WORDS: Gabija Purlytė
Airs Above the Ground (2010) by Finnish artist Salla Tykkä is, first of all, entrancingly beautiful. The video opens with white text fading in and out of a black screen, providing a synopsis of the context in a style strongly evocative of historical epic films. We are told about the origins of the Lipizzaner – the oldest extant pedigree horse breed in Europe, developed in the sixteenth century with support of the Habsburg monarchy, rulers of Austria and Spain. Hundreds of years later, these animals continue to perform haute école (High School) dressage in the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, demonstrating the highest achievements of classical horsemanship in movements that can be most easily described as dance and acrobatics. The poetic title of the work refers, in fact, to the most difficult of these exercises, when all of the horse’s feet leave the ground.
Tykkä’s video works often play on Hollywood conventions. Airs Above the Ground is an exploration of lush cinematography with an arresting soundtrack. The audial experience begins before the visual one, as sounds familiar to all equestrians accompany the textual introduction: the creaking wood and leather of a saddle, chinking metal buckles, a horse’s snort, hooves echoing in a quiet stable. For an experienced rider, these are a quasi-magical presage of another experience to be shared with the horse; less easily recognisable to the “lay” viewer, they serve to immediately focus one’s attention, transporting us to a state where the pace of time is slowed down.
The following scene is idyllic to the point of cliché – in a misty landscape filled with the twitter of birds, a herd of young horses emerges, approaching in trot and gallop. As the video progresses, these pasture views are interchanged with excerpts from a training session in a manège. The contrast is obvious – the foals roam in freedom, while their older sibling demonstrates highly controlled exercises, reined in with bridles and whips. The interaction between the animal and the trainers is subtle, yet the flicks of the whip which accompany the horse’s jumps gain a somewhat amplified tone of cruelty in this context. The schooled horse becomes an emblem for the junction of nature and culture, like the Lippizaner in general – a product of centuries-long rigorous selective breeding.
There is another darker aspect to this film, apart from the ambiguous, often painful underside of cultured beauty. The Lippizaner is a hallmark example of the perfected pure-blood race, an idea which sounds as much alluring as alarming in our post-Holocaust age. It is wonderfully symbolic that the coat of these horses, who are born dark, lightens with age, so that by the time they reach the peak of their skill, when culture has done all of its work, they have become glistening white. The fact that only stallions perform in the School’s displays adds another telling dimension, and with the implications of class hierarchy which the breed’s royal ancestry evokes, we have a complete set of allusions to inequality and discrimination which continue to plague our societies. Once the symbol of a dynasty’s power and prestige, however, the Lippizaners survive today mainly as a tourist attraction, and can be seen during their morning exercise by anyone willing to queue for a bit and pay a few euros. Tykkä’s video encapsulates the difficult questions that surround all forms of “high culture”, which, though unpleasant, cannot be glossed over, as they are crucial reminders of the dangers which accompany the human strive for beauty and perfection.
Airs Above the Ground is a perfect example of an artwork where an enchanting aesthetic experience is effortlessly combined with a heavier philosophical charge. Like in the fragment of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor (1749) heard towards the end, beauty is suffused here with melancholy, and we are left in a mood of tranquility and pensiveness which has become rare and precious in our hectic era.
