No Place Like Home - North Dakota Museum of Art, Grank Forks, North Dakota

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Melinda Barlow

Learning to trust these fleeting impressions is the challenge of dwelling in this installation; in Floodsongs one must remain open to what drifts into the ear or catches the eye. During a lull in the overall din, for instance, a young girl can be heard saying that she "kind of lost hope" when all her friends left their homes and moved away. A similarly arresting moment occurs later in the same interview, when a quick shot shows another girl diving into a pool. Although this is the only image on any of the channels that shows someone fully submerged, it is strongly evocative; both times I saw it, at the North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the physicality of the water all at once became startling.

Another particularly resonant moment in the installation occurs when a housewife/artist begins to sing her favorite hymn, her voice ringing out from the swelling waves of sound. The effect is riveting, and viewers are often compelled to turn around and move closer to the monitor as they listen, trying to understand every vibrant word. While this hymn is the most literal "flood song" in Lucier's installation, it is tied to images in the video projection that also link musical and spiritual themes. Perhaps the most succinct of these images, at once mysterious and emblematic, is of a mud-sprayed LP recording, split starkly in two, whose label reads, "Heaven Can Wait."

Experiencing Floodsongs in Grand Forks was both illuminating and moving. Commissioned by North Dakota Museum of Art director Laurel Reuter as one of several works in a project commemorating the flood, Floodsongs was created for a specific community, and when it was exhibited in that community it possessed the restorative power of the best public art. Watching the residents of Grand Forks see their friends or themselves in the work, listening to their survival tales, I felt the installation assume new meaning and an intimate place in the collective life of its intended audience.

Decay, memory, natural catastrophe, what it means to inhabit and then lose a home--the same themes and concerns that animate Floodsongs have preoccupied Lucier from the outset of her career, more than 25 years ago. Originally a sculptor and photographer, Lucier made forays into mixed-medium performance, then, in 1973, began to experiment with video. She created her first video installation the same year. Titled Antique with Video Ants and Generations of Dinosaurs, this work consisted of a secretary/armoire housing a cactus garden, a triptych mirror, a magnifying glass and a video monitor; on the latter ran a tape showing an ant farm and a series of dinosaur postcards. On the floor in front of the armoire, beneath a low-hanging lamp, lay two black-and-white photographs under glass, both close-ups of landscape, stamped near the center with the word "INHABIT."

Inspired in part by the writings of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Antique invited visitors to inhabit its whimsical environment by envisioning themselves reduced to the Lilliputian scale such a move would necessitate. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard examines our capacity for just such imaginative projection by exploring the ways we "inhabit" or dwell in protective enclosures like shells, nests, comers, chests, drawers, wardrobes and houses. His insights into how we invest these intimate spaces with our mixed feelings about our homes also pertain to Lucier's installations, where images of houses suggest both the stability of shelter and, as in Floodsongs, the possibility of domestic loss.