ART : Sparks Fly as Panel, Audience Tangle on Video Perceptions

What do people expect from a panel discussion on a contemporary-art topic? And what do they get out of it? That depends on the topic and the various levels of knowledge and sophistication of the audience. Responses are generally hard to gauge. People fidget, ask a few questions, applaud at the end and go back to their daily lives.

But sometimes, sparks fly and everybody benefits from the electricity in the air. That is what happened toward the end of a Newport Harbor Art Museum panel discussion Saturday morning in conjunction with the exhibit, “American Landscape Video: The Electronic Grove.”

The exhibit’s curator, William D. Judson, curator of film and video at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, was moderator. Panelists were video artists Bill Viola and Doug Hall, and David Ross, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Judson opened the session by talking about links he believes exist between the styles and subjects of 19th-Century American landscape painting and videos based on landscape themes. He said the sense of intimacy viewers feel in front of an easel painting translates to the feeling that they have in front of a TV screen, and he likened the light effects in Luminist landscape paintings to the glow of the video monitor.

Ross disagreed with Judson’s approach, saying it was “much too early” to take such a historical approach to video, a medium that has been around for less than a generation.

“Artists who chose to work with video did so to escape history and critical inspection,” he said. “They got involved so they could start looking at things that the rest of the art world thought were uninteresting. . . . The viewer was recognized as coequal to the maker of the work. All of the important works that deal with landscape deal with the interaction of human intelligence--the problem of looking at and understanding the environment.”

Video artists rejected the historical, idealized landscape, Ross said, just as they and other contemporary artists abandoned the frame of easel painting to concentrate on “the overall experience of the viewer in space.”

Video artists created a “psycho-geography,” which embodies both the visual facts of an environment and the “desires and compulsions” of the late-20th-Century viewer in an age of high-speed social change and ecological crisis.

Hall showed slides of two of his earlier video installations and discussed the way his work contrasts certain sensory information directly perceived by the viewer with other information mediated through elaborate technical processes.

(In Hall’s piece at Newport Harbor, “The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described,” the viewer witnesses an electrical discharge firsthand while watching videos of electrical storms.)

Apropos of the viewer’s reaction to the work, Hall said: “You do have a different spatial relationship to video than to painting or sculpture. I call it a psychedelic relation. It’s difficult to know how to position your body in relation to the images.”

Viola chose to read a complex, far-ranging statement impossible to summarize here. But his key point is the primacy of the “imaginary landscape of perception” over a world full of specific objects. The real landscape is limited, he said; the human imagination is infinite.

During the question session that followed, a woman in the audience raised her hand.

“All of us have been listening to the intellectual perceptions of the panel members,” she said. “But I have to ask myself, ‘Am I a moron?’ The things in the show--like the tornadoes and hurricanes (in Hall’s piece) are real. They are awesome and exciting. Why are you indulging in such an extreme level of intellectualism?”

Hall spoke first. “What you are witnessing is one level of a communication that artists carry on with themselves,” he said. “(Some) of the strategies we use are intellectual. And of course we’re talking after the fact of producing the work. But there are whole other levels of engagement (between the artist and the work). Artists are people who make things.”

Ross broke in at that point, testily calling the woman’s question “quasi-hostile.” Amplifying on her notion of “real images of the real world,” he described his early morning visit to Fashion Island, in search of a cup of coffee.

“I started walking into this completely empty shopping mall. There were Mozart violin concertos playing from the trees. . . . And there were people cleaning up nature, sweeping up leaves so there wouldn’t be too much nature. It was completely unreal. It was real, but it was appalling--like being in a space station, like being in someone’s architectural model.

“This is the crisis of representation: How do we extract meaning (from the world around us)? What does it mean to say real? What do you need to believe something is real? . . . It’s not just a jejune exercise in intellectual snobbery.”

Viola spoke up. “We’re all sitting around the table, so we have to talk. We can’t go. . . .” He suddenly squashed his drinking cup and screamed like a maniac, startling the audience.

In their various ways, the panelists were laying bare a central fact about important contemporary art, and not only in the realm of video. Some viewers may wish that art is like anamusement park ride, with thrills and chills fine-tuned for maximum consumer pleasure. But the best of today’s artists are not engaged in creating experiences viewers have already preconceived.

Instead, they are taking mental journeys into uncharted wilderness. They are wrestling with big-ticket ideas involving perception and reality, and the task of finding ways of translating their ideas into visual form.

Just because anyone whose eyes are in working order can look at art, people seem to assume “looking” is all there is to it. But contemporary artists have chosen to probe territory as complex as the outer reaches of physics or philosophy, two disciplines that are equally absorbed in probing the very essence of our world.