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

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Melinda Barlow

In another sequence, shot at night in a deep blue corridor, the shadow of an African-American man appears. He starts to run, darts into a room, retrieves his hat, and as he reaches the camera, disappears. His urgency suggests insurrection, or maybe he is meeting his female companion, also African-American, who runs down the same corridor projected on another side of the house.

Other images in each of the projections reveal a world surrounded by water. Ceaselessly lapping off the coast, crashing relentlessly against the shore, drumming down fences during a hurricane, promised as nourishment in a verse from the Bible, the water seen in House by the Water becomes a somewhat ambiguous symbol, capable of offering comfort even as it inspires fear.

If, as Le Corbusier suggests, the purpose of architecture is to move us, then for more than 25 years the video installations of Mary Lucier have realized architecture's highest goal. As intimate but fleeting architectural structures, they also teach us to value experience, accept impermanence and free ourselves from attachments to physical objects. As one of the survivors in Grand Forks said upon losing his home and life's possessions to the river, "After all, those are only things."

(1.) Under the Whelming Tide is the title of a collection of photographs and essays commemorating the Red River Flood of 1997. It was edited by Eric Hylden and Laurel Reuter and published by the North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, in 1998.

Floodsongs was first seen as part of the exhibition "Mud and Roses: The Aftermath of the 1997 Flood of the Red River of the North," North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, N.D. [Dec. 5, 1998-Jan. 31, 1999]. Subsequently it appeared solo at the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y. [Mar. 13-June 20, 1999].

Melinda Barlow is assistant professor of film studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She recently edited a collection of critical essays titled Mary Lucier: Art and Performance, forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins University Press.