To
come up with an idea you want to film, then pause whatever it was you were in the middle of and fetch the camera, make sure it works, set the angle, and then proceed
filming yourself executing a daily chore is to measure how long it takes
to do both a thing that compose you and one you compose
yourself.
Or
is there any difference? Are there any categorical - or felt -
differences between doing art and living, when your life equals making
art, and the art you make seems to consist of the life you live? Can the act of becoming and making really be set apart? I'll get back to this later, because it relates to feminist physicist Karen Barad.
An
artwork might not be a trustworthy witness to its author’s life. In a
review of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle: Book 2, Sheila Heti shares a conversation she had with him. Heti queries the Norwegian author if a scene in one of his autofiction novels really took place. ‘No no,
I made it up.’, he responds. Later, Heti considers her disappointment
with this newfound knowledge but find solace in the act. ’We continue to invent, because the past
eludes us all; it’s past, it’s gone, even for Knausgaard.’ Heti
concludes.
The
fictionalization machine that is memory takes hold of everything
eventually. Filming yourself is an act of optimism, then, because it
reaches out to the future by way of acknowledging the present moment's inevitable
pastness that’s always already present in the act of recording. Seen
this way, a selfie, for example, is nostalgia for the present you
might’ve not been sure you wanted to experience but would ended up living through
nevertheless. Since many of us record ourselves so much nowadays, it
figures some people claim we’re less present because of the
ability-cum-obsession to document our lives. But doesn’t it run deeper
than that?
Hyperbolic claim incoming: recording
is perhaps the single most important tool by which we’re beginning to
manifest the lived reality of quantum physics. A mirror tells us we can
be in two places at once and that our outlines are arbitrary; a recorder
or a video camera confirms this to a remarkable extent; an artist
working with such media is naturally inclined to blur the boundaries of
the supposed self and others. A recorded self is always a multitude. The
invention of recording paved the way to the collapses of both Cartesian
logic and binary worldviews; philosophy and physics merely document
the crash.
(That Knausgård bit has perhaps nothing to do with the topic at hand, but let’s see if it could lead us somewhere.) I didn’t manage to move past first few hundreds pages of the first volume of Knausgård's
My Struggle series. I feel uneasy around autobiographical novels. It doesn’t help if they’re sprinkled with highbrow quotes and
hot theory (Maggie Nelson), or have a pleasingly loose structure (Jenny
Offill). Perhaps my aversion can be explained with my love for video
art. The magic of moving images is that they give me more headroom. An
inspiring video work won’t leave me passively admiring the life of its
author, like in the case of reading the stylized chronicles of literary celebrities. Narrow-minded? Yes. But this gambit did leave me towards what I wanted to write about.
Moving
image as a medium comes equipped with less pressure. An author is prone
to compare themselves to the canon of fiction, spanning from Ancient
classics to the latest idols, because what you’re doing - writing down
words - is the same thing as the masters did. The idea of writing a book
carries the same potential as buying a lottery ticket. The chances of
win are slim,
but you never know. Maybe I’m the next great author, maybe I'm holding in my hands a Great American Novel. Whoever won last week did nothing different, just
bought the ticket to this literary lottery like the rest of us. Someone one told me their sister, upon reading a novel by Knausgård, immediately declared "world literature." It made me realize I prefer local art.
When
you’re a contemporary artist living in Europe and working with video
without gallery representation, big budgets, or institutional
commissions, you’re keenly aware of how your work will
likely not mean much to the hegemonic version of cultural history, i.e.
the one with the big names and prestige that plays out in New York and London. For this reason, looking at
video art is less exhausting. The work rarely demands you christen it as
our latest pick for the role of lord saviour. Video art, in general, is not interested in
being interesting, and in times when everyone demands we shower them with attention, this quality makes video art deeply alluring.
 |
| Image courtesy of Camille Auer, from her web page. See: https://camilleauer.com/2020/02/04/207/ |
Camille Auer’s latest work, a single-channel, half-hour long video titled Seepage, which
was on display at Third Space, Helsinki, for only five days in February
2020, is that kind of video art. It’s not in the business
of trying to sell you something, or convince you of its author’s
capabilities, even ideas, for that matter. Seen this way, the size - or
amplitude - of the work might throw you off-balance. It has no big gestures. It was there for five days and now it's not there but living inside the people who witnessed it in that space in Tarkk'ampujankatu.
(Before I continue, I
get that there are books that are written like one does a video of this
size, just as there are video artists whose bold ambition - the kind
that gives stuffy institutions and various go-getters their raison
d'être - all but alienates me.)
Watching,
and listening to, Seepage (there are four sets of headphones in front of
the wall projection) is akin to picking up the Erstwhile record label back catalogue after a steady, high-carb diet of ultra-saturated,
action-packed EDM. If you’re unaware of the said label, imagine making
yourself a salad for lunch from kale, zucchini, walnuts, hulled hemp
seeds, tempeh, black pepper, and olive oil. Now imagine preparing and
putting those ingredients together as slowly as humanly possible. Your
kitchen space would reverberate with a distinct-yet-abstract-due-to-its-distance-from-the-audio-event-preceeding-it sound,
every now and then. Mostly, there’d be a static hum. The breaking of
walnuts into small bits would sound like the sonic climax of your
culinary labour.
The gentle sprinkling of hemp seeds on top of the salad would nourish
your ears like sea waves. Finally, adding the olive oil as seasoning
would count as an elegant coda.
Auer’s
video shows us the artist doing everyday things, like taking a shower
or plucking her eyebrows, calmly and quietly. There’s a flickering dance scene that
juxtaposes a shaky shot of an empty road at night with footage of Auer twitching and dancing at a small pier with the dark night behind her. It’s very Lost Highway, and very
affecting. With a jangly bouncing bass drum acting as the soundtrack
for the scene, you are unexpectedly transported from the self-care
routines set against bathroom tiles to more expressive milieus.
The
surreal-noir scene doesn’t feel like a juxtaposition to everything else
that’s taking place in the video rather than a horizontal shift. These
are all things of equal weight. On a bad day, you might take the video’s
strategy to signal meaninglessness and nihilism, but really you
shouldn’t. The artist seems
to trust you’re better than that. I can’t but admire her power of
restraint to not fill the video with action and movement. It reminds me
of the oft-quoted exchange of words between two avant-garde composers,
Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and John Cage, where the former asks the latter if he really
doesn’t ”push” the sounds, not even a little bit, and Cage just keeps
saying politely no to the German behemoth.
Where
Cage made a whole thing about indeterminism, Auer presents us with a
vision borne out of conscious choices. There’s nothing random about
her video piece. It’s neither high-horsing over its own minmial execution nor
avoiding saying anything
at all, but rather the work is a manifestation of ice-cold and
big-hearted modesty. Does that make sense? As in, the work looks at you
with this cold stare that is completely non-judgemental, but it’s not
trying to artificially make you feel better, either. The gaze from
within the video back to you spells brutal honesty, while making the viewer feel silently understood. This dualism -
of plainly stating your case (or your life) with all the time it requires, while being empathetic of your own possible shortcomings or the viewer’s anxieties - pumps the work its tranquil, low-humming yet sustaining energy.
The handout note brings up Karen Barad
and her concept of intra-agency, which in a very stripped down sense
means ”we make each other possible” or perhaps that ”our relationship precedes us”, and that the limit between self and others is an unfortunate myth. I’m at first unsure if the background information is necessary
for the video work. Unlike in some other exhibitions where
Barad has been brought up, in Auer’s case the theories have really
seeped through the work. It's there already, deep in the trenches of the moving images and close-miked sounds. Another Finnish artist, Jaana Laakkonen, comes
to mind. Her paintings gracefully re-negotiate their conditions before and after and during the fact of being set in space. Something of this negotiation is reflected on the plastic cover that almost entirely blocks the view to the street from Third Space, with a poem about seeping through written on the surface. Helsinki, humming outside and blurred by the plastic, becomes a soft component in the becomings and negotiations taking place in the gallery space.
Barad
for Auer is clearly more than an academic reference. Although
that’s not a bad thing in itself, either; I think it’s wholly worthwhile
to point your audience towards research you care about. Not everything
has to be embodied. Things left on surfaces, say, on a countertop, can
be just as inspiring, as any amateur chef would tell you. OK, sometimes
it’s a little maddening to see people leaving their stuff all over the
place. Surface or depth, then? Somehow, this age-old dynamic
that dominated the field of painting for centuries exists in Auer’s video, too. There’s a scene where you’re
literally not seeing the forest from the trees. Seepage has substantial depth but it considers its depth a state of things that’s neither random nor remarkable. It’s as if Albert Dürer had written a chapbook called “Perspective & Chill”, instead of Four Books on Measurement.
The last thing I’d like to bring up about Seepage is that the length of each shot is absolutely crucial. This length
is a way of showing consideration towards our need to have enough time
during which we can leave ourselves and our addiction to consume and
experience. The issue of length in Auer’s video work can’t be satisfyingly explained
by way of genealogy only, i.e.
by bringing up Andy Warhol’s Sleep, or Bruce Nauman pacing around at
his studio, or waxing on Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. All those
artists had their respective contextual reasons to pursuit lengthy shots
of bodies living through everyday events. Auer’s reasons seem
different; for now, I don’t know what they are exactly, but I feel there might
be an atmospheric rationale behind - or around - it; that today, these
languid shots of plucking your eyebrows, or of a snowy forest gently reshuffling
itself, causing some snow crystals to hover down from the
branches of the pine trees, are sorely needed if we want to negotiate
with all the you’s
and it’s and I’s and heavens know what unknown quantities that exist
within and through the situation in which we find ourselves. Auer is undeniably onto something and what a pleasure it is to witness that measured search. I left the small, one-room space of Third Space gallery thinking how badly I needed to see this. Barad must be right: my relationship with the video did preceed us both.
’All mountain lions are one. You are just one example of a lion. Mountain-lionhood is strong and immense and
goes beyond the individual. Each lion is a part of a continuum, and
privy to everything good and bad that happens to other mountain lions. You
tough things out on your own, but you’re linked to the pleasures,
pains, and drama, the leap and recoil and lonely deaths of others.’ -Lucy Ellmann, ”Ducks, Newburyport”