Cristin Tierney, on the Bowery, presented Mary Lucier’s nine channel video and sound installation “Leaving Earth.” Inspired by the journal kept by her late husband, the painter and writer Robert Berlind, after his diagnosis with a terminal illness, the work combines video and still images of the couple’s living and working environments, offering glimpses of their Chelsea and rural New York State homes and studios, and their surroundings. Both a deeply moving meditation on mortality and an affirmation of continuity, rebirth, and the persistence of memory, the piece explores Lucier’s experience of the end of Berlind’s life, as well as his response to his situation, best described as a detached curiosity about the impending transformation. The largest screen was a kind of introduction, with images of Berlind’s sunlit studio and quotations from the journal: “being about to pass through an unknowable membrane into the unknown” and “Spirit and body contemplate separation and yet I forget to fear death.” We saw a pot of beautifully cleaned brushes and close-ups of verdant paintings, one digitally melting into liquid paint. The artist’s face filled the screen, nearly dissolved into pointillist touches— actually “snow” from obsolete video—and then disappeared. We heard cawing crows and chirping birds, a chain saw and heavy machinery, a plaintive saxophone, and more.
On the opposite side of the room, six monitors displayed loops of images in indeterminate sequences: family photos of both Lucier and Berlind, their friends and relations; a collapsing house; a fallen carousel horse; baby swallows fed by their mother; the shudders of a dying fawn; a rushing stream; construction machinery; rubble; fires at Ground Zero; hands drawing massive logs. The rectangular screens, elevated on slim supports, evoked an installation of landscape paintings, while remaining declaratively about their wholly contemporary medium. A near-horizontal monitor offered images mainly of water, evoking a pond whose depths and reflections Berlind often painted, while a wallmounted component captured the changing light and atmosphere of changing seasons. Excerpts from the journal were interleafed unpredictably: “my mind is now that of a child for whom time does not yet exist”; “moving with as little distraction as possible toward the light”; “finding myself on the edge of consciousness, the lights go out like that.” Lucier’s face filled the highest monitor, her expression neutral and inscrutable. At times her image and the pointillist image of Berlind confronted each other.
“Leaving Earth”—a phrase from the journal—demanded that we spend time, sometimes concentrating on one sequence, sometimes skipping from one to another, allowing the gradual accumulation of images, sounds, and the occasional phrase from the journal to present a message of loss, resignation, and hope. As Lucier put it “words, pictures, and sound become interchangeable, not serving as descriptions, but as a rumination on reality and a form of coping.” Or as Berlind described his state of mind: “a succession of discontinuous moments occur then disappear without the elemental structure of sequence.” If we could wrench our attention away from the mesmerizing images, an enigmatic mask-like object, Last Breath (2018), constructed with found objects including a burnt-out obsolete television tube, solemnly watched from the sidelines. It was like a hi-tech version of a classical herm or a funerary portrait, or perhaps, given Lucier’s distinguished history as a video pioneer, a spirit of place.
