Light show - multimedia and interactive art, various artists, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, New York

Art in America, Sept, 1996 by Eleanor Heartney

A reconstructed room from Jenny Holzer's contribution to the 1990 Venice Biennale flickers with trademark phrases, here in multiple languages. Confined to a neutral box rather than the marble-floored American pavilion in Venice, this work lacks the drama of her more architectural efforts at Dia or the uptown Guggenheim. Marie-Jo Lafontaine's monumental Les Larmes d'acier (Tears of Steel, a name applied to German bombs in World War II) first appeared at the 1987 Documenta. It suggests the melding of man and machine through 27 monochrome monitors in an elaborate sculptural framework. We see muscular young men working out on exercise machines, accompanied by an opera sound track and culminating with air-raid sirens.

Bill Viola is represented by two pieces, both of which use nearly motionless images and counter the frenetic image barrage that characterizes much video art. In Threshold (1992) the viewer passes under an electronic signboard flashing the latest news, into a dim room in which the sound of slow breathing can be heard and images of the heads of three sleeping figures fill the walls. The City of Man (1989) is a trip-tych of three nearly static video representations of disaster, developed landscape and political rituals.

Bruce Nauman and Steina and Woody Vasulka are represented by old and new works. The 1990 Raw Material: Brrr uses what has become a Nauman standard - a video of a large head (in this case, Nauman's own) shown horizontally, shaking slightly and uttering the title noise. Far more provocative is his early work Video Surveillance Piece (Public Room, Private Room), 1969-70. The viewer enters a room which is empty but for a small black-and-white monitor in one comer and an oscillating video camera in the other. Though the lens appears to be recording activity in the room, the screen remains blank, because the viewer's image is in fact being sent to a sealed room with an identical monitor. The image that the viewer sees on the screen, meanwhile, comes from that empty, inaccessible room. This work creates an intriguing play of presence and absence with a remarkable economy of means.

The Vasulka works also suggest that bigger is not necessarily better. Steina's recent work, Borealis (1993), permits viewers to wend their way through a set of large, freestanding translucent screens, each side presenting projected images of abstracted natural phenomena - water, rocks, earth. The older, collaborative work, Matrix I (1970-72), is a wall of black-and-white monitors which presents an early effort to run abstract images in a synchronized manner across a field of screens. Again, the early work has more vitality than the recent one, despite its obviously cruder means.

The success of these older works and the vacancy of many of the newer ones suggests that, in many cases, video art's concepts have not kept up with advances in technology. One wonders: why does Viola's City of Man need to be a video work? Wouldn't a photographic triptych be just as effective? Does Lafontaine take the idea of the machine-body meld anywhere new?