We can easily distinguish the technical differences of film and video. With film, the light coming through a camera aperture exposes a frame of film, causing changes to the light-sensitive grains of the film emulsion. The illusion of motion is created by projecting the film on a screen at 24 frames per second. With video, an image captured by a camera is formed electro-magnetically on an iron oxide coating of tape at a speed of 25 frames per second.

But what is the difference between film Art and video Art? Film art derives from literary and theatrical traditions where text plays a central role. A film is a visualized text dominated by the laws of drama. A video is, however, something else. Video art is writing with images. Gene Youngblood, a scholar and the writer of Expanded Cinema, a well-known book published in 1970, said on his only visit to Finland that video art is characterized by an essay and collage form instead of a novel form.

However, in the digital age, film and video increasingly embrace each other in a way that makes the technical differences insignificant. In fact, the social and spatial differences are now more visible. A film is a film when it is watched in the context of a cinema. Video art still lives, under the slightly amused gaze of its more serious elder brother, outside cinemas and finds temporary exhibition spaces in museums, galleries, and on streets.

Harri Larjosto belongs to the generation of Finnish artists that entered the arena in the 1980s and for whom the use of different media has offered a natural way to develop their own artistic expression. Larjosto has made performances and been involved in several collaborative projects starting with the activities of the famous Group Ö. His numerous photographic works, and particularly his photo series, are so close to the world of video that they are like two sides of the same coin.

The photo and video artist Harri Larjosto’s works strongly subscribe to the essayistic and collage nature of video art. Larjosto is a writer of visual stories. No one talks or acts in his works, they only perform or remain quiet. Performativity is found throughout his works. His video work Winter Way (1998) is based on a photo series and uses a compressed time scale, easy to achieve with video, where the filmed events take place as the seasons change. Aino (2002) is a small-scale work based on a performance that, for Finnish people, is very simple yet fundamental: going in and out of water. The womb and the primeval life of water make us come out of our urban shells. This simple rite is one of the most central metaphysical journeys into Finnish nature. In his recent video, Saunajazz (2006), Larjosto shows the ritualistic performance of going to a sauna as it reveals Finnishness in its most beautiful: the family sauna, submitting yourself to the spirit of the steam, cleansing, an enjoyable improvisation of the hot and cold.

One can easily find in Larjosto’s works signs of strong visual symbolism and an absurd, almost surrealistic touch. At times, behind the black humour of the works lies a middle-aged man’s serious concern over the world; a concern easier to bear as an absurd gesture rather than as politics searching for solutions. Examples in this compilation include Wire (1993-96) and Curating Scene (2002). There is so much to interpret in the works that you could easily discuss them over several drinks. Larjosto does not explain or make things easy. He does not involve himself with obscure, arty images but with a clear realistic surface. But under the surface swells a different current of possible interpretations, and questions are needed before diving in.

If we were to find one repeated theme that runs throughout his work, it could be an ecological point of view or a visual challenge, backed by a strong ecological consciousness, that invites us to think about the realities of our world. However, Larjosto is not a green evangelist or a dark prophet of doom. There is always abstract hope in the midst of all logic. This is particularly evident in the oldest work of the compilation, Apple (1990) which, by showing fresh apples being picked from a rubbish dump, draws parallels between the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the problems of today’s world.

Larjosto’s video works examine two kinds of environments. The first human environment – water – acts as the central stream of nature’s power and is often shown physically as a landscape, and also as a central element within it. It is not surprising that one of the most pivotal works of his repertoire is Water Stories (1999), a work combining documentary with video art, which has a structure based on people’s experiences of water as an element.

The central metaphors of the second kind of human environment – culture – are department stores and their display shelves that Larjosto’s camera shows in many of his works. In Fitting (1999) the biggest crime of western consumer culture is committed, something that should make the Finnish Trade Association issue an instant death penalty, shame the offenders and banish them to the countryside. A man and an woman are strolling in a department store, returning their items of clothes to shelves, and ending up in the roles of Adam and Eve. The return to paradise is not left unpunished in this world.

It is worth noting that Larjosto’s works are technically of high quality. He is an experienced photographer himself but has used other professionals in his large-scale works and, also in other ways, a lot of attention has generally been paid to the cinematography. He does not consider video as a medium for self-expression where shaky camera movements and unfocused, badly-lit images would be indications of artistic existence.

Larjosto comments on his nature as a maker, “I’m too introverted to be a politician, too much of an artist to be a philosopher, and too pragmatic to be an artist…” This kind of ambiguity and the use of different media are not wise policies for grant applications in a professional person’s life in a system that tries to pigeonhole artists and their lives. But for Harri Larjosto this ambiguity is a natural home in an unstable world.
 
Perttu Rastas