Through February 15, 2009

The promo image that got me in the door.“Enter a hauntingly beautiful world of landscape and loss” (Amon Carter museum promotional material)

I knew I had to see this installation the first time I saw the poster, which showed a rural country in a rear view mirror. I’d seen that sight so many times while driving a pickup and pulling a horse trailer, before I moved from a small town to a city, so I ought to be able to appreciate this exhibit, a lament for the loss of rural life. It was with great anticipation that I walked up the stone steps of the Amon Carter museum and found my way to the second story, southeastern gallery, where the 5-video screen exhibit is playing on an 18-minute continuous thread.  

Video art, because it’s our current medium of choice (in TV and movies) and is so approachable, has a place in the modern fine art museum. The question of how to exploit that place, however, remains debated. Last week’s review of TCU’s Warhol exhibit talked about how Reineke Dijkstra’s video installation successfully engaged the question of portraiture and film to present an urban population on the margins. 

Mary Lucier is working with a different topic here, discussions of settlement patterns and western history. This conversation was already in full development back I was in grade school, when filmstrips and super-8 movies presented us with images of western farms, ranches and wild places and a voice-over discused information about the pioneers, the cowboys, and the sodbusters. 

The “Plains’” exhibit’s electronic soundtrack by longtime Lucier collaborator Earl Howard is haunting and lovely. The images or rural North Dakota, as they flicker past, bring to mind the experience of driving across a cold and rural landscape. The viewer experiences exploring an abandoned house, worn down by years, as the camera lingers over a potbellied stove, a broken trophy, a smashed piece of doll furniture, and rusting 50’s automobiles with shattered windows.  

Although I genuinely enjoyed the installation, especially the beautiful views of the grasslands, both close up and far away, I was troubled by a certain sinister mood; a sense of darkness pervaded even as the screens showed videotape filled with light. “A nagging strain of pessimism informs the work,” agreed the New York Observer when the installation was shown in that city from March 10 to April 28 2007. Does North Dakota deserve this?

Whether you think so might depend on whether you think the prairie country is really in danger because small farmers are moving off the land. Apparently, in North Dakota, the state has lost about 1% of its population over the last five years, and many people no longer live in the countryside. It’s not unlike the Texas panhandle. 

Lucier’s rhetoric seems to be “look how modern economies drive people off the land.” In her defense, that idea was not cooked up on her own; it was fed to her by award-winning North Dakota Museum of Art curator Laurel Reuter, who purchased several works on this theme with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and who is a North Dakotan born and educated. I admit this gives her some moral authority to say what’s important and what’s happening in her home state. 

Nevertheless, I have to quibble with the exhibit’s theme and interpretation. There are some hopeful signs for land use in the state, for example, the development of a new National Park, Theodore Roosevelt, which is returning poor quality farm land to its natural splendor. Buffalo and wild horses are resurgent within the park’s boundaries. Is this really a loss? Can we perhaps be satisfied that North Dakota’s rural depopulation comes not from modern evils but from the revelation that not every hundred acres of land has a human carrying capacity?

The exhibit concludes with a video of a bull rider coming out of the chute to the strains of George Strait singing “I can still make Cheyenne.” The rider is thrown but his hand is stuck in the strap, and the bull sunfishes around attempting to stomp him while he dances and jumps under and over the crashing hooves until the clowns get to him. The rhetoric I take away from this is that the North Dakotan is a survivor in a rough country. And that’s fair enough. 

Why then does the image begin to split into mirror images of itself, distorted into a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes? According to Brooklyn Rail art writer Phong Bui, this part of the video is “pulsing with the overlappings and repetitions of the unfolding images right in the middle, it’s both sexy and psychedelic at the same time.” 

Believe me, there’s nothing psychedelic or sexy about depopulaton in rural regions, and the comment tells me Bui is concerned only with technique, not with theme. Perhaps the artist, who’s lived in New York since 1974, doesn’t see the contradiction between her theme and using technology to deconstruct it? 

Actually, that’s probably the point, and perhaps we are expected to infer that modern life strips the land of its culture and relevance.  I’m not willing to go along with that interpretation of the situation. By destructing the cowboy’s image with the video camera, Lucier ultimately suggests that her own medium, video and by extension, technology, is a part of the problem, a premise with which I disagree. But that’s a topic for another post. 

At the end of the 18 minutes, although I enjoyed the experience and would have been glad to watch again, I felt suspicious that the artist was a Big City Person, who has no real roots, even remembered ones, in rural life. Perhaps that’s the reason she appears to register only the surface view, not the bursting life of the land which predated us and will be still here when we as individuals and as a race are gone.