Art in Brief
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
MARY LUCIER: The Plains of Sweet Regret
Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.
Over the past 20 years, North Dakota has experienced a transition from a family-based, rural economy to one based upon agribusiness. Change has been so drastic that the North Dakota Museum of Art began a thematic program called “Emptying Out of the Plains” in 1999 for posterity. The museum has commissioned artists to create works for the program, and “The Plains of Sweet Regret” (2004–07) is Mary Lucier’s second commission.
Ms. Lucier began her career in video in the 1970s, when video was a proprietary medium of news transmission in America. Some artists found that it was a live and mercurial medium for solo performance, and could encompass the best aspects of photography and experimental film. Ms. Lucier has consistently used video to meld the documentary with the poetic.
Conceived as a five-channel, synchronized video installation with surround-sound, the 18-minute “Plains of Sweet Regret” is a lyrical meditation upon the contemporary landscape and ghost towns of North Dakota. The artist’s superb coordination of visual narrative, text, music, and special effects fractures yet distills the subject matter into a new media ballad for the 21st century. Its mostly evenhanded and unsentimental approach competes with an unmistakable elegiac mood brought on by the musical soundtrack. Ms. Lucier’s sensitivity to color contributes to the work’s powerful effect. Wooden school chairs anchor the viewer’s experience of the ephemeral visuals with a concrete sense of the region’s material culture.
One focal point of the installation is a large, split-screen image, projected on the back wall, of a wheat field under blue sky and a human hand gently holding a cricket. Meanwhile, four other screens project visions of endless roads, abandoned farm buildings, and ruined domestic interiors onto the gallery’s side walls. Poetic phrases of text come and go. Scenery flashes by, fast and inchoate; a barnyard cow gives birth, and a rodeo becomes a kaleidoscopic montage of bulls and cowboys. Blue jeans, red shirts, yellow signs, and brown hides slide brightly through one other.
Until April 28 (514 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-941-0012).
