Alain de Botton: Aurora Borealis (unseen)
An essay within the monograph: ‘Going Nowhere’, published by Film & Video Umbrella, 2009

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Simon Faithfull’s Aurora Borealis (unseen) is a deceptively small, delightfully evocative essay on the art of seeing and noticing. On one of its twin video screens, maintaining a constant presence throughout the works five-minute duration, is an image of a human eye, on which we can glimpse the reflections of various items of scientific equipment (apparatus deployed, as it happens, in the study of the Aurora Borealis, or, to use the more common name for the phenomenon, the Northern Lights). On the other screen, presented alongside and perpendicular to the first one, is a looping sequence showing recorded footage of one of these regular magnetic storms (as rendered by the observatory’s All-sky-Camera).

Among this work’s many virtues is the extent to which it illuminates a comparatively neglected feature of visual experience: the fact that everything we have seen, from the fibres of the living room carpet to the Matterhorn turning a greeny-orange at dusk, has entered our consciousness through a couple fragile and largely watery disks not more than a centimetre in diameter. It is rather embarrassing to look too long in someone’s eyes, we are all a bit too scared of what we think of one another to play the game for a decent length of time. Even with lovers it gets awkward; ‘You have pretty eyes’ is allowed, but to gaze into them for eight full, ripe minutes, such a demand can arouse suspicion even in those who pride themselves on being beyond shock. Unlike other parts of the body (shoulders and wrists especially, which get a good deal of attention for they can be seen when the lover is sleeping), the eye folds away into the privacy of the night, emitting no more than the occasional tremor or blink as the sleeper retreats into the darkness of their inner universe. To gaze, to really gaze into another’s eyes, that would be a journey worth charting.

What would we find? Faithfull – whose journeys have routinely taken in the furthermost frontiers of human exploration: the Antarctic, the edges of space and, in this piece, an equally remote location, the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory in Northern Finland, 120 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle – shows us the surface topography: a small black pool surrounded by an ambiguously colored ring that most closely resembles the texture and colour of birds’ feathers. At times, these delicate feathers look like those of a humble pigeon, at other times, of a dove or a barn owl. But most of all, the eye, as featured in this work, resembles the very thing it is trained on observing: an aurora, something molten, a visual echo of the atmospheric phenomena it is attempting to witness.

We wonder by what alchemy such a surface is able to encompass the world, from a painting by Ghirlandaio to a packet of processed cheese. Faithfull deals skillfully with the traditional question that often haunts video art: what is going to happen next? Nothing much will happen, we know this from the start, and so can allow ourselves to caress a stranger’s eye with impunity.

We notice that the eye we’re seeing is at the same time doing its own bit of observation. It’s travelling around. We’re standing in front of a satellite dish, part of the Sodankylä complex, where Faithfull spent two weeks – without seeing any Northern Lights, an anti-heroic, bathetic outcome that only adds to the self-effacing humour that attends many of Faithfull’s projects. The observatory, too, is in the business of observation, but Faithfull makes us notice how much effort these machines must expend in order to be able to go about their business. They need steel bracing, concrete supports. electricity generators (there is a soundtrack of mechanical rumbling to add vitality to the act of seeing). We humans, on the other hand, just need to drink milk and rice and open our lids.

The apparently fruitless two weeks that Faithfull spent in Finland waiting for something dramatic to streak across the sky was nevertheless an inspiration, for it focused the artist on the act of looking itself, accentuating the contemplative, votive aspect which lies at the heart of the works appeal.

Few of us look up at the sky very often, but we retain some ancestral memory of the act and of its therapeutic benefits. It seems at the core of who we are. It makes us rooted and humbled in a productive way. If only we could live a little more as Faithfull’s work of art suggests we might: in a patient, observant, unhysterical way, pious beneath the vastness of the universe. Faithfull’s work is a little like a Byzantine icon; a reminder of a holiness we generally lose sight of in the press and pressure of our working days and nights. lt moves us because it functions as a reminder of all we look at and never see. It is a devotional object, an altar-piece to a secular transcendent force. If only more artists might follow Faithfull in the precision of his ambition and the humanity and creativity of his means.