Mary Lucier: Chase Manhattan Plaza

By Charles Hagan, Artforum
July 1, 1984

A big question in any video installation is what to do with the TV sets. At this point in the development of TV technology the equipment that generates the illusion can’t be physically separated from the image itself.

 

In Ohio at Giverny, her video installation in last year’s Whitney Biennial, Mary Lucier hid the work’s seven monitors behind a white wall—a simple solution that made the piece look like a series of pictures hung along the gallery, the “series of portholes” that exhibitions of perspective-based paintings were dismissed as by some Modernist critics. In Winter Garden, installed in a corner of this echoey, glass-walled, Modernist-anomic bank lobby, Lucier enshrouded her monitors—six, in various sizes—in chic containers shaped like unusual geometric solids, all covered with mat Colorcore Formica in decorator pastels. TV sets are inherently furniture, and the motif here was Italian modo, with Lucier’s five units (one, a long horizontal, held two monitors) clustered together like merchandise in the back room of a Soho design atelier.