When Sincerity Becomes Form

A Series of Disjunctive Notes on Art by Jaakko Pallasvuo

     I fell in love with the idea of Jaakko Pallasvuo after watching Vanilla (2011) on Vimeo. The shaky forty-second clip featured the artist rubbing ice cream on to his face, hair and body at an exhibition opening. Dancing erratically to “Drop It Like It’s Hot”, onlookers clap and cheer the artist on in the background. This unembarrassed performance within a lackluster white cube is artistically “hot” to me, as a longtime fan of amateur aesthetics and performance for the camera. A frank voice delivers truisms on the indecisive nature of creativity:

     “Dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. It's the heart's triumph...I don’t know what I’m doing here. Later on, I will claim it as a performance... I titled it “vanilla”–as in white, straight, unadventurous…”

Stepping hideously to hip-hop, Pallasvuo acknowledges artistic tropes of appropriating Black-authored masculinity for performative pleasure and amusement. In accordance with the Duchampian paradigm, any act, object or event exists as art by illocutionary force¬. An awareness of such a history causes the prosuming subject to be ambivalent¬–to desire authenticity while valuing irony, to be conscientious about reviving old tropes while satirizing well-trodden ones. A more literal criticism that Pallasvuo directs at (mis)appropriation of “swag” is presented in REALNESS (2011).¹ Flashing black text in the white .gif warns of “white fetishism of black speech”.²

     If academia regards art as a process and product of subjective expression, then it privileges a rational analysis of aesthetics in relation to intention.³ This mode of interpretation reinforces practices of fetishism–of both the creative process and its products. Art objects and events are purposefully organized in the liminal gallery for focused appreciation and serious discussion. While watching Vanilla, the art student in me empathized with the desire to destabilize the socialized codes of polite observation within the gallery space.⁴ Ice cream and hip-hop may be ultra-banal sources of kitsch, but the performance turns the exhibition opening reception into literal celebration of the artist’s spirit.

S is for Swagger

     In the opening shot of LOW EPIC (2011), a pair of legs that don coral-coloured socks balances on two blocks of ice cream. With the voiceover acknowledging his actual role behind the camera, Pallasvuo acts as a director and pornographer of beauty. Accompanied by the detached yet soothing British voiceover, the resultant value of the text is one of blunted affect.⁵ An anticlimax after a plateau.

     In Vanilla, ritualistic dance sensualizes the rigid customs of the white cube. A sculptural installation of ice cream that is embedded with smart technology demands a performance to be recorded and substantiated by documentation. Incorporated into LOW EPIC as a slow motion clip, the video becomes filmic. The pleasure invested in the writing the text combines with the pleasure of absurd bodily performance. This is indulgence in the very performance of male artistic mastery. Swag. However, self-defeating commentary on justifying dance as performance or the inability to colour-correct the image hints at a deeper desperation for conceptual and perceptual authenticity. An artist declares frustrated aspirations for eminence and intuitive creation through recursive reference to disjunctions between the medium and his intentions.

     The slow-motion dance sequence cuts to an aerial shot of an iPhone. It is recessed in a geometric block of vanilla ice cream that sits at the center of a triangular mirror. A co-performer moves to repeatedly trigger the picture-taking function on the iPhone with their finger. Ambient music, slow motion post-processing and the high-angled shot renders the gadget the enamored subject. Such ritualistic treatment of the screen recalls Holographic Principle by Iain Ball, where a single burning coal is placed the surface of an iPhone to burn Incense of Abramelin.⁶

Left: Robert Morris (Untitled (Corner Piece) (1965)
Right: Carl Andre, 144 Magnesium Squares (1969)

 

These high minimalist sculptures were arguably interactive due to the phenomenological engagement of their shape and surface. Andre’s were made for the viewer to tread upon, whilst Morris’ were made to be admired like Modernist furniture. These forms are sterile products. Conversely, Pallasvuo’s melting ice cream blocks are metaphorical of the pleasantly iconic, yet semantically flaccid hetero-minimal art object.

A Little Plateau

     Subtextual desire is outlined in (what Pallasvuo calls “limp-wristed narration”) the voiceover, which shifts from formal to personal. Irony and sincerity are expressed coterminously to convey a complex set of emotions that are often eclipsed by the conscience of the “professional artist”. Commentary on the construction of the image grows into confession. It appears the artist has a broken heart.

 

“I did love him…this to say, he did not love me in return...I keep relearning a lesson. Honesty is never attractive.”

The deep British voice laments through static shots of the same socks, stretched out on the pine flooring with melted ice cream on the soles. A singular block of vanilla ice cream stands on a triangular mirror. The video ends abruptly with black and blue screen fields.

 

An Other’s Plateau

     Our anticipation of a resolved narrative is habituated by our comfort with cinema as a medium for storytelling. Pallasvuo’s representation of object-based fetish is anticlimactic in contrast to the myriad of user-generated videos that exist on the internet. Amateur paraphilic videos of object “trampling” and “crushing” often feature repeated action and fixation on the object. In LOW EPIC, an introspective mode of observation emerges from the juxtaposition of documentary conventions, deadpan framing, and romantic editing. The structural analysis I have applied would attribute symbolic value to the slow-motion editing, the contact with the iPhone, the socks or the ice cream. However, to be interpassive instead of interactive is endearing. The relocation of agency from viewer to text, and user to object is characteristic of a culture in which power and control is attributed to images.⁸

     Screen Test (2011) is an attempt to find an essential sense of self in relation to the screen.⁹ The video begins with the dry, female voice of Hanne Lippard, who speaks in a British accent. A bearded male stares at the camera and drinks from a paper cup, unbeknownst. She declares that he is not an object. Static long shots and scenic views of nature are reminiscent of lingering camera and melodramatic dialogue from Last Year at Marienbad (1961).¹⁰ A female figure stands with her back to the camera, admiring the landscape. The audience is positioned to observe her onlooking–an introduction of intersubjectivity between camera, author and subject. Watching, waiting. I expect to see her step into the pond; instead she stays at the edge. What Pallasvuo investigates is the nuances of visual desire connected to the performance and observation of infinitely small gestures. Voyeuristic pleasure is sustained, yet withheld by the slow-moving shots. Stark voiceover and pristine imagery suggest incomplete emotions and sensations of lack.

Jaakko Pallasvuo, SCREEN TEST, digital video, 2011.

Nice and Slow

     Spectacle and revelation are usually anticipated in the encounter of art in public distribution.¹¹ The deflated performance of this paraphilic fetish breaks down the symbolic power this fetish, or any image may yield for any viewer. As a static video, the beautiful and boring cinematic presentation challenges the most basic erotics of vision. Why are we watching and how are we watching? Is this interpassive–instead of interactive–in the same fashion that canned laughter in a sitcom comes to prescribe and replace one’s experience of humour?¹² In Screen Test, the viewer may anticipate the staring subject to speak to the camera, but he never speaks for himself. Instead, Lippard’s humdrum voiceover determines the way things appear to the artist and the way things should appear to us. Narrated by a similarly dry male voice in an English accent, LOW EPIC explores the production of fetish and release of desire through its projection onto objects and its release through bodily movement. Screen Test and LOW EPIC are neither documentaries nor autobiographies, but the artist acknowledges his role in their construction to question the screen as the default mediator and generator of reality.¹³ Invoking strange pathos between irrelevant objects and subjects, these videos divulge tragic twists in the relations between self-knowledge, authorship and art production.

Displacing the body

     In Auditions (2011), the artist attempts to discover his essential self-as-artist by soliciting potential archetypes of himself to recite a carefully written artist statement.¹⁴ Taking instructions from Pallasvuo to read the statement in a Finnish accent, Nicholas O’Brien frames the shot professionally against a white backdrop. Conversely, Jake Delieber chooses to stammer hastily to a webcam in front of a tropical backdrop, and crops his body off at the bottom of the frame. The usually intimate truth-procedure of confessing to the camera becomes a moment of remote role-play.¹⁵

Jaakko Pallasvuo, Auditions, online videos, 2011.

     “One of the reasons I wanted to become an artist was to give my name new associations, to drive it further from me. This happens to all artists, especially the successful ones,” the subjects retell. The ensuing lines explain how big names like Jenny Holzer and Piet Mondrian become symbolized by iconic artworks in a Google image search. And when they die, they are replaced with other artist-turned-brands. The statement reflects a cruel optimism for dedicating to a lifetime art practice that will face harrowing pressures to adapt to market demands.¹⁶

     With no identification to the scripted content, the readers recite his statement impersonally with no emotion or artistic pretension. Soliciting other artists to enact his professional persona, the depersonalization of the self conveys the mediocrity of the emerging artist. An online viewer may recall Charlotte Young’s prosaic Artist Statement, a video portrait that went viral amongst online art communities.¹⁷ In Auditions and Screen Test, performance of Pallasvuo’s subjectivity is continually deferred to an Other body, another’s face. By inverting the symbolic order of imaging the self-as-subject and instead casting the other-as-self, Pallasvuo implicates the viewer in visual riddles of persona and image. This is critical detachment.

Exquisite Carcasses

     Pallasvuo’s work addresses the exquisite yet tortured relationship between art and emotion. Feelings of frustration, inadequacy and dissatisfaction breed useless emotion. Critical detachment arises from political depression that stems from operating within and outside of the art world.¹⁸ We are all fetishists that anticipate our feelings to be mediated and cued for us in televisual viewership; LOW EPIC crushes these expectations. Aside from its semantically queer imagery, it offers no narrative resolution or art product. The underlying questions Pallasvuo’s work tackles are not of marketability or popularity, but the love and honesty one can instill in networked art in a time when one’s persona may be highly visible.

     Contemporary artists, critics and curators are quick to feel embarrassed about sentimentality, amateurism, and indefensibility. Intuitive action threatens the orderly operations of an institution. When sincerity becomes form, clichés can be rendered persuasive and daring. Extending Sontag’s call for an erotics of art, I want to turn the stakes to engaging with the vulnerability of inarticulable feelings and intentions, to shut down the post-rationalization of intuitive aesthetic decisions.¹⁹ Whatever the art historian may call it–romantic conceptualism, depressive realism, new sincerity, post-irony, post-postmodern–Pallasvuo’s implication of empathy is a counterpoint to the clinical nature of gallery art.

Endnotes

¹ Urban Dictionary defines the colloquialism, “swag”, as “confidence, style, and demeanor”. The term was intitually popularized in rap songs by African American rappers.
Urban dictionary, “swag”, 2011. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=swag

² Jaakko Pallasvuo, REALNESS, animated .gif, 2011. (DawsonsCreek.info) http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llpy0vPdQg1qcawzfo1_400.gif

³ Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961. 7-14.

⁴ Carol Duncan. “The Art Museum as Ritual” The City Cultures Reader. Second Edition. ed. M. Miles, T. Hall, and I. Borden. (Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group: London and New York) 2003. 72-80.

⁵ Blunted or flat affect is a psychological term employed to describe a lack of emotive expression and response.
Suzanne L. Cataldi. “Flat affect vs. deep emotional experience”, Emotion, Depth, and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space. SUNY Press, 1993. http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/52787.pdf

⁶ Iain Ball, Holographic Principle, digital video, 2011. http://www.iconoplasm.com/holographica.html

⁷ Carl Andre, Steel Zinc Plain, Steel and zinc plates, 1969. (Tate Modern, London) http://www.tate.org.uk
Robert Morris Untitled (Corner Piece), Painted plywood, 1964. (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) http://www.guggenheim.org

⁸ Slavoj Zizek, “The Interpassive Subject”, The European Graduate School, 2008.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-interpassive-subject/

⁹ Jaakko Pallasvuo, SCREEN TEST, digital video, 2011. http://www.jaakkopallasvuo.com/screentest.html

¹⁰ Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1961. 7-14

¹¹ Diedrich Diederichsen. “Radicalism as Ego Ideal: Oedipus and Narcissus”, e-flux, Journal #25, May 2011.
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/228

¹² Robrecht Vanderbeeken, “Web Video and the Screen as mediator and generator of reality” Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube, ed. Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles, Institute of Networked Cultures, 2011.
Citing television programmes as texts in which audiences relinquish emotional agency, Vanderbeeken notes Zizek’s use of canned laugher as an example of interpassivity.

¹³ Ibid, 41.

¹⁴ Jaakko Pallasvuo, Auditions, digital videos, 2011. http://www.jaakkopallasvuo.com/auditions.html

¹⁵ Ibid, 39.

¹⁶ Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism”, d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 17, Number 3, 2006. Brown University, Duke University Press, 20-35. http://differences.dukejournals.org/content/17/3/20.full.pdf
Lauren Berlant (21) defines “Cruel optimism” as “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility…subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being…the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means… to look forward to being in the world.”

¹⁷ Charlotte Young, Artist Statement, Online video, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v8DbLWAXvU This video is a YouTube video portrait of Charlotte Young, who addresses the camera directly while reciting a vague, yet professional artist statement. Meanwhile, subtitles foreground the realities of her career and her unstable future.

¹⁸ Berlant, 23.

¹⁹ Sontag,14.