ART REVIEW : ‘American Landscape Video’ Exhibit Breaks New Ground

In case we were becoming complacent, 15 terrible seconds last month 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, “American Landscape Video: The Electronic Grove” (to Dec. 31) presents six large video installations produced during the last 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 high-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 many viewers, the idea of a video “portrait” of landscape may be hard to reconcile with the familiar, hand-crafted 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 last century, from abstract painting to Earth Art. By turning to video, artists gain a number of advantages lost to cutting-edge art since the 19th Century, as well as others perhaps undreamed of by earlier generations. Video, after all, offers not only intimacy and directness, but also the user-friendly, non-elitist quality of TV viewing.

Working outside the loop of TV’s consumer culture, however, artists are free to use the special features of video medium (including the ability to fragment, rearrange and instantly replay footage) to present unusual, unsettling and difficult ideas.

In the installations, video monitors either create an “environment” all by themselves or function as elements within a larger sculptural or architectural setting.

Viola’s “Room for St. John of the Cross,” from 1983, is a particularly evocative blending of video with other media--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 imprisoned by the religious Establishment after introducing a new austerity into the Carmelite order.

In a darkened gallery, Viola places an imagined replica ofSt. 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. 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.

The small, unchanging view of the mountain is symbolic ofSt. 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.

In Myers’ “Rift Rise,” images of destruction (fire, charred tree branches) and renewal (rushing water, green leaves) play on both sides of 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 five-minute meditation on the cycle of life.

Vasulka’s “The West” 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 Mexico desert play over 22 double-stacked monitors for 30 minutes, subjected to lots of fancy cutting and coloristic manipulations. But sheer technical wizardry overshadows the inherent wonder and grandeur of the subject.

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.

This latter-day Marguerite (the woman Faust seduces) appears in the video as a dreamy face surrounded by green foliage. Eventually, the foliage turns autumnal red and there are quick glimpses of children gathered at a doorway. Meanwhile, the woman’s voice murmurs inaudibly on the sound track, recounting her abandonment by her lover.

The piece--which, to be fair, was partly malfunctioning last week--seems to be about the way the environment colors memory and affects mood. But the clues were vague and the repeated image of the woman’s face unsettlingly reminiscent of insipid commercials for intimate products.