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PARTISAN REVIEW
proximity of the viewer, allowed you slowly to piece together the story,
through the recollections of participants - Lucier's mother and her
brother and, miraculously, an aged Italian woman, located by chance in
Positano, who had not only known the young couple, but had worked
for them and remembered the christening of their child - and the rather
embittered comments of that child, now a middle-aged woman, wholly
American, but with what in some circles might be called an exotic ori–
gin-myth.
The density of the piece, the number of soundtracks and "active"
images, depended on the number of visitors. I'd be hard put to say
whether isolation or the crowd made the work more effective, since
isolation revealed sounds hidden by the full orchestration, but full or–
chestration created a visual counterpoint among the images on the
monitors. These were close-up heads, filmed at a slow speed, not enough
to suggest slow-motion, but sufficient to make subtle changes of expres–
sion and small movements dramatic and monumental, or make the swing
of an earring into an eloquent gesture.
Last Rites (Positano)
demanded
close attention and multiple visits and amply rewarded them; you kept
discovering things you'd missed the first time around: memories, observa–
tions, and associations. And through it all, against the back wall of the
darkened gallery, two overlapping projected images of rippling water,
timing slightly shifted, provided a graphic metaphor for instability and
the passage of time. Lucier's one of the few video artists, in my experi–
ence, to use her medium for its inherently visual properties, not simply as
a way of recording a narrative. From what I've seen of her work over
the last decade or so, it keeps on getting subtler, more suggestive, and
better.
