Looking good: the videos of Burt Barr: in a series of works created over a four-year period, New York artist Burt Barr explores the technical language of film, Hollywood cliches, the irresistible silliness of puns and the sheer beauty of the monochrome image

Art in America, March, 2002 by Lilly Wei

If you have gotten out of the habit of black and white, go see veteran video artist Burt Barr's version of it for a refresher. His luminous tapes--spare, succinct (often no more than 15 minutes, sometimes less than 2), with and without sound--are elegantly conceived, fastidious presentations that might be described as post-New-Wave retro. Part documentary, part feature in appearance, they combine the experience of real time and straight shooting with the scripted. A director who both seizes opportunity and is a control freak, Barr explains, "My best footage happens when the camera's been left running. Others have the tendency to shut a camera off as soon as a take's been done, but I leave it running, recording. Many of my pieces are built on accidents, no matter how precise they later appear." (1)

Many also look as if he's spent time watching the works of Godard, Warhol and Hitchcock, as well as mainstream Hollywood movies and television from the '40s and '50s, succumbing to their characteristically leisurely pace, picking out details to be reexamined, buffed and reused to new effect. Most compelling, he somehow captures the nuanced tonalities and fabulous, fictive light of the silver screen in its heyday. Barr casts an aura of nostalgic reverie over his recent work, creating a timeless (or rather, a time-out) zone, an imaginary cinematic world where life is elsewhere, but heaven, if it exists at all, is here. When present, the audio consists of ambient sound matched to the film's content. In a Barr scenario, which is always a little offbeat, a little skewed, a little skeptical, nothing is said, nothing much happens. Instead, he concentrates on one event, one action constructed "with the loosest of intentions" but the tightest of results. The style is smart, subtly subversive and concentrated, wrapping up the wry, the ironic and the literal in "what looks good, who looks good."

A group of films from 1998-2001, which were recently shown at Brent Sikkema in Chelsea and the Whitney Museum of American Art, "all started with Slo-Mo," says Barr. He is referring to his video, included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, which features a tortoise hunkered down in the grass; eventually, the creature rouses itself and lumbers offscreen. Slo-Mo is a 9-minute video in which minutes seem like hours. Barr recalls thinking, "you want slo-mo, I can do slo-mo." For the show last spring at Brent Sikkema, Barr turned the front space into a six-screen multiplex. The installation was called "Sextet II" (he likes puns, both visual and verbal), and coupling was the theme. Six wall projections formed a two-tiered grid of three works. Upper and lower projections created vertical diptychs, pairing images of winsome couples with the settings for their nimble flirtations. Curiously, the tapes approached color, as each diptych radiated a slightly different tone, a slightly different light. Each work also has a low but distinct audio track.

Barr's casting almost invariably includes well-known, attractive artists, the who of "who looks good." The first of the trio, Angel (2001)--perhaps a pun on camera angle--stars dancers Stanford Makishi and Jimena Paz. Accompanied by the lulling, sibilant whoosh of wind-tossed trees, they twist and turn gracefully, filmed from below through a clear floor (which adds a titillating fillip to the Baroque convention of di sotto in su), while weaving and waving branches in the upper projection reprise their dance. Barr, who is married to the dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown, has long been influenced by dance and performance.

Dancers are again paired in Rain Piece (1998), with a voyeuristic, now-you-see, now-you-don't view of a young woman (Jodi Melnick) sitting in a car. You see her intermittently through the windshield, as the wipers sweep back and forth, brushing the rain aside. The rapturous expressions that cross her face are explained by the sudden emergence of a man (Stephen Petronio) from beneath the dashboard. The two embrace but coolly, sexuality yielding to choreography. Barr is a master of sophisticated desire and of desire's deferral, of seduction as a tease and divertissement, of the ironic formalist vignette with its frisson of eroticism. Beneath the projected lovers is the image of a road viewed from a moving car, its double median line smoothly unrolling to the rhythmic click of wipers, the slap of tires on wet asphalt.

A similar gambit is seen in the third component, August, to more spectacular effect. Artists Cecily Brown and Billy Sullivan are tossed and tumbled by the surf in a kind of remake of From Here to Eternity's most famous scene. Drenched and spangled with water and light, Brown and Sullivan are ultimately more involved with the euphoria of their movements than with each other, as they roll in a playful pas de deux without passion or consummation, their self-consciousness the very opposite of the spontaneous combustion of the original Burt Lancaster/Deborah Kerr clinch. In the upper projection, waves crash down in tribute to sex, euphemistic emblems and censors.