Is Construction Something Natural?

In his new photographs, Halso has placed yet another curtain or obstacle in front of the expression of the direct and authentic in the image. The images, constructed and combined with the aid of a computer are a construction that is increasingly non-concrete. Halso had previously combined parts of insects on a table to be photographed, and he later made large constructions in the forest for the sole purpose of photographing them. But now, in his Nature Museum series everything is constructed only in the image, in the unseen recesses of digital files. They are suggestions, like building plans, but their author, Ilkka Halso, does not want to see them realized.

When concrete construction is left out, one would think that the amount of work would decrease. But, of course, the opposite happens. When Halso built his scaffolding in the forest for his Restoration series in 1999-2000, the work required for each picture was a relaxing period of one to two weeks, but now in the Nature Museum series the image is constructed serially with a computer, calling for an oppressive one and a half months of sitting at a table. The first two pictures took two and a half years to make. Here, too, a new system had to be learned.

Although nature is exceptionally rugged in Halso’s new pictures, it is nonetheless the object of seeing, a painterly reflection, and not a direct space of experience. Though beautiful and appealing, a nature photograph of this kind is still a representation, out there. At present, nature is used as a staged setting for arranged experience, the stage of "adventures". The image of the nature experience is distanced, becoming a background or alternate object; it takes on the nature of a game. Rules are developed for it, and yet the image is felt to present its object in real terms, correctly. Nature is also becoming museumized, changing into representative examples. Through the museum, the difference between the aesthetic of nature and that of the artwork, the constructed object, which has long been discussed in aesthetics, decreases. Both are becoming the subjects of an aesthetic gaze of a museum nature with the same rules.

All this arranging is so natural for man.

Even traditional nature photographers have to define their position on whether a picture taken of nature can be technically manipulated into a more impressive and better image. They have to take a stand on what is more essential – a picture appearing to be typical and impressive, or something that really existed but was perhaps less imposing.

This condensation of the experience of nature into understandable and distinct natural history may relate to a natural-scientific view of the world and the shared and victorious progress of the tradition of realism, which was ultimately not swayed to any major degree even by the relativistic ideas of post-modernism. Closely related to realistic representations, i.e. depicting its object "correctly", is the idea of the scientific, of being able to create a model "correctly" depicting its object.

In Halso’s works, the various manifestations of this greatest Western tradition, relying on the empirical and objective gaze are repeated again and again. Everything can be constructed to be truthful, to correspond to nature. The idea of museumizing is associated with the fact that the best and most authentic examples can be discovered, isolated and preserved forever. We can also follow this course with nature.

Archaeology, in turn, was associated with the idea that a "real" image of the past can be constructed from even the tiniest remains.

Also associated with this tradition relying on the computational power of scientific empiricism is the aspect that conservation, for example, can be excellently realized once it is regarded as useful by the economy and the financial sphere. The free market economy is the "natural" state of affairs, and realism. Halso makes an ironic comment on this with his photograph Sponsored Forest.

Why couldn’t an amusement park built in the forest be also an indication of authenticity; a roller-coaster running among real water and trees would be a more genuine experience than one on a plastic mountain.

In Halso’s works, the festival of authenticity, veracity, naturalness and objectivity that is manifested in almost everything is then transformed precisely in its gaily confusing totality to become partly an antithesis of the culture that it represents. Halso says that he gives his works the degree of "excess" that one will notice perforce that they cannot be research, that these constructions cannot be realism. This cannot be true in this manner.

And it is in this excess that the rejection of the objective ideal is manifested in Halso’s pictures. The subjective, play, experiment, convincing or fooling become part of activity that has value as such. The imposing nature of Halso’s images derives equally from the artist’s solutions, the mark of his work as from the existence of nature independent of him.

People readily begin to organize things, develop systems, create clear images in order to understand. This is done in relation to nature and with evolving technology, arranging in this manner can achieve ever fateful manifestations for nature. In his works, his constructions, Ilkka Halso concretizes this culture of constructions, while admitting its features in himself. Man cannot escape his own rationality. "There must be a small engineer in me. I notice that I want to construct even though I am horrified at the same time," he complains and feels that when he constructs these pictures, he thinks, even to an unnecessary degree, of what is constructively possible, even when he could proceed more from visual construction.

Nonetheless, construction usually takes place through geometry, avoiding organic form. And the aesthetic is not necessarily seen as a part of organization, classification and systems. But in Halso’s works these aspects join each other. An initial impetus for Halso’s photographic art dealing with natural classifications, archaeology and constructions was, however, a purely aesthetic fascination as a student for the plastic forms of the parts of insects. By sorting these forms, Halso discovered a connection between imagination and systems. He also became interested in 17th-century scientific works, containing illustrations where imagination, imagined and possible worlds were resorted to when information ran out. There is a utopian spirit of this kind also in Halso’s latest works. Can things be so imaginary, in a truthful, planned and researched manner?