In the early 70's this was still a radical concept. The gallery was suddenly no longer regarded as a neutral receptacle, an ethically blank space. It was a white cube, an active container of meaning wherein we could become part of the art. All this may not come as news to you now. But you may be surprised by how refreshing it is to encounter it in a near-virginal, unadulterated state.
Ms. Lucier's Polaroid Image Series matches slide projections to an audio tape. The slides (a woman, croquet players, Boston, a room) are photographs copied over and over, the work consisting of these images progressively deteriorating until they become unintelligible. The tape by the composer Alvin Lucier, then her husband, is a speech similarly rerecorded until it also can't be grasped. The work is simple and elegant: speech and image transformed into music and abstract form, as if to say that music and abstraction are the essence of language and sight.
