This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, June 3, 2013 - Enter the Contemporary Art Museum and you will hear the work of Mika Taanila. The audio component to Taanila’s HD video installation, The Most Electrified Town in Finland, was composed by the Finnish experimental electronic music group, Pan Sonic. Its pulsing, clinking, whirling, wooshing sounds give the whole museum space the feel that Gyorgy Ligeti’s music created in 2001 Space Odyssey.
The Most Electrified Town in Finland is shown in the large open area of the museum. It is actually three separate video projections juxtaposed through synchronized panels. The video triptych documents the construction of a super powerful nuclear power plant in Eurajoki, Finland, over the course of eight years along side the beautiful countryside surrounding the rising nuclear colossus.
The filming of the plant construction often occurs in the dark, making the action seem covert but also a bit enchanted. Of course, dark is nearly constant throughout mid winter in Finland. Shown in accelerated motion, building cranes move like giant robotic arms weaving up, down and around the developing dome of the power plant. Plant employees in their regulation suits reinforce the Stanley Kubric atmosphere as they silently move through the halls, pulling levers and pushing buttons.
Just around the corner, Taanila’s video projection, Six Day Run, plays in an enclosed space that you might miss if you don’t look for it. The run described in the title is the Self-Transcendence Six Day Race that takes place annually in New York City. Competitors run around, and around, and around and around and around (get the picture?) a one-mile track. Apparently, sleep deprivation, lousy weather, exhaustion and boredom lead to enlightenment, at least that is the premise of the race organizers and participants. The video footage of the runners, steady in their pace, has a meditative effect, and does not involve sweat or knee pain.The two video projections that make up Twilight place toad test subjects on the gallery wall. These unlucky toads were part of a seemingly benign 1997 study at the University of Helsinki. The amphibians look to be in an alternate state not too dissimilar to that of Taanila’s transcendent runners, they’ve been at this for a long while.
Taanila’s Verbranntes Land (“burnt earth” in German) is the video version of painters making paintings about painting or painters of canvases painting images of cave paintings. Here, in a clean digital format, VHS cassettes are revealed as tragic figures, documented in their degradation. Taanila uses clips from a bazaar instructional video warning about the medium’s fragility.
Taken in their totality, these videos project a humanity that is an active agent of its own fate. The humans know what they are doing, but they do it anyway. The Most Electrified Town in Finland takes a long and expansive look at the humans creating technology in the hope of progress, with the looming threat of total destruction. Six Day Run explores the human machine, and the possibility of controlling it through the mind-body connection. Twilight places humans over the frog, significantly, in an academic lab. Verbranntes Land looks at an object as complex as a VHS cassette that only exists for a short window of human history, produced by us and then found wanting and quickly left behind.
The only non-video component of the exhibit is still a comment upon video. In Black and White Movies, eight stark and striking, black and white photograms appear like Rorschach test images. A photogram is a cameraless photograph. It is made by exposing photographic paper to light, creating a negative shadow image of whatever is place upon the paper.
The process Taanila used to produce these photograms is as “meta” as all of his other heady enterprises. The video artist has chosen some of his many old, grainy VHS cassettes of Finnish TV broadcasted movies and destroyed them with the glory that their scripts demand. For example, the VHS cassette for Kiss Me Deadly was reduced to bits and pieces in an explosion of consumer fireworks, in homage to the atomic blast that concludes the iconic 1955 film.
The enjoyment of video projected artwork requires a slight time commitment. It is unlike more standard forms of screen watching, in that the compositions are almost always circumspect. For this reason, gallery guests often glance at the wall and move on. Taanila’s video program at CAM is clever, well composed, and, decidedly, worth making time for.
Sarah Hermes Griesbach is a freelance writer.