A Scene of Gazes

At the present exhibition Vuokola displays a collection of works having in common viewing and perception – the observation of the world. Characteristically, he does not present a personal view of the world, in which observation would combine with mind. Vuokola addresses the ways that constitute seeing. Seeing has become the theme of art; instrumental and programmed, it has become a "narrator’s voice". This is not to say, however, that pictures created in this way would be preordained. Activating in the image-making process both the laws of nature and the chaotic order of nature itself, Vuokola achieves results both surprising and fascinating, yet also beautiful in a very fresh way. The images are made with a film camera, a video camera and the technical movement of painting, both via them and with their aid. The artist decides what is depicted or done and where and how this takes place; he times the recording and duration of the images, decides on the presentation of the results down to the smallest details.

In recent years, the history of modernism has also been discussed in terms of a history of the gaze, and the ways in which it passes on a manner of seeing the world, a kind of visual worldview. It has been observed how, in disrupting Renaissance perspective, so-called avant-garde art and literature chose a different path than photography and cinema, where the "eye of the camera" relied on seeing based on perspective, thus conforming to the traditional conception of how the world appears in reality. Where the visual arts experimented with various models of seeing the world, the visual worlds of science and also popular culture, relied on the traditional model of perspective. (Jonathan Crary: Techniques of the Observer).

As photography, video and cinema offer increasingly interesting and complex opportunities for visual expression they have established their position among the visual arts. They have also introduced the debate on the image as document, which is typical of contemporary art. Discussion on the document and its special visual features is highly interesting and multi-faceted, as its role is being undermined by the world of digitized imagery and the techniques of image manipulation..

As a visual genre, the document operates simultaneously in the areas of both icon and index, the two traditional classifications of pictures, thus being kind of hybrid. An icon is a picture representing something, while an index classifies the physical signs associated with a thing or event. The photographic document contains features of both. A typical icon is, for example, a figurative landscape or portrait, while a classic indexical sign could be a footprint in the sand showing that someone has been there. A documentary photograph is ultimately indexical, for it serves to tell that a camera has been at the location and a sign thereof has been imprinted on the film. The depicted thing or event, in turn, is a figurative image, which in contemporary photography is highly multi-layered, with a wide array of possible styles and conventions of presentation. These means may be associated with the technique of photography and printing as much as with the choice of subject and whether life is presented as seen or whether the photographer becomes involved, or whether the course of events is solely the photographer’s own narrative.

Vuokola’s pictures of the night sky are made with long exposures, making it possible to photograph in the dark as the film registers an event of long duration into a kind of temporally stratified picture. The resulting image is beyond the photographer’s control, and is rather a product of the collaboration of continually changing light and the sensitivity of the film. Vuokola turns his camera towards the cloudless heavens and steps aside to observe the same heavens with his own eyes. He also sees the aeroplanes in the sky as fast phenomena of light and follows, for instance, a ship at night. The print shows the movement of the stars as small curved lines of light. The movements of the aeroplanes are distinct and graceful lines resembling the meandering ornaments of Art Nouveau. The movement of the ship is a wide array of lines. These images entail the magic of making the unseen visible, which in the early days of photography was used, for example, to present the movements of men and animals, i.e. events in movement that the human eye cannot distinguish. The cooperation of eye and camera has opened up new areas of seeing with an important influence on our way of comprehending the world.

While pictures are documents with traces of past movement and light, they are also icons presenting the landscape of our age – things taking place so slowly or so fast that our eyes fail to record them. Metaphorically, their meaning also lies in the fact that they tell of the continuous movement and different speeds amidst which we live. This meaning is important in the present worldview of art, and its representation appears to be one of the main objectives of contemporary art.

Besides images of the night sky, Vuokola also presents video films with the programming of camera movement as their theme. Particularly fascinating is a combination of two video films portraying a typical Finnish lake scene in the summer. The camera moves gently on the waves and there are summer clouds in the sky, telling the viewer that the lake is not quite calm. This film was recorded with a camera attached to a tripod placed on a freely moving, light raft made of polystyrene. The artist followed the recording from a nearby boat. Both monitors show the same film, but at a different pace. Watching these films, the viewer, too, feels like a cork floating on the water, as the capricious movements of the picture and its random angles follow the chaotic rhythm of the wind. The ordinariness of the landscape is transformed into a new experience, with new angles of view and a new experience of movement that becomes almost physical.

The other video piece consists of two films shown on two adjacent monitors. Both films feature a simple tumbler of water, familiar from Vuokola’s earlier works. In one film a hand holding a spoon is stirring the water with a regular revolving movement seen directly from the front. In the other video, the movement is formed by the motion of the camera around the glass with the surrounding room reflected as somewhat ponderous suspended, soft-contoured images on the surface of the water and the glass. In both films, the normal speed has been slowed down slightly, making it easier for the viewer to focus on the visual stages and details of the event. In all its simplicity, this video diptych reveals the two ways in which a camera tells a story; in one the movement is within the picture, and in the other the camera moves around its subject, thus creating a new narrative.

The photographic diptych, a reconstruction of a still from Robert Bresson’s film "Pickpocket", is based on an analysis of an image taken from the film and its construction anew, the representation of representation and thus the following of the traces of a multi-layered gaze and the use of the camera. This image is also an instance of "pictorial theft", as the artist appropriates or cannibalizes, a picture taken by another artist, but – as far as is known – this was no longer an image from Bresson’s movie but a picture taken by a photographer during the filming, in turn published in a book on cinema. With reference to the image published in the book, Vuokola has reproduced the situation as accurately as possible. This immediately brings to mind the question of whose gaze and seeing are involved here? Is it Bresson, who made the film, the still photographer who recorded the filming, or Vuokola? All three are stratified in this image by Marko Vuokola.

In addition to photographs and videos the exhibition also presents two sheets of aluminium painted yellow and faced with glass to emphasize their already smooth shiny surface, painted without being touched by hand. Photographs of the same size as the aluminium sheets were taken of them, replicas of a kind in altered technique. The photographs differ in minor respects from the original paintings and upon closer inspection the surface of the prints reveals discrepancies and tones lacking in the mechanically painted sheets of aluminium. The aluminium plate and the photograph are presented as two diptychs, which, however, are only apparently identical. In the exhibition, their glass surfaces pass on an image of the surrounding space, the things going on there, and the viewers engaged in viewing, all as a continuous "reflection". The intense yellow, however, "marks" everything around the piece, and thus the reflection does not correspond to reality but is "coloured" yellow. The yellow reflecting surface also returns the gaze to the viewer, while focusing attention on the differences between the variously programmed gazes of all the images on show and the recording of what is seen on the one hand, and the present moment, in which we stand amidst the movements and randomness of life, on the other. This implies a situation in which everything is unfinished and not registered in an image, and will not be registered except for a fleeting moment in the viewer’s mind.

The models of viewing applied by Vuokola in his works can also be analysed with reference to ways of seeing recently developed in the study of so-called visual culture. Peter de Bolla distinguishes three different ways of seeing. The first is associated with the verb "to gaze", implying a concentrated viewing. The second way of seeing is to glance, a quick view, while the third is to look, to see with thought. The gaze burrows deep into the image, organizing the visual field to generate meanings. The glance quickly scans the surfaces, enjoying their variation. The glance is said identify with the field of view, being defined by the virtual spaces in which it moves. Bolla’s third variant, the look, attaches the element of reasoning to seeing and the viewer’s consciousness of the eye’s ability to see, and perhaps also an awareness of the limitations of the world as seen by the human eye. This form of seeing is also described as oscillation between the gaze and the glance, with the eye moving between the depth of the gaze and its associated reasoning, texture and deepness (from Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (ed.) ‘Vision and Textuality’).

Vuokola’s works at the present exhibition apply all these forms of seeing. The long exposures slowly construct the image, adding layers and depth, the viewing of which calls for the time and thought of the gaze. The video camera floating on the lake represents a typical glance, not only looking at the surface of the water but also steered and defined by its movements. The reflections on the yellow painted surfaces can be associated with the look, both observing the reflected image on the glass facing the paintings (including the viewer) and addressing this picture: the presence of self in a situation that is an exhibition, i.e. having the explicit social function of seeing. This situation is also an opportunity to approach the internal models of viewing of all the works on show, and the images created by the various types of seeing.

The internal dialogue of Marko Vuokola’s imagery between various kinds of movement and the patterns of signs marked out by them constitutes a new kind of image, in which the traces of technically achieved movement is analogous with the eternal motion of the earth and the forces of nature. The long exposure and the ability to register movement unlike the human eye bring forth signs of movement that know to exist and function before our eyes but whose forms and properties and their poetry of randomness can also be shown by a photograph and the video image.