigger scale, how do we picture this planet? (The idea of getting an overall picture that emerges from the fragments – look at the composition of Horizontal as the distinct parts become a greater whole).
What is your dramaturgic intention behind a multiple-screen setting?
To play with the linear perspective and the order it implies – and the viewers’ omnipotence. I’m aiming at creating a cinematic space in which screens interact with each other, making use of the space between the screens, in which the viewers are situated. The viewer enters a state in which she or he is never able to see everything at the same time as things occur in the room. It changes their position as privileged viewers. There are several ways of seeing, not one defined path or angle from which to look at the action. The setting denies a singular perspective of things, or a specific order of how knowledge is acquired. It also emphasizes the fact that we have to make choices about how we want to look at certain things. (Note – the puncture of the illusion of human omnipotence and human ego in their perspectives as a result).
In “Horizontal” you created a film portrait of a spruce tree, in six different parts. What led you to the idea and what message were you trying to convey?
The work originated in the shooting of The Annunciation, from 2010. In its production we needed to shoot first landscapes and then trees. When we confronted the task of shooting a tall tree, we were faced with many restrictions – first with the camera, and then with the idea of a picture of a tree. With the film camera and its aspect ratio one can only capture a part of a tree. When backing off, it becomes no longer a portrait of a single spruce, but the picture of a landscape. Using a wide-angle lens produces a distortion effect, which no longer results in an image of the spruce, but in an account of the mechanism of optics.
In 2011, I made the drawing series entitled Anthropomorphic Exercises on Film based on this observation and the limitations the camera mechanism poses for visual recording of our surroundings. Then I thought I might as well take the challenge seriously and make a moving image piece of the attempt to make a portrait of a tree. It is a long story, but to make it short: We shot a 30 meter tall spruce in six parts and presented it in a human space, horizontally, since otherwise it would not have fit inside. That’s how the name Horizontal originated. The more we got immersed in this task, working with technical equipment, that has been made as an extension to human perception, the more we ended up seeing ourselves and the mechanisms of both the machine and the idea.
Research Notes (Secondary Reading and my Ideas about them)
She has often probed individual identity and the boundaries of the subject in relation to the external world.
(Note: In this exhibition, she is probing the boundaries of the subject through the limitations imposed by their vision and human perspective).
Using the visual language of cinema, Ahtila presents large-scale installations with split-screen projections on multiple panels. These viewing conditions, with their simultaneously charged vantage points, break the idea of cinematic perspective and construct an experience of several co-existing times and spaces for being.
(Note: is the tree video in sections a collection of different times and spaces for the being of the tree? What about the overall unity which connects these different sections? They have a screen continuity if not a physical and temporal continunity. The theory of the gestalt, perhaps the suggestion that we falsely experience the whole even though the parts radically differ from each other, as in the construction of the tree where we don’t scrutinise the great difference in different branches and leaves, etc.? )
2.
In her earlier works, she dealt with the topic of unsettling human dramas at the center of personal relationships…
Although Ahtila’s films do include more than one character, they tend to focus on the internal experience of just one person. Her work seems to be more about studying and understanding an individual’s subjective experience, and how the influences around individuals shape who they are and what they do, and shape their unconscious selves. She is greatly interested in the factors that go into the construction of personal identity, and in how fluid that construct can be.
(Notes – then the portraits of trees are standing in for the psychological selves of nature from that early interest in portraying humans. Are they studies of our our psychology through the trees, how the trees influence our personalities? Yes, because they show the trees adopting human traits – when we look in the mirror of Point of View/With a Human, we literally put our personality into the tree since we look at ourself as a personality. Finland is known as being the happiest country in the world and this is precisely because of the connection of the Finnish to nature and the trees – in other words, the trees have built the national psyche).
3.
HORIZONTAL is a six-channel moving portrait of a living spruce tree.
The attempt to film a spruce tree brings the portrayer face to face with the technical apparatus constructed as an extension of the human eye and perception. It also invites us to consider the preconditions of anthropocentric dramaturgy and the valuations it engenders in images and in the order of representation. It is a record of its existence as a living organism, or perhaps more to the point, a presentation of the difficulty of perceiving and recording a spruce tree with the methods of visual documentation invented by humans.
Suneel’s Interpretations
Horizontal–Vaakasuora
– The tree is projected onto a rectangular wall, a human structure.
– She is a former professor at the Department of Time and Space-based Art at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Finland). She breaks up the tree into conceptual packets of space and time through the filming – the conceptual analysis of the tree through the fields of space/time. Is there a link with Einstein’s view of the universe as a space/time continuum and of discrete space time fields? Is this a cosmological vision of the tree?
– The Finnish word ‘kuusi’ means the number six and ‘spruce’ – the tree is in six sections. Lingual play exploring the multidimensionality of words and their many different meanings in the video installation which suggests that the multidimensionality of the tree is evolving from an idea of the multiplicity of meanings within words and signs. They shot when it was windy – wind as breath possibly, and the link to language. She says in the video: the tree is moving and it is ‘breathing’ which would add evidence for this interpretation. (‘Through her cinematic work, she studies the structure of images and language’ – https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/eija-liisa-ahtila/ )
– ‘All these facts are comforting and calming’ – the movement in the high wind gives calm and repose – this is what the Finnish answer to being the happiest nation is supposed to be. That whatever life throws at you, there is calm and repose in nature.
Point of View/With a Human
– Is it a ladder of the tree into the self? The tree as a spiritual guide for the recognition of the self?
– Or (even at the same time), a puncturing of human arrogance as you step to look at your face in the top branches of the tree? That our sight and our vision of nature is based on narcissism and ego? Can we only see ourselves in nature? Nature as ourselves?
– The fragments: Finnish art has traditionally been preoccupied with fragments rather than wholes (exhibition curatorial note). What is it saying about human beings as a fragment of nature, as part of nature’s collection of fragments? The fragmented self of human beings in the world of nature?
– In the mirror, we are moving. We are not completely still and this is impossible. Again, this is about the moving image. Whereas the artwork of the tree is completely still and calm – a comment about the different states of being, the different time register’s between the tree’s slow movements and our own movements? If so, there is an ambiguity – because we appear to be still in the mirror. So there is an illusion of human stillness amidst the stillness of the tree, a false mirroring of nature from the human. In fact, we merge in the mirror with the tree. It is a moment of connection of a sort, but a connection that is dictated by our human frames of time (the mistaken assumption that we can ever be completely still).
– The arbitrariness of vision: Some are too tall to look in the mirror, some too short. There is an arbitrary vision of the human at the top of the tree which is not even accessible to all – is this a comment about the politics of cinema and the moving image? The rigidity and inaccessibility of the moving image?
Themes
Fragments – Finnish artists focused on fragments of nature. The frames of a video are fragments that build up into a larger whole that moves like the moving image – this relies on a trickery of sight since we can only see a certain number of frames per second. Our vision is based on illusion as well as our impression and understanding of the greater whole, such as our impression of the planet Earth and the way we see its nature.
Portraits – what are portraits showing? Why do they show what they show? Action portraits of the trees as they move in human gestures – what it means to make the trees protagonists of the action. In Point of View/With a Human, the human portrait we actually make ourselves through our reflection in the mirror – we are active constructors of these portraits of ourselves in nature. The point is that the portrait is not ‘real’ in any sense – it is merged fictitiously with the tree. Our portraits are determined by context and influence with nature.
The Inhuman and the Just: If the trees are portraits, they have no discernible gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, etc. They are purely green. In Horizontal, this is a glaring comparison between the human figure that provides the scale as this person has an obvious gender and ethnicity and age. In these images that represent the moving image, we are seeing the representation of an inhuman and impossibly just world which destroys our vision and its discrimination. So, the portraits actually show something that resists the limitations of human vision. If the whole exhibition is a criticism of human vision and its limitations, then there is an optimistic message about what we could achieve if we transcended those limitations.
Criticism of her Project
But a question remains, glaring, refusing to be dismissed: who cares about the human-centered perspective of the traditional cinematic apparatus? Why devote this energy to dismantling an anachronism? It’s like mounting a critique against the normalizing effects upon intellectual production of the codex book format. Surely intellectuals have worse things to worry about. The question has serious ramifications. The mainstream model of narrative film certainly remains in force, arguably more powerful than ever. But its dispersal across a plethora of screens and formats, and its integration in multiple interfaces and consumer technologies, in a way has already transcended the limits of human perception. This pervasive decentralization of the apparatus for mediating audiovisual commodities belongs to the wider process of colonizing and redeveloping the human lifeworld, creating ever new domains of exploitation and accumulation. The ultimate product of this process is a new mode of subjectivity, a form of life whose conditions are not determined according to the physical needs of the human species, but established by the demands of deregulated, globalized capital.
diary of a lone man 