ART&RESEARCH

My use of objects also aims at photographicality. My hope was that it would recall the traditional conflict within photography, the fact that photographs allude representatively to something in the past, while at the same time they are present in the here and now as physical artifacts. It is thus essential that I have chosen to use secondhand clothes and books; in other words, objects where the past becomes visible.

I have been fascinated for years by a comment made by Walter Benjamin, in his essay on the history and meaning of photography, ‘A Small History of Photography’. Benjamin writes: “Thus in fact it is to build something up, something artistic, created.”

Building developed into an important artistic method for me, but perhaps in a slightly different way than Benjamin was thinking. For Benjamin, building was a force contrary to photography, which relied upon a creative, traditional aesthetic; the kind of (photographic) constructivism developed by the Surrealists or Russian avant-garde filmmakers through the use of collage and montage. For me, building meant the construction, processing and combination of my photographic discoveries into a kind of presentation, where information would be paralleled, and also opposed, by aesthetic dimensions contained, not in language, but in a more immediate sensory perception, and which were based on repetition, color and space.

Thus my production gradually developed into an investigation, not only of the found, but also of the presentation I had made using found objects. At the same time, my research began revolving around what was to become the main theme of my work, the polar intertwining of the presentational, aesthetic dimension, the “here and now”; and the photographic, representative and informational dimension, the “there and then.”

As a painter whose work rests upon non-figurative and colorist reduction, Carolus Enckell represents a mode of artistic thinking which contradicts the informational tradition of documentary photography which served as the starting point in my artistic work in the early 1980s. My decision to invite Enckell to be my thesis supervisor and interlocutor was based on the fact that my art had changed gradually in the 1990s - issues dealing with repetition, color and space had become central to the way I thought about photography and making art.

In early 1999, I suggested to Enckell that we start meeting once every six months or so to discuss my ongoing works that would be included in my doctoral thesis project. This resulted in four conversations, each lasting 4–5 hours unedited. Neither of us planned our talks very much; the idea was instead to comment freely on everything that the works and changes in them would bring to mind. This must not be taken to imply that our meetings were accidental in terms of their content. The preceding conversation always affected the course of the subsequent one – in other words, we established a discursive contact and culture.

For some time, discussion has been a natural way for me to approach art, and I have used it when I have produced material for publication about other artists. I think that a dialogue, which a conversation always essentially is, creates at best the kind of unforeseeable knowledge and sense of presence not always achieved in writing, which tends to be more theoretical. Discussion also seemed suitable to my artistic research, because it would permit me to document, in a more or less chronological and authentic manner, those reactions and moods which the current phase of the works elicited over the course of the two years it took to make them.

At a later stage, I wrote appendices to the conversations. I wanted to include in my research also these elements that had affected my work, which for practical reasons were impossible to explore systematically in the meetings between Enckell and myself. These elements included theory, phenomena and works in the sphere of the history and present status of photography and art.

My original idea was not to evaluate the interrelationship of the appendices well in advance, but to link the appendices to every relevant point in the conversations so that the end result would resemble a collage with multiple perspectives. I did follow this idea for quite a while, but the scope of my material just kept expanding. At one stage, I was working on 150 extensive appendices, whose subject matter differed so wildly that I was completely unable to control the situation. I therefore continued by cutting and combining, finally ending up with 32 appendices which had a concrete link to my practice, and also shed light on its background within the complex framework of photographicality, presentation and contemporary art.

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Response

George Smith

I love the term photographicality. It is so pertinent to the problems we are dealing with when it comes to the question of a PhD project in visual art and the notion of research as a studio practice. Photographicality situates your project within an in-betweenness, which seems the key to it, since in-betweenness undermines the hierarchy of knowledge and frames the debate around the question of classical, traditional and conventional philosophy on the one side, and research and knowledge on the other. It allows us to see relationship as one of becoming, as opposed to one fixed in a dialectical tension. What we get then is a much more dialogical relationship, moving away from a hierarchical, dialectical relationship.

In the context of your work specifically, I love how the grid interacts with the notion of the everyday. The everyday is of course something that comes in through a romantic channel. Posited against the neoclassical representational aesthetic discourses, it allows us to think about the commonplace level within an aesthetic appreciation, and it moves towards reminding us of the hierarchical structure of knowledge in the relationship of aesthetics and philosophy.

Jan Kaila’s project shown in the Nameless Science exhibition is a wonderful project. The language used to represent the process itself becomes embedded in the artistic experience, turning the art inside out. Precisely through representing the language as part of the work, the philosophical principles do not clothe the work, but evolve from within. Again, that is a wonderful way of getting toward the dialogical relationship between philosophy and art, between knowledge and artistic representation.

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