One of the most satisfying aspects of “Super Vision,” a by-product of the interior design of the new building, is how it allows you to enjoy video installations without their interfering with other works on display. With its soundproof ante-chambers and carefully choreographed entrances, the new ICA succeeds like few other spaces in honoring the demands made by video artists. Yoko Ono’s 1966 Sky TV, however, occupies wall space alongside more traditional wall hangings. At first it looks like a uniformly sky-blue painting lit from behind; gradually, almost imperceptibly, the painting transforms as the closed-circuit TV that has been turned on the heavens records the changes in the sky.
MONA HATOUM’S CORPS ÉTRANGER: Like looking at a living slide on a phone-booth-sized microscope. |
Twenty-eight years later, Mona Hatoum turned a video projector of a different kind on herself. With the help of a physician and an endoscopic camera, you can watch the penetration of the artist’s own orifices while an amplifier projects her breathing and her heartbeats. Hatoum knows better than to allow for such imagery to occupy a wall. Instead, the footage is cast on the black floor of a small, cylindrical white room which you can enter through two doorways. The result is like looking at a living slide on a phone-booth-sized microscope; discomforting revelations abound. Just beyond Hatoum’s Corps étranger (“Foreign Body”), another set of body parts comes to life in a selection from Tony Oursler’s Eyes series. Five white balls, ranging in size from melons to weather balloons and either suspended from the ceiling or resting on the floor, act as screens for five different projectors, each of which casts a video loop of a blinking human eye. One morphs into fire, another into atmospheric phenomena, another into industrial forms.Captivating, astute, and flawlessly executed, it reminded me of someone I know who can commit to memory the birthdays of everyone he meets. What feels like personal attention, the human gaze, remembering the day you were born, may be little more than a party trick.
Eyes both reflect and take in the world, as do mirrors, and various artists handle reflecting surfaces in ways that entertain, though often with less complexity and ambition than Hatoum and Oursler. Josiah McElheny has constructed a mirrored case that holds differently shaped mirrored decanters. Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2005) is a wonder even if it doesn’t get far beyond being a magnificent department-store display case. Jeff Koons’s stainless steel Rabbit, on the other hand, feels both obligatory (what international group show doesn’t include Jeff Koons?) and cynical — Rabbit would surprise no one as an Easter prop at Toys “R” Us. More successful is Anish Kapoor’s waist-high orb Turning the World Inside Out, another stainless-steel confection, with a deep navel at its top; as you bend to look in, it’s possible to imagine falling into your own reflection.
Other highlights of “Super Vision” include Andreas Gursky’s monumental photo Shanghai, which depicts the seemingly infinite interior of a hotel atrium. Nearly 10 feet tall and seven feet wide, it envelops you in the circular, golden tiers of the many floors whose luminosity and anonymity combine to make the space alternately forlorn and exciting. Thomas Ruff’s similarly huge, black-and-white digitally manipulated photos of both natural and unnatural disasters — an erupting Mount Saint Helens, Iraqi bunkers — deliver you to an emotionally less ambiguous place. Bridget Riley’s clever and prescient 1964 abstraction, Pause, is a study in how a plane of uniform black dots can be made to feel like an undulating surface.
