Instasaturated: the Tasmanian landscape on Instagram

The tag #Instatassie on Instagram.

Earlier this year, Instagram was littered with ‘best of 2016’ posts.  The site 2016bestnine.com catered to us narcissistic ‘grammers, trawling our accounts for the most popular posts.  I write ‘us’ because I too indulged.  I did not, however, post the grid.  I was surprised by the utter banality of my most ‘liked’ images.   I expected they’d be happy snaps of Paris, a photogenic artwork at the Venice Biennale, or perhaps even one of the dog, but they were almost all landscapes – slightly oversaturated and utterly pleasant landscapes.  My grid was no different to that of any other avid #Instatassie user.

While Instagram was once criticised for its ‘ye olde’ filters, which conjured up a false nostalgia through washed out colours and mottled frames, it’s now dominated by over-saturated hyper-photographs.  Landscapes are sharpened, brightened, saturated.  Up the contrast and you’ll up the likes.  Sunsets in particular get the special treatment. Pinks become scarlets, greys get bluer, and mountains become midnight silhouettes.  Everything is dramatised.

My offending Lime Bay image.

I’m guilty of these very sins.  On a recent camping trip, I experienced an incredible sunset over Lime Bay Lagoon in South Eastern Tasmania.  I immediately got out my phone of course, eager to share my experience with the world (or at least my 681 followers).   But the photograph could not capture that sublime moment – how could it? I was standing ankle deep in water with a stubbie of beer. The warm breeze that was exceptionally unusual for a Tasmanian evening carried a slight tang of fish and burning eucalyptus.  Seagulls, and even a bird of prey, circled our heads, and aside from their shrieks, there was just a soft lapping of waves.  The pink of the sunset was subtle, but it bathed us in mood-altering light, and while it sounds like a cliché, the shallow lagoon really did sparkle.  When I uploaded the photograph later, I wanted to share this experience, and faced with a square image of moderately-coloured seascape, I set to work ‘enhancing’ this projected experience.  I upped the saturation, deepened the contrast, and played with a couple of coloured filters.  The birds, which were clearly visible to our eyes, were reduced to silhouettes against the purple sky, and the sky was clearly reflected in the water.  I was rewarded with many ‘likes’, and a request from one of the many saturated-landscape-loving Tasmanian Instagram accounts to re-post the image under their account.  I would not have received these likes without upping the saturation.

Of course, cameras lie. They cannot represent what our human eyes actually see, let alone the sensory experience of being in a landscape.  Naturally, we want to share our incredible experiences with others, and in lieu of other forms of easy representation, the oversaturated ‘Instagram aesthetic’ replaces genuine expression. A two-dimensional mimetic photograph or painting will never come close to conveying sublime landscapes, and that’s why paintings like Turner’s seascapes and Monet’s gardens, which convey emotion and hint at the multi-sensory experience of being within the natural environment, are so compelling.  The Instagram aesthetic, by contrast, is retrograde, and risks making the actual live experience somewhat underwhelming.  Over-saturated hues have become the norm – the equivalent of a sugary treat.  It’s immediately gratifying, but has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.  In our image-dominated world, how do artists compete with this raised bar? That’s the challenge for artists: how to convey the subtleties of experiencing a sunset without resorting to the junk food of over-saturated representation.

JMW Turner, Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, 1842. 
Collection of the Tate Museum. © Tate, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 

Interview with Brigita Ozolins

Brigita Ozolins’ Kryptos is one of the most liked artworks at Mona. The Hobart-based artist and academic now has a second installation, Graphos, at the museum within Mark Changizi’s section of the current exhibition, On The Origin of Art. I talked to Ozolins about her lifelong fascination with language, 60s Minimalists, her response to Changizi’s ‘nature harnessing’ theory, and the very reason why she makes art.

Tell me about your art practice.

It’s about exploring our relationship to language, to books, to the way we store and sort information, to codification, and to an essential mystery I see associated with the process of writing. It’s inspired by my love of books and literature and libraries. My interest in all these things stems from growing up in a family where we spoke Latvian as well as English, and my parents spoke a number of different languages so I’ve been fascinated, or exposed always to this idea of different ways people express themselves.  When I speak Latvian, something different that happens in my brain, the way I express myself and my thinking. There’s something slightly different there and I think it changes with each language. They’re the concepts underpin my ideas, that I’m interested in conveying - our complex and paradoxical relationship to language. On one hand language is an extraordinary tool. It enables us to express our thoughts and ideas and our feelings, and to describe our place in the world, but at the same time it’s not an accurate reflection of reality. It’s something in a constant state of flux and change.  And it changes as our perceptions of the world and our understanding of the world changes. I’m interested in trying to convey that gap between reality and what language does. That’s where the mystery is for me. I think we have this paradoxical relationship to language as a result of that. One of the key strategies I’ve used in my works is to promise meaning but also deny access to meaning.

Could you give me example?

In Kryptos, the walls are lined with binary code. As you enter Kryptos and experience it more and more, you start to see there are some English words in amongst the code. There is this promise of meaning embedded in this code, that it’s not simply patterns of zeros and ones on the walls… but ultimately the viewer’s access to that meaning is denied. Hopefully you get a tantalising glimpse where you may start to question your own relationship to language.

Does that mean the artist statement is key to interpreting the work?

I like to think that people can have an experience in my work that affects them. They can have an experience about the work – a rich experience – without having to know my specific intentions. People might go into Kryptos and say ‘oh wow, I loved being in that work’, but they don’t need to know that the text is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and that it’s to do with a man coming face to face with his own mortality as Gilgamesh does.

I think that’s an indicator of a successful artwork, and one of the things I like about Kryptos: you can read the artist statement if you wish, but really you can enter the work from any level.

And that’s my aim. People say ‘oh wow, now you’ve told me about the Epic of Gilgamesh, I feel as if I really understand what the work is about.’ But I don’t think that way. Reading my artist statement and finding out what I was thinking and so on may add some other dimensions to your understanding of the work, but I really don’t think it’s necessary to get that work.

I’m not sure if it’s the same with my new installation. Graphos is a response to Mark Changizi’s ideas [on the origin of art], which are very specific and from a scientist’s point of view. I’ve tried to create another experience that evokes his ideas but is also poetic in some way.

He tells us that language is all around us. We develop it because of our relationship to nature and the world around us. We see certain objects in relation to each other... we see angles and lines and intersections that then become the basis of an alphabet in any language. [However, his interest is in] the formal structure of language, whereas I’m more interested in the content and meaning of what we say.

I was drawn to Changizi’s minimalist diagrams in his book [The Vision Revolution], and the three large objects [in Graphos] come directly from his diagrams. The first thing I thought of … was the work of the 1960s Minimalists like Robert Morris and Donald Judd.

Yeah, I was reminded of Robert Morris’ L Beams when seeing your work.

It’s an obvious conversation that I’m having with 60s Minimalists. But my work’s created out of wood, so that’s my reference to nature and the world around us. The objects also contain sound. One thing Changizi says is that the actual forms of language come from seeing objects in relationship to nature in the natural world. He says the actual sounds of language come from the sound of body in motion in the world, and basically from three types of sound: hits, slides and rings. It might be the stamp of a foot, a body hitting something and the reverberations that come from that. I interpreted those things as quite percussive sounds, and so they’re the sounds you get in Graphos. I think they’re a little avant-garde, a little bit 50s and 60s. They have an experimental beatnik sound to them. But then you get voices intermingled with that that are sounding out the phonemes of the words that line the walls of Graphos, which say ‘around us everything is writing’. Those words are a direct quote… from a beautifully poetic work by the late Marguerite Duras … about what it is to be a writer and the process of writing.

Changizi says a similar thing, but from the viewpoint of the scientist: that writing is everywhere. I think writing is embedded in the world around us. So Graphos is the merging of the scientist, the writer and the visual artist. They’re three different ways of thinking about writing, but they have interconnections.

Both works have a really interesting relationship to the human body through scale and movement. That was something the Minimalists were doing too – L-Beams was designed to be walked around and viewed in relation to the space and the body.

I was thinking about the relationship people would have to the forms in the space, but I was also thinking about the dimensions of the space and the size you would need to command the space in a particular way. 

But I’m also quite practical as an artist, and I designed them to the standard sizes that the plywood panels come in because it makes it so much easier to construct. It’d be really interesting to look at the origin of those dimensions. It’d be related to what the human body can make practically and also handle. 

It’s similar to the standardisation of photographs and paintings. Why are they usually rectangular and hung in ‘landscape’ or ‘portrait’ orientations?

Yes exactly. So my objects work with those standard dimensions, which also gives them a sense of proportion.

One thing that I notice in your installations is a sense of excitement, play and anticipation.

I think that really works in Kryptos. In Graphos it’s a different experience because you don’t have separate spaces. It’s one big all-encompassing space. A number of people have said to me that they enjoy being in there, that it feels very warm and comforting. The wood makes them reasonably sensuous objects that you would like to go up and stroke. It’s quite different to Kryptos which creates a little bit of anxiety.

One is very cold and the other very warm.

Yeah, one’s a crypt really. It uses concrete steel and glass – materials that are naturally cold. Whereas Graphos uses organic materials – it’s all wood.  There’s this idea that it’s still breathing and contracting and changing with the environment in a different way to steel and concrete, which are manmade materials.

Although to be fair, plywood is manmade.

Yes, but it’s still made of wood.

I was buying my sister’s new baby a toy the other day, and I thought back to Roland Barthes’ essay on plastic where he talks about wood with its warmth and soft sound.

We do respond to wood. I don’t like glass tables. I think it’s slightly scary. That timber and the rich grain in parts of it with those embedded letters feels inviting and all encompassing. It’s that idea of ‘around us everything is writing’.

Lastly, why do you make art?

For me, it’s a way of thinking in three or four dimensions. It’s a way of realising my thoughts physically, and it’s a way of distilling a lot of seemingly disparate thoughts, or seemingly disparate thoughts and interconnections between ideas. Art can be a combination of anything and everything that you’re thinking and that you’re interested in. In art, I can combine my love of literature, my love of film, a phrase that I’ve read in a book, or heard in a film that evokes a powerful idea about something. It can combine all my interests and passions. Then the great challenge as an artist is to distil those ideas into something three-dimensional - or four-dimensional if I’m using sound or time-based media - into something that makes your thinking concrete. It’s like the process of writing. Writing allows me to think. It’s only through the process of writing that my thoughts become real. [Making art is] a similar process in that it enables me to see my ideas and extend them even further. And sometimes when you make art you don’t realise what those thoughts are until years later. You review the work in a different way from what you did at the time you were making it. You do some writing at some point in time, and then you express thoughts at that time, and then later on you read it and you go ‘oh hey, there’s some really interesting ideas – things that I haven’t quite expanded on.’ It’s a form of thinking and understanding your place in the world.

Visit www.brigitaozolins.com for images.

A shorter version of this interview was published in Warp Magazine, December 2016.

Disclosure note: The interviewer is a Mona employee.