When watching the video essay Listening to the Forest (Røed 2022) I feel an immediate affinity with the work, hypnotized, although I realize it is in many ways opposite to my own ways of listening to the forest. Although the camera is on a static tripod as an impersonal witness, it is here constantly moving, almost dancing, and thus becomes the main performer. Although repetition is used as a tool for focusing attention on the constant changes, here the two images placed on top of each other accentuate the minuscule differences between the two perspectives rather than changes over time in time-lapse videos. Although the use of automatic focus always emphasizes the agency of the camera, and of its designers, here the automatic shifts from foreground to background and vice versa between the two images become major events. Although the moving frame sometimes focuses on details of individual trees, the panoramic view sails over a rather uniform forest. Although the human being is very much present, here it is mainly through the narrating voice, the body is visible only in the final images that show ‘the making of’ the work.
The double perspective on the forest reminds me of works by a Finnish conceptual artist, Marko Vuokola, whose series “The Seventh Wave” consists of two large almost identical photographs of a site or sight, not necessarily a landscape, taken on two different occasions. In the first pair I saw, a view of a lake, I could not detect any difference; later versions can vary more. The distinction is created by changes over time, while in the videos in “Listening to the forest” the distinction is made by a spatial change, the slight difference in location, besides technical differences between the two cameras. The movement invites the viewer to recognize the shift in the relationship – sometimes the images are almost identical, sometimes one image is focusing on something that will be visible in the other image only a little bit later.
If the task of art, according to Deleuze & Guattari, is to create percepts and affects, unlike philosophy that creates concepts and science that creates functions (Deleuze & Guattari 1996), this work really does the job. It is all about attention, which somehow involves both affect and perception, although sensory fine-tuning seems to be at the core. Attention, or focusing on attention, is a good way to help us, and by extension others, to be present, here, alive, and aware. Elsewhere I have written about the tension between a bodily, somatic awareness and an awareness of the surrounding environment, (Arlander 2022) and the need to find the right balance, so one does not wipe out the other. In that context I thought about the performer in front of the camera, in the forest. Here the awareness of the viewer and listener on site in the forest, and the viewer and listener in front of the screen are probably very different – as they almost always are, when dealing with recorded lens-based work.
A person recording the sounds of the environment and hearing them via headphones, or a person video filming the surroundings by looking through the lens of the camera (which is rare today) is immersed in a heightened and often exciting sensory experience. I remember my first experiments of recording the path of two small mountain brooks to the point of their confluence in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I was feeling almost paranoid while focusing on one-minute close-ups of the water a few meters apart and on my hands not shaking. Anybody could have pushed me into the stream while I was bent above the water immersed in that narrow camera frame and in the sound of the water. That was the real performance, while the video installation was something else altogether. Soon even cheap video cameras would have small monitors attached to them, which changed the whole experience. When using a tripod there is no need to worry about the camera shaking and it provides the possibility to step in front of the camera as well. What is lost is the movement. Here, in Listening to the Forest, on the contrary, movement is key. The person recording witnesses the balancing act of the two cameras with their ‘sails’ catching the wind while sitting next to the construction, open to perceive the environment beyond the camera frames, anticipating the movement of the cameras without interfering and aware of the circumstances even before they influence the images or sound.
This performance on site in the forest is in some sense documented in the video work, although there is no way to trace back the performance from the documentation. What the artist performing the act of recording senses in the forest and what the viewer and listener of the video work experiences in the exhibition or on the screen are two different things. And as a viewer I have no way of knowing what it is like to sit there, next to the camera construction slowly moving in the wind, except by using my imagination and comparing with somewhat related situations that I have experienced myself. This is a familiar problem when documenting performance art, especially when the work is performed or executed without the presence of an audience. And even when there are witnesses, most of the public will know about the work through documentation. Philip Auslander, in his text “The Performativity of Performance Documentation” (2006) uses Yves Klein’s Jump into the Void and Cris Burden’s Shoot as examples to argue that the circumstances on site are less important than the actual event taking place in the image. Both these actions were performed mainly for the camera and known later as photographs and film stills. For the viewer it does not matter whether there was a safety net under Klein, later removed from the photograph or whether Burden was really shot, Auslander claims. For the performer, the artist, it really does matter, of course. And in today’s world of fake news and fake everything, the idea of authenticity has regained value.
Here, in this case, authenticity is not so much about whether the artist really was there on site in the forest, which seems rather obvious, but whether the movement of the camera is really directed by the wind. And I am willing to believe that it makes a difference, however subtle, to have the camera react to gravity and wind rather than controlled by machinery. And that I can sense the difference as a viewer in the form of some kind of suspense in the moving image without knowing how it was produced.
This idea of sharing authorial agency, of letting the circumstances, the technology, the wind and the weather decide, too, is very much a current concern. Today many of us want to focus on process, performativity, and materiality rather than representation, but the problem of representation remains there regardless. There is a tension between performance and representation. I remember reading a study by Jouko Aaltonen (2006) on the strategies of Finnish documentary film makers, which focused on two aspects of the process: firstly how to encounter the world and secondly how to tell about it to others. According to the abstract, “the making of a documentary film is a process, in which the filmmaker takes a stand in relation to two basic factors: to the surrounding socio-historical world on the one hand, and to the traditions and conventions of representation on the other.” He calls these factors the reality aspect, and the representational aspect. “These aspects are realized in different ways in different traditions, while different filmmakers also have personal approaches to them.” For Aaltonen “the production of a documentary film is about ’being in the world’ and about encountering the world” involving “an open dialogue with ’reality’”. He also stresses that the documentary film maker has become an artist, for whom “the documentary film is a paradox. It is an art, which is tied to a real, socio-historical world. And yet the filmmakers feel that it offers more creative freedom than traditional fiction film.”What was self-evident to documentary filmmakers, who at the time, in the beginning of 2000, were more interested in fictional and autobiographical aspects, was a great eye-opener for me, with a background in fiction. Engaged in performance art and the critique of fiction or pretense, of the ‘unreal’, this distinction between encountering the world and telling about the world was new, or at least not discussed in the context of performance documentation in those terms. Or then I just did not know about it. In my own work I have accepted the two different realities: the one I encounter while performing on site and the one that the resulting video work depicts or produces. What I see next to a tree and what the camera sees are not the same, and looking at a video work is yet another thing again. Here, in Listening to the Forest, the ‘making of’ photographs show the activity on site as a fascinating performance, like a mixture of a retro and futuristic outdoor sport of some kind.
The performance on site is nevertheless downplayed and hidden in favor of the minimal performance in the video, the aerial dance of the cameras with the two frames tied to each other sliding smoothly left and right in the forest, which looks almost, but only almost similar wherever they turn.
Røed writes in the introduction to the essay: “By considering how the moving image might be seen as a form of site in itself, it explores how the moving image can manifest as place on its own terms rather than as a mode of representing reality.” (Røed 2022, 2) The video – which I have encountered through the essay, not as an installation in an exhibition – is a documentation of a performance only in a technical sense. As an immersive artwork orchestrated for a specific space it can become a site of its own. And that evokes other problems. Another old text that comes to mind is by curator and critic Boris Groys, where he on the one hand discusses the installation form as an exercise in restoring aura to an artwork (Groys 2013, 60-65). A video is removed from its original site, mobile and transportable, and even reproducible, thus losing its aura, as Walter Benjamin famously analyzed regarding photographs. To create an installation, a spatial one-time event, is a way of producing and reinstating aura – you had to be there to experience the installation. On the other hand, Groys complains of current developments in contemporary art, where art no longer happens in the exhibition space. What we see in exhibitions is no longer artworks, he claims, but merely art documentation, traces of art that has happened elsewhere. (Groys 2013, 53-55) Certainly the tension between the two modes of attention demanded by what happens on site while performing-recording-listening and what happens in the exhibition space for the visitor viewing, listening, and imagining, is very much evident also in this work.
With artistic research in general the problem is getting worse, one would assume, when the whole research process must be documented and shared with the public. This topic has recently been discussed by Claire Bishop in “Information Overload” (2023), where she complains about the massive task confronting a viewer of research-based art and the resulting lack of attention. She analysesthree phases of research-based art; first “knowledge is networked, collaborative, in process”, then “the archival impulse” is combined with pulling “disparate strands together through fiction and subjective speculation” while the third phase is a fully digitalized “aggregative search-as-research”. According to Bishop “each phase of research-based art presents a different understanding of what constitutes knowledge and a different approach to spectatorial labor.”
She regrets that many current installations “convey a sense of being immersed—even lost—in data” and suggests that “artistic research can push against the limits of academic research” either by “challenging an objective relationship to truth via fiction and fabulation” or “by presenting research in aesthetic forms that exceed the merely informative”. She demands that research goes through a body, that it is lived through, that “preexisting information is … metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world”. Based on this video essay and the video material, I would imagine that such an embodied metabolism is exactly what this practice of listening to the forest is based upon. And which a hypnotized viewer invited to gently swing to the images of the aerial dance in the forest is allowed to forget.
References
Aaltonen, Jouko. 2006. Todellisuuden vangit vapauden valtakunnassa – dokumenttielokuva ja sen tekoprosessi. [The Prisoners of Reality in the Realm of Freedom: Documentary Film and Its Production Process] Keuruu: Like.
Arlander, Annette. 2022. “Becoming a Tree with a Tree”. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices Vol. 14 Number 2., 231-248. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp_00081_1
Auslander, Philip. 2006. “The performativity of performance documentation.” Performing Arts Journal 84 Vol. 28, N 3. September 1-10.
Benjamin, Walter. 1936. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
Bishop, Claire. 2023. “Information overload” Artforum April 2023 Vol. 61, No.8 https://www.artforum.com/features/claire-bishop-on-the-superabundance-of-research-based-art-252571/
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1996. What is Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press.
Groys, Boris. 2013. “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation”. In Groys, Boris. 2013 (orig 2008) Art Power. MIT Press
Røed, Ellen Johanne. 2022. “Listening to the Forest.” A&R Nordic Journal of Art & Research. Volume 11, Nr 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/information.5043
Vuokola, Marko. “The Seventh Wave”.
https://artmap.com/anhava/exhibition/marko-vuokola-2009
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5132958
Annette Arlander is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. She is educated as theatre director, Master of Arts and Doctor of Art. She was the first to be awarded a doctorate from the Theatre Academy, Helsinki (in 1999). In 2001 she was invited as professor of performance art and theory to create the MA program in Live Art and performance studies, which she led until 2013. In 2015-2016 she was professor of artistic research at University of the Arts Helsinki and visiting professor at Stockholm University of the Arts. She was professor of performance art and theory at Stockholm University of the Arts 2018-2019 and is visiting researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. She is a member of the editorial board of JAR.