Harley Ives is an inventive and thoughtful video artist. If the contemporary is at least in one sense defined by a new approach to history, Ives embodies this ambivalence. The past, present and future all conflate into the now, where linear art history dissolves all together into an overall equivalence. The most immediate response to Ives work is that he is in some way “returning” video, or at least the picture on the screen, to painting. This is definitely true and he mines the genres of painting to make this connection explicit: the sublime waterfall, flowers in a vase in portrait format, various landscapes in landscape format.
But since Andy Warhol’s “still” videos like Empire 1964 in which he photographed the Empire State Building for twenty-four hours compressed into about an eight hour loop this sort of static video has questioned video’s approach to time and movement. If the time and movement is merely a subtle aspect of the video presented it is still present as a defining characteristic of the medium. This approach tempers the painterly quality in Ives’ work.
In Lake Lidell Ives hones in particularly on landscape and the beautiful aspect of the sun slowly rising on the scene. In a fluke of politically pertinent timing Lake Lidell images a coal burning power station. The work is not directly about the pros and cons of coal power but of course these concerns cannot altogether be quarantined. This aspect marks the contemporary and the documentary aspects of the work. Ives successfully counters this reality with the fantastical and the painterly.
When Ives chose the lake it was for its connection to the Romantic sublime. The sunrise on a lake is a classic trope of the Romantic (like the waterfall). A cloud (often representing the awesome power of God or nature) was a constant and vital motif in many of the paintings of the Romantic period in various tempests, deluges and Exoduses. Often the clouds took on their own persona pointing to and directing the scene. Here the clouds rise in a double form, an enclosed circuit of two, that is less like a Supreme Being, or God and more like the superego of bureaucratic processes (think of the World Trade Centre twinning as the quintessential closed circuit of capital as suggested by Baudrillard).
But the shift from the Romantic cloud into the steam of industry was already an extension explored by the Impressionists: train steam, power plants (in the back of Seurat’s paintings of Asnires for example) and assorted factories. Even here the painters oscillated between celebration of the new spectacles and the anxieties of the machine age. At the turn of the century when Monet visited London to paint Parliament House at sunset recent scholarship has shown that Parisians often travelled to London to see the beauty and soft edges of this new thing called smog; London at that time was one of the few places on earth with this new modern sublime.
Ives attacks the indexical reality of the video form by placing the images under different types of distress. Often this is an analogue distress when he brings the digital image back into analogue video tape to scrunch and munch it. The glitches here are not just digital but analogue. The music too shows its age and comes from an old 50s recording. The temporal aspects and ideas of history seem again to come to the fore. The work embodies the history of painting and video, it has the long time of painting and comes right up into the present. In this work particularly there is a grand theme of the sublime that Ives has successfully played with and shifts between the kitsch, the romantic and the darkly critiqued. That the beautiful returns to bring everything together is the last fillip of contemporary perversity.
