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SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
October 28, 2000 - January 15, 2001
Reviewed by Barbara Lee Williams, U.S.A.
E-mail: delano@pacbell.net


Double Feature, the current SFMOMA installation curated by the museum's new media arts maven, Benjamin Weil, is actually a provocative pairing of two disparate works by artists Nick Crowe and Gary Hill. While the works themselves feel vaguely incomplete, the juxtaposition opens an intriguing dialogue on art, sex, death -- and, of course, multimedia.

Formally, the pieces are a contrast in black and white. Crowe's The New Medium (1999), reproduces messages from bereaved relatives to recently deceased family and friends, ostensibly posted on the Internet. The fifteen glass plates bearing 'postings' are mounted on white walls and bathed in clear light. Unfortunately, the floating texts (composed like pages from a web forum but etched shakily on the panes of glass) are excruciatingly hard to read. The obvious purpose of the panels is to explore the strange Net phenomenon, the online memorial (found in websites like http://www.imminentdomain.com/), a unique if peculiar facet of the search for spirituality in our high-tech culture.

Oddly, given the subject's rich potential, Crowe's experiment in communication with the dead is banal and sentimental. Mothers write to dead infants, children lament missing parents or lovers but the effect is not touching: "Remember, Dad, I said one day I would get a computer? I did but I never thought that I would write you in heavená." The fifteen texts are suspiciously similar in voice, reinforcing the impression that they are fictional. Still, several passages suggest the irresistible appeal of the Net to contemporary mourners: "I feel like I'm just writing a letter to you, like you're at home waiting for my letter. LOL," or, as 'Ruthie' writes to 'Ross': "It's like you never even left." The most provocative aspect of this sad banality is its revelation of our seemingly irresistible urge to launch private musings out into cyberspace.

One aspect of Crowe's installation is striking: several pale squares of light that have been carefully arranged on the floor. Eerily, these simultaneously evoke both the idea of 'heavenly light' and a vision of cemetery tombstones. Nonetheless, despite this radiant environment, it is difficult to feel genuine empathy for the 'characters' in each of Crowe's 'tragic' scenarios - for our understanding of their loss is distanced by the awareness that these narratives are, ultimately, fiction.

In contrast to the dazzling brightness of Crowe's work, the installation of Gary Hill's experimental video, Remembering Paralinguay (2000), (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson), plunges us into darkness - although our immersion is not long enough to be genuinely uncomfortable. After a few seconds, a small glowing light projected on one of the walls increases in size until it emerges as an image of a young, blond woman in a classic black dress. Despite her chic haircut and garb, she moves with an awkward gait, her image growing larger and larger until we are confronted with a huge close up of her screaming face. The sounds that emerge are incomprehensible but clearly anguished. Harsher and more perplexing than actual paralanguage (sounds in language that have no semantic meaning - and which seem to have inspired the work's title), this gibberish is jarring, its disturbing effect enhanced by both the woman's beauty and her physical awkwardness.

The cries continued for several minutes, and, as I was confronted by this woman's accusing eyes and wide screaming mouth, I found myself mesmerized, momentarily struck dumb by her unrelenting, frustrated attempts to speak. Her passion was tangible yet the sounds - pseudo words, near screams- made no sense and, as she confronted me I suddenly found I shared her helplessness. In dramatic contrast to Nick Crowe's abstract references to loss, Hill's piece seems a confrontation with genuine grief -- with the utter failure of language to communicate a hidden narrative of pain and loss.

With this work, Remembering Paralinguay, Hill dominates a large room with a single video image, subverting our expectations of this sexy female with startling expressions of profound, highly personal emotion, -- emotion most often hidden from view.

Each of these installations feels unfinished, but, the rich contrasts between two - light vs. dark, word vs. image, narrative vs. symbol - is far more suggestive than either of the works alone. In this, Weil's Double Feature bodes well for the adoption of new media to some of art's most difficult subjects: pain, human communication, sex and death.

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