Where Compasses All Go Mad
2007

Where compasses all go mad reanimates arctic explorations through the use of different archival material. Puranen has re-photographed historical photographs and other visuals related to heroic Arctic expeditions. In Where compasses all go mad Puranen combines three different interests. Namely his long term work in the Arctic, his interest in the archive and the use of reflecting light as a metaphor for speaking of history and memory.

Puranen uses flashing reflections of daylight on surface of printed images blurring them sometimes completely unidentifiable and always difficult to look at. This blurring of images emphasizes the impossibility to consider history as objective truth, rather suggesting a fictive historical world.

Where compasses all go mad explores interconnections between individual encounters and historical space; indigenous peoples of the north meeting arctic explorers in icy vistas of the Arctic. Puranen proposes that traces of events and encounters and their historical consequences, are scripted into the fabric of northern space and culture.

Where compasses all go mad continues Puranen´s poetic explorations of arctic landscape and historical memory. Through experiences of travel, borderland and identity Puranen creates a matrix of fact and fiction, a field of fantasy and geographical imagination.

Galerie Anhava will present the 18-part installation Where Compasses All Go Mad for the first time at Art 38 Basel in June 2007.




Jorma Puranen (b. 1951) is the grand and-not-so-old man of contemporary Finnish photography. His magnificent series of works "Imaginary Homecoming, "Language is a Foreign Country" and Shadows, reflections and that sort of thing have aroused attention and admiration all over the world, and he is featured in many important public and private collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Jorma Puranen has received both the Fotofinlandia and the State Art Prize of Finland . He has been Professor of Photography at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and has contributed to the meteoric rise of Finnish photography in various international forums.

In his most recent series of works entitled "Icy Prospects", Jorma Puranen continues in a sense the painting theme of his previous series. This time, however, he has not photographed fragments of paintings. Instead, he painted a piece of wooden board himself with black, glossy alkyd paint, took it outdoors in winter and photographed the fragmentary reflection of nature on the surface of the board. The result was a series of extremely painterly, painting-like, works, in which the brushstrokes and the uneven features of the board are mixed with the reflected subject. These "photograph paintings" are breathtakingly beautiful, continuing the best traditions of romanticism. They are extremely fresh and they breathe, avoiding sentimentality and the pathetic.

Ilona Anhava





'Places are both the topos for a given event but also the sign, the tropos for the recollection of the path to another place and time'.

Nikos Papastergiadis          

Dialogue: Marjatta Levanto and Jorma Puranen

Your ultimate and deepest interest as an artist seems to be moving further and further away from the history of art. Art history is of course present in your works, which consider the works of artists of the past as elements of the whole, but now you seem to be delving deeper and deeper into the history of culture. To what degree is this an explicit choice, or is there any choice at all?

My approach is multidisciplinary and I want to keep a certain openness in which I avoid cut-and-dried interpretations. I have used a variety of visual sources in my work, such as anthropological photographs, old maps and scholarly illustrations of northern cultures and expeditions. The starting points of most of my projects thus lie in museums and archives. It has also been important to consider museums as places where different cultural visions are engendered and established.

The relationship of Icy Prospects, this new work of mine, with my earlier series Shadows, reflections and all that sort of thing (1997-2004) and accordingly with the history of art is of course obvious. While photographing painted portraits I thought that what I was doing was in fact like knocking on the frame of a painting and asking "Is anyone there?" or saying "Wake up, I know you're there." This work, too, is a kind of rehabilitation of the subject, like Imaginary Homecoming (1991-1996), an attempt to create a living context, in which the people shown in those images and perhaps their fates could be readdressed. I am not interested in imitating painting or considering photography with the concepts of painting. This question is of a closer viewing of historical paintings, experiencing them and an attempt to expand their attendant ambiguous space to apply also to our own time.

It is important for a work of art to give an idea of the context in which it operates. I feel that art history alone is not enough for this. Images, art are visual signs of cultural meaning. My work is a kind of historical poetics that cannot be approached solely from textual forms. Creating art entails the deeper wish that the images could expand and shift the boundaries of our knowledge further away.

In a previous connection we have discussed the concept of beauty in your works. Speaking of beauty as an objective of making art is not particularly popular in contemporary discussions on art. However, I feel that it is intimately present in everything that you do. But I assume that it is not as simple as all this.

It's true that beauty has not been in much favour in art over the past decades. However, after some two decades of deliberating the problem of representation and the "everyday", we can see how there is now discussion in contemporary art on the opportunities of beauty, the sublime and the picturesque in a completely new way. Even in contemporary photography, it appears to have been an obviously liberating experience to give in to the allure of beauty, even within documentary photography.

As a concept beauty is of course problematic and heavily laden. The question may also be of revealing levels of subjectivity and providing room for reflexivity, which the rationalism of the modern world has stifled so many times.

The possibilities of beauty can also be used as explicitly critical means. In Icy Prospects I have particularly considered the nature of the picturesque, the sublime and the mysterious. Already in the Curiosus Naturae Spectator series (1995-98), I addressed the means with which the world had been objectified in photographs; romantic photographic rhetoric included oppressive dark skies and foreground rolling forth.

In Icy Prospects the sublime is understood as the extreme and highest yet ambivalent form of human experience, related to an appealing transcendental feeling of beauty. The sublime is also associated with the feeling of danger in strange landscapes, the perspective of the stranger. In this work, almost hallucinatory visions are like the echoes of ancient expeditions in the Arctic seas. I am reminded of the story about Turner, who had himself bound to the mast of a ship to experience the extremes of a storm in order to paint the world in a more credible manner.

Veracity ensured by history, the impressions of ancient tales, lived lives, geographical locations and the reality of landscapes create a new and intact reality in your works. Are you constructing your own utopia, a spiritual home if we were to put it in pathetic terms?

The idea of this new work named Icy Prospects came from reading histories and accounts of northern expeditions and from watching tourists on the furthest promontory of Nordkap in North Norway. Nordkap is a place where tourists throng from all parts of Europe to admire the last shore of our continent. To the north there are only Spitzbergen and the North Pole. The people standing on the foggy cliff stare northward as if they had in mind the ancient myth of Hyperborea, the temperate land beyond the northern winds surrounded by the polar ice.

This work is associated with new concepts of space, mobility and distance that have emerged in cultural studies. I was interested in the possibility of a cultural space created by different fates, places, histories and encounters, a fictive historical world. Icy Prospects is a kind of fabric of facts, fantasy, geographical imagination and intellectual landscapes.

On the other hand, the points of departure of Icy Prospects are highly personal. I have worked in the North for thirty years on projects connected in different ways to the relationship between history and the Arctic landscape. In addition, I remember from my childhood my father's stories about the Arctic Ocean when he worked on fishing boats in Petsamo until the outbreak of the Second World War. The trawlers would go as far as Bear Island, situated between Spitzbergen and the Finnmark coast. The North, that highly elusive dimension, is perhaps more than a spiritual home. It has shaped me to become what I am.

You know the landscapes of the North from over a period of decades. Did this thorough familiarity let you take distance from surrounding reality and make you go deeper into history and thereby into completely new experiences of observing the landscape?

I have been interested in the world of the North for a long while and I have therefore felt it necessary to always seek new perspectives on that world of themes, which many people no doubt regard as limited.

Icy Prospects is the last in my series of projects on the northern landscape. It is naturally related to a stage of studying art and culture in which questions concerning space, the landscape, have partly replaced the body as the locus of complex considerations of identity, cultural difference, marginality etc. There is now simultaneous interest in contemporary art in both mobility and attachment to a place. Narratives of place and unattachment now have a central role. Places, landscapes and their images are also important political metaphors. The Arctic is often associated with mental images of something immense and boundless, of endless distance. Images that in themselves are like an invitation to Otherness and Elsewhere. A voyage across the sea was an encounter with the unknown, both metaphorically and in practice. In many cases, it also became the tool for the cultural identification of one's own "self".

The photographs of Icy Prospects are paths, not a map. I am particularly interested in the resources of photography to speak of the levels of memory and history. By using an abundance of literary and visual historical pickings, I seek to create a fabric of encounters and connections, a matrix that I translate into images and narratives, a field of fantasy and imaginings.

You have never let the viewer immerse himself in peace in the grandeur of northern landscapes. In similar fashion, you have not provided any opportunity to admire the masterly brushstrokes and harmonious world of colour created by artists of the past. You have forced the viewer to take a stand on historical facts, on the fragility and vulnerability brought on by time, on the difficulty of seeing and the complexity of circumstances. Now you seem to be making the viewing even more difficulty. Will reality now move completely beyond grasp?