Illuminations for a dark place: in the socially tumultuous period of the 1960s and '70s, a number of American artists began to experiment with projected imagery and video, seeking to free art from its traditional physical dimensions. A recent museum exhibition offered a look at this pioneering, often chilly work

Art in America, March, 2002 by Nancy Princenthal

With tourists staying away from New York, it was quiet in the city's museums last fall. The relatively low attendance at the Whitney Museum during the run of "Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977" seemed somehow apt, or at least historically indicative. Crowds and spectacles go together, and both have grown massively in the art world of the last 25 years. But during the period covered by this exhibition, art was made within a far smaller community, and the difference shows. The effect of early film and video installations as represented here--not all 19 works included are projections, though all do in one way or another rely on a particular site--is mostly that of a slow burn. The work progresses incrementally and tends to be repetitive, focused, time consuming and intimate. In a word, it is demanding--a quality that opens the door to charges of ivory-tower difficulty, but also to the kinds of hard-won rewards foreclosed by much of the more audience-friendly work that has come in its wake.

Brainy though most of them are, the projected images shown tend to address the whole body as a perceiving organism. Propensities for alarm, arousal, boredom, fatigue and trance are engaged serially, severally or all at once. But these sensations are framed in the most general terms, free of gender, class, race--of all the qualifications of subsequent (and some contemporary) experiential, body-centered art. (Strikingly, the nude female body, when it not infrequently appears, is evidently meant to seem, in perfect academic tradition, more abstract than a clothed one.) Chrissie Iles, the exhibition's curator, emphasizes in her catalogue essay the connection to "Minimalism's phenomenological approach." The opening up of perception as an "event," Iles says at the essay's conclusion, is the main business at hand.

It is a little deceptive, then, that the show opens with two relatively naughty works, one by Andy Warhol, the other by Robert Whitman. Warhol, born in 1928, is the earliest artist represented (Gary Hill, now 50, is the most recent), which is surprising not just because, like anyone who dies before his time, Warhol is remembered as youthful, but also because his work is the most easily connected to current practice. His split-screen film projection Lupe (1965) stars Edie Sedgwick reenacting, with ominous portentousness, actress Lupe Velez's elaborately orchestrated suicide by drug overdose. The drama proceeds slowly, its morbidity mixing with the lassitude and glamour that are Warhol's trademarks as a filmmaker. Whitman's Shower (1964) shows a woman showering, mostly with water, though at one point she's splashed with paint. Her image is projected onto the rear wall of a funky shower stall (Ed Kienholz's assemblages come to mind), while real water cascades within, a frolicsome touch that balances some rather dark Hollywood (read Hitchcockian) associations.

For the rest, though, sober-sided formalism prevailed. William Anastasi's Free Will (1968) and Yoko Ono's Sky TV (1966) are live-feed videos of not much: an empty corner of the gallery, a patch of sky. One senses Nam June Paik's closed-circuit video of a self-regarding Buddha lurking in the wings, though, curiously, Paik is absent from this show. Even more reductive is Peter Campus's aen (1977), which uses a closed-circuit video projection simply to deliver viewers to themselves, albeit upside down. Video cameras circle warily in Dan Graham's two-screen projection Helix/Spiral (1973), with a stationary performer moving a camera around her body, trying to keep its eye focused on a second performer who advances, spiralwise, toward her. Robert Morris's more complicated, in fact rather dizzying, Finch College Project (1969) involves a projector mounted on a turntable, re-creating a 360-degree panning shot. What we see is a gridded photograph of a movie audience and its gridded mirror reflection being installed and dismantled square by square in a start-and-stop circular sweep. But the most perceptually destabilizing revolutions of all occur in Bruce Nauman's Spinning Spheres (1970), a four-wall projection of a hugely enlarged, furiously spinning ball bearing; the viewing sensation is something like being inside a clothes dryer. (It's worth noting that though many of these works are landmarks, most were made relatively quickly and on the cheap, in sharp contrast to current film and video projections. For instance, Spinning Spheres is one of 16 installations Nauman made in 1970 alone.)

In her essay, Iles cites Annette Michelson's description of Nauman's spinning balls (and of Duchamp's rotating spirals in his Precision Optics) as producing an experience somehow parallel to an "autistic response." Elsewhere, Iles describes Paul Sharits's Shutter Interface (1975), which breaks film down into its chromatic fundamentals and delivers them in a rapid-fire two-projector montage, as "a 3-D metaphor of the space of the brain in an epileptic state, brought under control and harmonized." The suggestion, also applicable to the show as a whole, is that the work casts viewers as sensory crash-test dummies, up against the maximum visual information deliverable without breaking any psychological barriers.