January 7 through February 27, 2016
512 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 255-5793

Mary Lucier, who has long worked at the intersection of music and the visual arts, weaves together past and present for her current video installations at the Kitchen, which is marking its forty-fifth anniversary with a series of events and exhibitions. Color Phantoms with Automatic Writing commemorates Lucier’s friend and collaborator, composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 and whose production with choreographer Steve Paxton, Quicksand, was concurrently featured on the Kitchen’s stage earlier this month. Revisiting works going back to 1971, Lucier draws on editing techniques of layering and displacement to provide an elegant frame for the Kitchen’s celebration of multimedia research.

Lucier literally introduces the Kitchen’s current programs, with a four-channel work in the theater lobby and a more elaborate installation at the entrance to the second floor gallery. Richly furnished with memorabilia, the upstairs entry recreates the waiting room of a psychoanalyst, with plain wooden chairs randomly arranged in front of a projected video of Ashley in his studio. Layering past and present, Lucier inflects this footage with a sense of loss, covering the projection in a luminous scrim of pixillated snow that evokes its distance in time. An oriental rug that once belonged to Dorothea Tanning leads into the adjoining “office”. Here, where the business of analysis focuses on the recovery of the subconscious, more rugs and cushions create a sense of oriental luxury, while the furnishings, modeled on those of Freud’s office, evoke the era of surrealism: a bookcase of esoteric texts, ethnographic artifacts, and artworks by Max Ernst, Tanning’s husband, set psychoanalysis itself in a distant temporal realm.

As though by magic, the viewer can enter and take his or her place on a magnificent leather couch, where a monitor suspended overhead offers entry into a realm of reverie. Composed in 1971 of slides taken from a moving car and layered with slides of black and white TV programs, Color Phantoms uses gradual dissolves to suggest movement, a sense of immersion indebted to surrealism, which she has developed with changing technologies throughout her career. The dialogue of analysis is displaced onto the soundtrack, in which a man’s and a woman’s voices are overlaid; Ashley, who had a mild form of Tourette’s Syndrome, generated the man’s voice from his own involuntary speech – hence the title, Automatic Writing, which conflates his process of music composition with the surrealist technique. He’s accompanied by electronic sounds and by the voice of a woman who translates his words into French. The analyst’s chair is empty (available to the participant). We are taken out of our internal space and encouraged to project our personal histories into the room’s poetic vagueness, transporting the serious work of analysis into a realm of artistic play.

In the downstairs lobby, Trial, a four-channel video, revisits Lucier’s 1974 footage of Ashley in performance with Merce Cunningham and his dancers at Cunningham’s studio. With characteristic openness, Cunningham accepted Ashley’s loosely scripted theater piece, The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity, as “decor” for his dancers, and welcomed Lucier and her video camera on stage. Through the lens, all is fragmentary, elusive. In a compression of space and time, Lucier directs the camera at a mirror at the end of the studio, in which Ashley and Anne Wehrer appear as reflections, seen from behind; Cunningham and his dancers also appear as reflections, but occasionally cross in front of the mirror. Sound consists of the couple’s indistinct conversation and ambient noise. The woman speaks constantly; they smoke and drink, kiss, and finally end up on the floor, as Ashley falls from his chair and his partner continues her conversation. Lucier moves back and forth from close-up to long shot, but these are projected here side by side, as though occurring simultaneously. The enigmatic austerity of the Cunningham event contrasts with the ornateness of Lucier’s upstairs installation, yet the reworking of old footage in both cases resembles the process of analysis, bringing lost materials to the surface as fodder for current investigation.

Back upstairs, From Minimalism into Algorithm extends this process. A group exhibition created by the Kitchen’s curatorial team, it juxtaposes, among other things, a plate of steel by Donald Judd, a video of Lucinda Childs dancing to Philip Glass’s music, multi-hued mounds built by termites provided with colored sand by Agnieszka Kurant, and labor-intensive paintings of paint made by Paul Sietsema. It proposes that the chance operations of Cage and Cunningham and the repetitive iterations of minimalism can offer a bridge to art in the digital age. Lucier’s story-telling instincts supply a context for this resurgence of primal materials, as she weaves installation, video and sound into personal and collective narratives that stimulate reflection on the Kitchen’s history. At forty-five, it’s become an institution, but, with experimental ambitions intact, it cultivates awareness of the past with an eye out for new possibilities.

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At the recent memorial service for Robert Berlind, who died December 17th after a long illness, friends and family members spoke movingly of Robert’s profound generosity of spirit, his equanimity, and his unflagging determination to experience life’s gifts even in his last weeks.

Over a fifty-year career Berlind produced an expansive and refined body of work that was rooted in landscape, reflecting a scholar’s knowledge of the history of art, and a contemporary artist’s relentless effort to understand how we perceive and integrate the visible and interior worlds. This effort was almost entirely camouflaged by the deceptive simplicity of his work, and yet it could be sensed in the considered organization of forms, and in the tensions he created across the surfaces and within the layers of his paintings.

The movement of Berlind’s vision reminded me of the gestures of a Tai Chi practitioner, gradually encompassing all dimensions of space (and time). We sense the scanning and tracking motion of his eyes as he sought and isolated particular fragments of the landscape. The artist Mary Lucier, Berlind’s wife of 22 years, beautifully captured his tight concentration in her video Summer, or Grief (1998), as his head moves quickly back and forth between the motif and the canvas he is painting. This working method resulted in a way of saying – through his paintings – Here, look at this. Pay attention—this snow shadow, this shivering reflection is really magnificent.

Berlind’s particular contribution came through the manner in which he superimposed layers of space and distance, foreground and background, as though the substances within each spatial level were compressed under a microscope’s cover slide, or seen through sheets of Mylar, one above the other. This layering and flattening of the levels of space contributed to a straightforward coolness and precision in his work can bring to mind Winslow Homer’s ravens waiting to attack a fox in the snow, or his hunted ducks careening above waves in mid-air. For me, Berlind’s approach to pictorial depth also metaphorically suggested that all things are (ideally) created equal, and that the hierarchies we impose on life are essentially artificial and divisive.

His ingenuity also came through in his articulation of the edges of things, either softened by movement or distance, or crisply delineated—as in the branches of Studio Roof #4, 2015, a painting to be shown in his scheduled solo exhibition next month at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., his New York gallery. In the monumental (5 x 17 foot) Passage (2007), Berlind created a shimmering grid of interwoven branches and fluttering leaves that alternate between blurred and crisp focus, not unlike the dizzying sensation of watching a filmmaker pulling focus. Berlind’s mastery of subtle color reflected his affinity with such peers and mentors as Harriet Shorr and Robert Kushner, Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, but his greens were the envy of many painters, as he captured the symphonic range of hues reflected in stream beds, rice seedlings, and winter branches according to their position in the light, the time of day, or the season.

In addition to his work as a distinguished professor, and writer of art criticism, Berlind was also a supportive colleague in quieter and less visible ways. One day in 2005 while crossing Fifth Avenue I bumped into Bob as we were both heading up to see his exhibition at Tibor de Nagy. With his flashing blue eyes, laugh lines, and regal elegance Bob always resembled an 18th-century portrait of Voltaire. Immediately launching into animated conversation about studio problems, we became so engrossed that we almost got run over by a taxi.

Remarkably, Bob made a recording of his thoughts on dying and expressions of gratitude to be played at his memorial service, a gesture that conveyed the tremendous grace and awareness possible within loss. He will be remembered as an artist who was always interested in locating what was most alive in others’ work, and who scrutinized the world with searching curiosity, devotion, and love.

Robert Berlind: Kyoto/Cochecton opens Saturday, January 9, 5-7 pm, at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., 514 West 25th Street, New York.

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March 7 to April 20, 2013
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

In “The Painter of Modern Life”, Baudelaire envisions a painter of “the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity that it contains.” He also condemns photography, which for him too easily gratifies the popular desire for images. But Baudelaire’s words about the painter could well apply to video artist Mary Lucier, whose latest piece, Wisconsin Arc, combines constructions of light and contrapuntal movement with a sympathetic documentation of everyday life. In this highly formalized record of bourgeois recreation, comparable to Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on the Grande Jatte, Lucier engages both popular culture and high artistic ideals.

These new videos were made during two years of teaching in Milwaukee. The works unfold progressively in the gallery, beginning with a three-minute flat screen video at the entrance. Like the predella to an altarpiece, this loop, visible from the street, entices viewers with narrative scenes, leading into “Wisconsin Arc”, the more ambitious projection in the inner gallery. There’s indeed some sense of a chapel in that chamber, with benches before large images of Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum, whose monumental window onto Lake Michigan creates a cathedral-like space, with networks of reflected light.

Shot on a beach near the museum, the more documentary and informal “predella” video, entitled Beauty and the Beast, follows a Hmong family group filming one another on the shore, seemingly aware of Lucier’s camera on them: observing and being observed. Lucier implicitly acknowledges this fundamental condition of our public life, while the obvious fact of the family’s ethnicity leaves open the question of what social divisions underlie the popular democracy of the beach.  As viewers pass into the inner gallery and the more sophisticated recreational context of the art museum, the passage is hung with video stills printed on silk, suspended like prayer flags along the gallery wall. These exemplify the multiple potentials of digital images, including their commercial value. The passage might reference the museum shop with its omnipresent commodification of culture. Like the question of ethnic diversity, the issue of art’s complicity in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” is acknowledged but left open.

These undertones of contemporary media ethnography give way to a starkly formal image in the opening section of Wisconsin Arc, a close-up of a glass with ice cubes. Centered hugely in the frame, it creates a lens through which we view the distorted figures of passers-by on a distant walkway. The message implicit in this surrogate eye is the camera’s authority, as it imposes itself on the visual process. Its active intervention is only extended in the editing of the next two sections.

If we think in musical terms, the middle section would be the scherzo, with its hyperactive pace, as amateur performers move through the space in front of Calatrava’s giant window. Along with this intricately choreographed sequence come layered images of the beach and the lake, dissolving the architectural frame while introducing footage of the family from the “predella” video.

The final section is the longest, set to the leisurely pace of a group of walkers. Now down on the beach itself, the camera tracks a panoramic vista as it picks up and follows a man and two women who are  carrying their own cameras. The man acknowledges Lucier with a glance before strolling on into what becomes a fugue of layered tracking shots. Sequences of the group overlap with one another and combine with other shots until the initial group re-emerges, approaching us again, and the procession repeats itself. By varying the opacity of the layers, and manipulating the speed of the projection, Lucier treats the people and landscape as visual elements in a larger composition.

Indeed, the sixteen-minute duration of this loop prolongs the simple pleasure of viewing and being viewed into a timeless, meditative continuity. Given our conditioned expectation of quick editing and punchy messages, it comes as a mild surprise each time the group reappears for yet another swing along the beach. For those who recognize the musical accompaniment – the intro to Jerry Butler’s “For Your Precious Love” – the continuity extends into the past, into a primeval ‘fifties realm, before the invention of video art.

This attitude towards time distinguishes Wisconsin Arc from Street, a video by James Nares currently featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nares has recorded passersby in New York in slowed motion and heightened detail, like Lucier, but where Nares emphasizes a sequential movement through space and time, Lucier layers her sequences to create a less linear, more forgiving temporal structure. Like the Soviet experimental filmmaker Dziga Vertov in “Man with a Movie Camera”, which concludes on a human eye merged with a camera lens, she integrates time, space, people and technology.

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Suzaan Boettger, Charlie Finch, and Bridget L. Goodbody joined David Cohen to review Kevin Landers at Elizabeth Dee, Kim Dingle at Sperone Westwater, Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cunningham, Mary Lucier at Lennon, Weinberg, and Rebecca Smith at Jeannie Freilich.

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