The Projected Image: Don't Let It Throw You

NEW YORK

Video art. Traditionally not a subject to bring up to get a dinner party going. Even some dedicated museum-goers, of a likely dinner-party age at least, still begin to . . . yaawwwnnnnnnn at the first mention of the form.

Anyone who flirted with the art scene in the 1970s still remembers snoring through a first encounter with experimental film and video. (I recall going with my artsy parents, and their being even more bored than I was.) Watching a cut apple turn brown could be more exciting than sitting through some of those early pieces -- those, that is, that didn't actually show footage of an apple turning brown.

But now, that apple of the vanguard's eye seems to be looking fresher than it ever has. Over the last 10 years or so, many art scene regulars have fallen hard for projected art, despite lingering memories of the naps it used to guarantee.

An important and impressive exhibition called "Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977," organized at the Whitney Museum of American Art by film and video curator Chrissie Iles, prompts two likely explanations for this collective change of heart. It may be that we're all late in jumping on a bandwagon well underway, finally catching on to virtues that had always been there; or maybe, instead, increased experience led artists to change the way they used moving pictures in their work, and we became the lucky beneficiaries of the improvement. Or maybe, as time spent with the Whitney show suggests most powerfully, it's been a mix of both: There has been successful video- and film-based art right from the start, and recent artists have scored their points by pushing on from those successes and ignoring all the early failures.

One nearly fatal problem with the first experiments in projected art was that you were expected to sit through them as you would a feature film, rather than dip in and out and around them, the way you tend to interact with painting and sculpture. Those first projection artists were still thinking within the framework of the full-length movie, or the prime-time TV show, even as they threw out the narratives those media use to keep us in our seats. Try looking at a painting for a solid hour or two -- try sticking closely to any unstructured, non-narrative, directionless experience for that kind of time -- and it's easy to see where they went wrong.

The Whitney show, dedicated to the best in early projected art, doesn't show any of those clonking failures at their worst, but Andy Warhol's 1965 "Lupe" sometimes comes close. Across two screens of cloudy footage, with equally fuzzy sound, we get to watch Warhol's manufactured starlet Edie Sedgwick reenact the final hours leading to the suicide of real-life Hollywood actress Lupe Velez. The result is precisely as dull as you'd expect, full of inane chatter, drugged stupor, vomit and then unconsciousness. There is a grain of interest in the trancelike tedium the work dares to provoke, and even in the abject, kitschy dullness of its subject matter. But as a central subject for artmaking, dullness, however daring, tends to end up being simply dull. (In the brilliant filmed portraits called "Screen Tests," each one showing just a few minutes of a screen testee staring blankly at the lens, Warhol's flatfooted, deadpan emptiness is concise enough to read as charming, even engrossing.)

Better, more prophetic early projected work tended to be more sensual than properly cinematic, often modeling itself on abstraction's play with shape and color, but also throwing time and light into the mix. An entrancing piece from 1973 by Anthony McCall makes an evanescent, intangible sculpture out of a movie projector's beam shining through a fog-filled room.

Imagine a white ring, about six feet across, projected onto the far side of a gallery: As it slices through the dark and fog, the light leaving the projector describes a thin cone, like an old-fashioned megaphone, beginning narrow at the lens and widening out until it strikes the screen and draws its glowing circle. Now invite people to interact with that solid-looking cone of light, cutting into it with their fingers and bodies, poking their heads right through the sparkling surface to see its hollow inside. At the Whitney, no one could resist the pleasure to be had from coming to grips with light itself, and leaving cheerily empty-handed.

McCall wins us over with the sheer spectacle that underlies every visit to the movies; he purifies stuff that normally gets drowned out by the plot, characters and images that the projector's joyous ray of light is forced to carry. The most popular of today's projected art keeps in mind that a dose of spectacle can sweeten the pill of even the most demanding content. Sometimes, in fact, it risks having more in common with MTV than Rembrandt.

Like much of the other abstract art of the 1970s, McCall's purely formal exploration didn't have many direct descendants. Another kind of inquiry, into the mechanics of the cinematic form itself, had more follow-through.

Canadian Michael Snow, for instance, fiddled with our expectations about the kinds of space we see in film. In a 1974 piece called "Two Sides to Every Story," he projected simultaneous footage of the front and back of an actress onto opposite sides of a thin screen free-hanging in a room: Take in one side of the screen and you see her in rear view as she strides off; walk around to view the panel's other side and you see the actress from the front, approaching nearer to you and to the second cameraman who's shot her from that vantage point. (Out of focus in the space behind her, you can also see the first cameraman, shooting her from the opposite direction, as well as the young artist managing the shoot from a director's chair.) We don't usually recognize the flatness of the cinematic image -- the way all that we see in films is resolutely from a single side -- but Snow's piece helps to make us focus on the two dimensions of the movie screen, and then helps us break through them.

But even this celebrated work by Snow, and similarly cinematic investigations by other big names like Dan Graham and Robert Morris, don't completely foreshadow what's come since. There's a mechanical, self-absorbed quality to this kind of work that makes it matter more to boys who play with cameras than to all the rest of us more interested in the kinds of things they show. These pieces can seem like narrow technical experiments rather than wide-ranging artistic inquiry.

A modest work by Yoko Ono, from the pre-Lennon, pre-celebrity days when her identity still had to do with making vanguard art, comes closer to the kind of video that museum-goers tend to see and like today. It recalls painting's mature invitation to long consideration, rather than the youthful hectoring of more self-consciously experimental work. In Ono's 1966 "Sky TV," her only brush with video, a closed-circuit camera is mounted on the museum roof, pointing at the sky. Down in the exhibition space, a normal color television broadcasts the result, for visitors to do with as they please: No plot, no narrative, no cinematic play at all, just clouds on sky, and a concise account of art's ability to take us out of the gray present and into the wild blue yonder.

Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977 is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. (at 75th Street), New York, through Jan. 6. Call 212-570-3676 or visit www.whitney.org.