ON THE NATURE OF THE ARTIFACT - Juha van Ingen's art

In individual works by Juha van Ingen we can find many elements. They show us traces of process art and conceptual art, minimalist sculpture, experimental film, video and media art, environmental art, or attributes of social art. The result of dividing his works into such categories can, however, often be unrewarding. My aim in this article is to understand some of these features of his art.

INTO THE WILD

The specificity of the medium is one of these features. Van Ingen's body of work proves that an artist working in-between the mediums, sometimes has to think most about their functions. Another feature is the special aesthetics that he extracts out of these functions.

Flutter (2006) and Nature Morte - Still Life (2007) are the most lyrical moving image works that Van Ingen has done. Flutter takes the viewer to look at the nature and natural history, reflecting the cultural values that we produce and link to our observations. We see the close-ups of the tropical butterflies flapping their wings. The soundtrack is done by slowing the sound of a fly to its extreme. ‘With the help of the aggressive, non-synchronical sound, the viewing situation becomes more intimate’, says van Ingen.

In Nature Morte - Still Life the starting point is the 16 mm -film material transported to video. The camouflage skins and the shapes of the preserved animals of a natural history museum are brought to life by the camera movements and editing tactics. ‘The silent actors of a natural history museum turn into a fluid and semi abstract flow of shapes and patterns (…) to perform an ambient dreamlike dance’, as Van Ingen describes the work.

He continues: ’The sound track is from a world beyond the museum doors. The looped sentimental sound of a Bollywood B-film star creates a link to the modern world where emotions and moments are preserved on to film and hard disks.’

With the haunting captured voice of the singer the viewer is led also to think about the concept of ‘the Wild Life’ and our longing for the natural conditions. Throughout the history of the modern era the Nature has been seen as ‘the Big Other’, which we humans have been eager to destroy, often paradoxically connected with the ambition to preserve.

(1996) CONCEPTUALISED TIME

The tension between the preserving and decaying is one of the features to be found in van Ingen's art. The fundamental problem of the history is that the materials and the technologies don't last forever. The preservation has always to be done on some platforms, which vary according to the technologies of the moment. Preserving and decaying are always connected with the question of time, and sometimes in time-based arts some artists comment on the question of preserving time itself.

Van Ingen’s sculpture 1996 (1995) conceptualises a period of a year into a spatial object. The sculpture consists of unopened packs of VHS-videocassette stacked together into a compact minimalist sculpture. The combined duration of the cassettes is 365 x 24 = 8760 hours. The work is a rendering of many durations unfolding into one. It can bring to mind Joseph Beuys’ work The Silence (1973), which consists of five zinc and copper coated film canisters containing a film print of Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963).

As with Beuys’ piece, 1996 can be interpreted as a rendering of how an immediate, living experience of time from the past is mummified and museified in our cultural memory. The same theme is also taken up by a sculpture project that van Ingen carried out, in which small animals made out of Lego were cast in bronze. In it, remnants of the social activity of play are combined with museum reification. Both the bronze Lego animals and the videocassettes waiting in their boxes depict the difficulty of capturing a living experience. At the same time, they make possible a processual construction and dismantlement.

In his work, Beuys employs a recognised classic of the modern full-length fiction film, while in his van Ingen uses the empty videotape. In principle it would be possible, without destroying the work, to take one of the videocassettes out of the sculpture and put it into a video player and watch it, whereas with the copy of the Bergman film in Beuys’ piece this would be impossible. But even van Ingen’s videotape would reveal to us no more than noise. Is this noise a living interval of time? It is for our senses and for the living experience that we have when we see and hear the tape turning, but otherwise it exists only as a virtual possibility of an experience. That is why van Ingen’s work is specifically a conceptual rendering of a period of time, and not preserved time in itself.

BEYOND THE ELECTRONIC IMAGE

Both opto-photo-chemical and electronic decaying processes are facts to be considered when thinking of the preserving functions of film or video. (Dis)Integrator (1992) is a videowork that scrutinizes the very smallest parts of the structure of the electronic moving image, reaching a level that might perhaps, modifying the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, be characterized as the elemental, gaseous or molecular level of matter. There is also the question of the entropy of the image, of the slow fading of an image stored on videotape.

The starting point for the work is a couple of shots from a 1958 science-fiction film directed by Kurt Neumann, The Fly, put together using the image-counterimage technique of classic film narrative. In the first shot the scientist explains to his woman friend how he has invented the principle for a matter-transference machine by comparing it to the transmission of a television picture via a TV set.

Take television, what happens? A stream of electrons, sound and picture impulses are transmitted through wires in the air. The TV camera is a disintegrator. Your set unscrambles and integrates the electrons back into the pictures and sound.’

In the second shot the women replies:

‘Yes, but this is different.’

Van Ingen has copied the two-shot sequence again and again using two videotape recorders, causing it to gradually disintegrate into the white noise of the videotape. At one stage of the work the two figures (the scientist and the woman) from the original scene are visible only as broken outlines. The sound crackles and breaks up, sometimes slowing down, sometimes speeding up.

At the end, the man and woman recognisable in the beginning as a kind of social-situation composition have vanished completely into the electronic background din of the white noise. The work replaces one process with another, decodes the content of the figurative image, placing it in a new interpretative framework: from the level of cultural representations we shift to the essential material properties of the medium, of the subject matter and of the image.

PERCEPTIVE VIDEO

In some of his other videoworks van Ingen explores the image perceptions and the underlying material preconditions produced jointly by the mechanical ‘eye’ of the video camera and the human eye. Skyline (2000) is a 360 degree pan zooming in as close as possible along an imaginary outline of urban buildings and distant mountains.

The shakiness of the image reveals the artist’s physical exertions as he holds the camera while tracing the ‘line’ of his own field of view along the horizon with both his camera and his gaze. The haptic or tactile, multisensory quality of the optical image is conveyed by Skyline’s tentative, probing movements. At the same time, the movements mark out a kind of area, a territory, around the point from which perception takes place.

In Waterfront (2001) the theme is the waterline, the contour dividing the underwater space from land. To illustrate this van Ingen sets up his camera in an unusual horizontal position. Combining this with a rapid, revolving movement of the camera, the shoreline is traced out as a sharp line across the centre of the monitor. At the same time, the landscape and its reflection appear to be separated off into two moving planes of becomings, like mirror images in rapid motion in both directions away from the boundary line. The boundary line becomes the work’s most material, almost tangible element. Van Ingen has achieved this by altering some of the underlying conditions of image-perception, by distorting ‘normal perception’.

In Skyline-loops, which are exhibited as installations, van Ingen creates new situations by changing the camera positions and framing to new angles from the positions that are supposed to create the normal vision. By turning the elements of the landscapes in a different positions, van Ingen subtracts the forms and reflections to separate events. ‘After seeing the loops, the viewer is maybe able to see also the landscape in another way’, says van Ingen.

CODED STRUCTURES

Van Ingen’s aim of creating new processes out of the properties of each individual medium plays a central role in Black & White (1998/2001). Black & White is a browser-work, where 3 ordinary html-coded webpages are creating a loop. The first page includes only the white backround colour. The code is written like this:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=black.htm">
</head>
<body bgcolor="white">
</body>
</html>

The page opens automatically the next page, which is composed entirely of the black backround colour.

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=mix.htm">
</head>
<body bgcolor="black">
</body>
</html>

The second page opens automatically the third page, which divides the view into a four frames. The cycle starts again in all of them.

<html>
<Body>
<frameset rows="*,*" cols="*,*" framespacing="0" frameborder="NO" border="0" scrolling="NO">
<frame src="white.htm" border="0" scrolling="NO">
<frame src="white.htm" border="0" scrolling="NO">
<frame src="white.htm" border="0" scrolling="NO">
<frame src="white.htm" border="0" scrolling="NO">
</frameset>
<noframes><body>
</body></noframes>
</html>

‘In theory the result should look the same each time but in practice it never does. Black and White can bee seen as a small trip in to the mind of your computers processor. It is also a reminder of the infallible structures we depend on in our everyday life’, van Ingen describes the work.

Another net art work Web-Safe (1999/2000) uses an Internet browser and a web ‘palette’, a ‘browser-safe’ colour chart of 216 colours. Being web-safe means that the colours in question have been designed as far as possible to be rendered the same in the most commonly used Internet browsers. Van Ingen's work consists of 212 auto-loading web pages, each of which is a different RGB colour. In the gallery version there are four times 212 constantly changing colour fields. The colours vary at a rapid rate, constantly producing new combinations. The pages load up in an endless colourscape.

In Web-Safe the properties of the browser become a component of the work, as do the optical properties of the camera in the videoworks. For van Ingen each medium or each perception revealed by a medium is a message or a system, the opening up, unpacking and re-coding of whose codes is a part of the realization of the work.

ESTHETIC SHIFTS AND CODES

The new version of Web-Safe (Video Colourscape) (2008) transforms net art to video. Six loops from the original work are shown in different speds through six channels, each one being presented in different monitor. The resulting new work is a never-ending animation in the form of an audiovisual installation, belonging to the realm of an art museum or a gallery space. The palette has been spiced with interesting ingredients, small esthetic distractions produced by the electronic shifts.

The functions of an artwork may vary from conceptual to phenomenological (the works dealing with perception) and critical approaches. Animating a barcode with an earthquake effect in the video work Ecuador (2008), van Ingen comments the use of digital information in the recent era marked by the moves of globalization. The barcode is received upon a purchase of two Ecuadorian bananas from a supermarket in Finland. When the work is shown among the sculptures by Henry Moore in Didrichsen Art Museum in Espoo, Finland (which is at the same time also showing pre-columbian art) it becomes also a comment on the esthetic shifts and codes of visual culture.

CONCLUSIVE REMARK

In a summary of sorts, van Ingen’s tactics are marked by a kind of fundamental insight about the relationship between the elements he is using, around which he then constructs a kind of game for the viewer. His approach makes use even of the small mistakes (sometimes called artifacts) produced by technology, showing that they are in fact important and unseparable part of the systems in which they are appearing.

Van Ingen's works are neither monolithic nor static, but changeable and mobile. The works occur in living intervals of time, and often involve subtle alterations of the esthetic assumptions and physical conditions underlying beneath the perception.

Kari Yli-Annala