ART / CATHY CURTIS : ‘American Landscape’: Vivid Look at Powers and Fancies of Video

In case we were becoming complacent, 15 terrible seconds last week gave us all the proof we needed of nature’s freakish and terrible willfulness. With TV images of the San Francisco earthquake burned into our minds by constant replay, a new exhibit at Newport Harbor Art Museum seems particularly timely.

Organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pa., “American Landscape Video: The Electronic Grove” (through Dec. 31) presents six large-scale video installations produced during the past decade by Bill Viola, Rita Myers, Dara Birnbaum, Frank Gillette, Doug Hall and Steina Vasulka.

Their landscape imagery ranges from the grandiloquent turbulence and shock effects of Hall’s “The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described” to the cerebral calm of Gillette’s “Aransas.”

Hall offers large-screen images of raging fire, billowing smoke and torrential floods--and a real jolt of lightning that leaps between two tall metal chairs screened off by a wire fence in the gallery. Gillette surrounds the viewer with monitors displaying peaceful distant and close-up views of the woods and marshes of Aransas County, Tex., in a slow, rhythmic sequence.

For some viewers, the idea of a video “portrait” of landscape may be hard to reconcile with the familiar, handcrafted qualities of landscape painting, or even with a stationary photographic image.

But the landscape tradition in American art already has undergone great changes during the past century. Think of the distance that separates the vast, detailed 19th-Century paintings of sprawling, untamed nature from the abstract color fields of Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series--or from the Earth Art of Robert Smithson, who worked directly on remote tracts of land.

By turning to video, artists gained a number of advantages lost to cutting-edge art since the 19th Century, as well as others perhaps undreamed of by earlier generations. Video can transmit instantly recognizable moving pictures of real objects. It also offers the intimacy and the user-friendly, non-elitist quality of TV viewing.

The artists, of course, are not in thrall to Nielsen ratings and other manifestations of consumer culture. They are free to use the special features of the video medium (including the ability to fragment, rearrange and instantly replay footage) to present unusual, unsettling and difficult ideas.

Video installations typically consist of one or more video monitors that either create an “environment” all by themselves--by virtue of the way they are arranged in the gallery--or function as elements within a larger sculptural or architectural setting. This three-dimensional context may either counterpoint or reinforce the image on the video screen, giving the viewer another layer of visual (and sometimes aural) experience.

Viola’s “Room for St. John of the Cross,” from 1983, is a particularly evocative blending of video with other media--and a superb example of the power of video to convey serious, humanistic ideas as well as flashy, nihilistic ones.

St. John of the Cross was a 16th-Century Spanish monk, a poet and mystic imprisoned by the religious establishment after introducing a new austerity into the Carmelite order.

In a darkened gallery, Viola places an imagined replica of St. John’s tiny cell with its thick walls and earthen floor. A small table inside holds a glass and pitcher of water--and a miniature portable TV displaying the image of a snow-capped mountain peak.

In Spanish, a recorded male voice softly recites St. John’s intensely spiritual poetry, which speaks of flying over city walls and mountains to join with God. On a huge video screen outside the cell, the same mountain peak lurches and trembles in black-and-white, as if laboriously photographed, bit by bit, with a hand-held camera.

In this work, the small, unchanging view of the mountain is symbolic of St. John’s contemplative state, a serene and focused view of the true purpose of life. The jerky large view of the mountain seems to represent the confused, distracted, partial understanding we have of life as we rush through it, oblivious to higher things.

Due to scheduling conflicts, Mary Lucier, one of the video artists in the original exhibition, is not represented at Newport Harbor, and Myers’ video, “RiftRise” from 1986 replaces her “Allure of the Concentric” (which, however, will be seen at the Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, from Nov. 18 through Dec. 17).

In “RiftRise,” images of destruction (fire, charred tree branches) and renewal (rushing water, green leaves) shift from one side to the other of two opposing banks of monitors, one made of sharp-edged black slabs, the other covered with live birch trees. At once very simple and very grand in scope, the installation offers a rhythmic, five-minute meditation on the cycle of life.

Vasulka’s “The West” from 1983 is the most visually complex piece in the show, though ultimately it seems to have less meaning than the others. Images of man-made and natural sights from the New Mexican desert play over 22 double-stacked monitors for 30 minutes, unrolling and twisting and undergoing all sorts of coloristic and light manipulations. The whole thing seems to be more about technical wizardry, however, than the intrinsic qualities of nature.

Dara Birnbaum’s “Will-o’-the-Wisp” (part of her “Damnation of Faust” series, begun in 1983) is the most elusive of the six works. Three color monitors are mounted on a 36-foot-wide photographic enlargement that can just barely be read as a woman’s face. The same face appears in the video imagery, surrounded by green foliage.

Eventually, the foliage turns red (Memories of other times? A look into the future?) and there are quick glimpses of children gathered at a doorway. Meanwhile, the woman’s voice murmurs inaudibly on the sound track (she is supposedly the fictional Marguerite of the Faust legend, recounting her abandonment by her lover).

The piece--which, to be fair, was partly malfunctioning when I saw it--might be about the way the environment colors memory and affects mood. But the clues were vague and the image of the woman’s face banal. (It looks like something from a toilet tissue commercial.)

Still, the installations as a group are enormously captivating, offering a meaty introduction to the powers and fancies of video. It would have been a good idea to post the duration of each piece, however, so viewers could determine if they’ve seen the whole thing or are simply wallowing in an endless loop of imagery.

“American Landscape Video: The Electronic Grove” remains through Dec. 31 at Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is $3 for adults, $2 for students and seniors, and $1 for children 6 to 17. Tuesdays are free to all, courtesy of Beacon Bay Enterprises Inc. Docent-guided tours are available. Information: (714) 759-1122.