Antti Laitinen @ Finnish Pavilion, Venice Biennale

It might be easy to dismiss the series of reconstructed birch trees outside Finland’s pavilion at the Giardini as yet another tree-centric piece of environmental art. The reaction once entering the pavilion itself may initially be how stereotypically Finnish the work is, a selection of photographs and videos featuring a single male figure in the midst of frozen lakes and pine forests. However what is at work here is something more tragicomic than your typical po­faced land art endeavour. While the natural world is his media, what Antti Laitinen is actually exploring is the adoption of an idealist position within an apathetic world. It is somewhat difficult to submit his work to the conventional critical framework; his 2007 piece It’s My Island consists of the artist repeatedly dragging rocks out to sea in order to, well, build his own island. This is very much one of the strengths of the show, Laitinen opting for literal over theoretical deconstruction. It seems at times as if he is punishing contemporary art's fetish for the metaphor, for the over­theorisation rife at the Biennale. A video in the pavilion shows Laitinen felling and splitting the aforementioned birch trees as well as their time-consuming reconstruction, the physical actuality of the act within spitting distance of the video. There are no illusions here, and indeed no need for them. While the obvious comparison to make is that of Sisyphus, compelled to roll a boulder up a hill, perhaps the Malayalam myth of Naranth Bhranthan, doing the same act but of his own volition (and laughing at the boulder’s inevitable descent) is more appropriate. [J.D.A. Winslow]