2.26.24 — Returning to Earth
When video art extends to nine channels and the breadth of a gallery, one can fairly call it an immersive experience. For Mary Lucier, it is Leaving Earth, but it is not transcendental. It is far too rooted in this world, at Cristin Tierney through March 2.
At age eighty, she is revisiting memories from before and after her husband’s death. It might be her return to earth after a forced absence. It makes her losses all the more telling and more real.
Lucier came early to new media, and she has been working in both single and multiple channels for some fifty years. (How could MoMA have left her out of “Signals,” 
its survey of video as installation and installation as video?) Earlier still she was a member of the Sonic Arts Union, and what could be more immersive than sound? Still, immersion suggests a single, unified experience, of a place and time, like LA for Cauleen Smith (at David Zwirner in Tribeca) or the Canadian landscape for Michael Snow. It suspends one between the space of the gallery and the artist’s vision. How could it ever leave this earth?
To be sure, a wide screen in a dark room can carry one into the sky and into the night, as with Buried Sunshine from Julian Charrière at Sean Kelly, also through March 2. It becomes a virtual hymn to creature comforts and convention. Lucier, though, provides scant comfort. She sets her monitors at varying heights and positions throughout the gallery. One on the floor could pass for a burial slab, and it does bear text. Only the lone monitor at your back confirms that you have in any way entered, and a place among the rest would be at best a tight fit.
If that were not worldly enough, they show her in a realm she calls home. She spends much of her time in Sullivan County a bit upstate, and these scenes are thoroughly rural—and maybe a bit cold. Monitors may at a given moment close in a red flower or pale stone, while one last monitor stands unused off to the side, like a deathly tribute to dated technology and her career. A gathering seems in progress, with younger guests, but without obvious signs of celebration. Lucier herself presides over all, with one monitor for her face alone. I hesitate to call it smiling.
The scenery includes a building at a precarious angle, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa for ordinary upstaters. It seems too grand for a shed and too modest for a home, but there it is, on the far side of a pond. If it is gray and falling apart, such is aging, but then she has always been aware of damage and decay. Dawn Burn from 1975 (also in “September 11” in 2011 at MoMA PS1) turned the camera on the sun, burning out its eye just as staring at the sun is blinding to humans. The images in Leaving Earth include burning branches. It is hard to say how much their fire brings warmth.
Lucier ticks off the lasting cost of damage and decay. Her husband, Robert Berlind, left this earth in 2015, and journals from his last illness supply the on-screen text. It too matter of fact to call it poetry, lamentation, confessions, or epigrams, but terse and telling all the same. A painter, he neither runs through his life nor dwells on impending death. Yet the words slip among all tenses, past, present, and future.
Images accumulate, like an unfolding portrait or a determined record, but they never quite cohere. The arbitrary can be deeply flawed, disrupting the immersion and lessening the art as for Smith. Lucier, though, has always been adding things up and taking them apart. If she loves her memories, it is with critical detachment. The words still speak, and the flames still burn, but they cannot exhaust experience. If she is left forever alone on earth, it is because there is nowhere else to go.
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