There is really no esthetic link between Mary Lucier and Dara Birnbaum, save for the fact that each is a video artist and each has created a special video environment for a public space, one uptown, one downtown. Their work is poles apart. Miss Lucier, remaining within the visual-arts tradition, views the screen as an animated canvas for lyrical landscape imagery; Miss Birnbaum takes her cues from the content of commercial broadcast television itself, using video to explore and satirize it. Yet seeing both of these cleverly designed multi- screen installations gives the viewer a sense of two directions—one an interest in video as an extension of traditional media, the other a concern with video as it relates to television itself—prevailing in a medium that, for all its innovative talents, is still in search of a supportive audience.
Miss Lucier—whose beautiful video piece, ''Ohio at Giverny,'' exploring the environment of the painter Claude Monet, was shown at last year's Whitney Biennial—has now produced ''Winter Garden,'' another multi-screen presentation that mingles closeup floral imagery with views of a Japanese garden and the architecture of lower Manhattan. Installed (through March 9) in a corner of the vast lobby at the Chase Manhattan Bank's main office, One Chase Manhattan Plaza (right outside, on the plaza itself, stands the commanding Dubuffet sculpture Four Trees, installed by the bank in 1972), it clusters six television monitors, set at different angles and levels, in a loosely arranged group of sculptural modules. Each of the free-standing modules is a geometric shape covered with Formica in a muted tone, with both the shapes and the colors designed to echo the melange of buildings viewable through the big lobby windows, as well as some of the images on the tapes themselves. (One or two even put you in mind of the Chase logo.)