Becoming one with his surroundings

Arno Rafael Minkkinen inserts himself into the landscape, with striking results

October 23, 2005|Globe Staff

LINCOLN -- William Butler Yeats posed one of the most famous questions in 20th-century poetry, ''How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Arno Rafael Minkkinen has devoted his career to offering a photographic riposte: How can we know the dancer from the dance floor?

The dancer, in this case, is Minkkinen's nude body, and the dance floor the surrounding environment. That environment can be a lake or canyon or even the Bridge of Sighs. The point is that Minkkinen photographs himself in such a way as to merge with his surroundings. He uses hands, fingers, feet, toes, torso, arms, legs, and various combinations thereof -- the whole field of his body. Is field even the right word? Array? Palette? It's a tribute to Minkkinen's originality that his work should pose such a lexical challenge. Environmental art meets performance art, self-portraiture doubles as landscape, duality is banished.

That all sounds highly conceptual, and not a little daunting. But the 121 photographs that make up ''Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Photographs 1970-2005" demonstrate what visually arresting results his procedure is capable of. The retrospective runs through Jan. 8 at the DeCordova Museum.

Sometimes goofy, occasionally provocative, and usually extremely beautiful, Minkkinen's work takes that old philosophical dilemma of the mind/body question (where does consciousness end and material existence begin?) and radically rearranges it with a land/body solution (who cares where I end so long as the external world begins and I am part of it?).

Minkkinen was born in Finland in 1940 and grew up in Brooklyn. After studying with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Rhode Island School of Design, he settled in Andover. He's lived there since 1977 and is professor of art at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

The most obvious question Minkkinen's work raises is choreographic: How does he position himself to achieve the effects he does? He's adamant about avoiding any and all darkroom manipulation or Photoshop trickery, so placement is nearly as important to his work as light is.

Sometimes the demands of placement turn Minkkinen into a contortionist (whoever would have imagined double-jointedness might serve as an artistic job qualification?). Sometimes it makes him an illusionist, as when he seems to have a mountain at the end of his thumb and forefinger, in ''Self-portrait, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2000," or when his submerged body has the appearance of a particularly pale manatee, in ''Self-portrait, Orlando, Florida, 1978."