Illuminations for a dark place: in the socially tumultuous period of the 1960s and '70s, a number of American artists began to experiment with projected imagery and video, seeking to free art from its traditional physical dimensions. A recent museum exhibition offered a look at this pioneering, often chilly work

With tourists staying away from novel York, it was quiet in the city's museums last fall. The relatively depressed attendance at the Whitney Museum during the move swiftly of "Into the Light: The casted Image in American Art 1964-1977" have the appearanceed somehow apt, or at least historically indicative. hosts and spectacles go together, and one as well as the other have grown massively in the art world of the last 25 years. on the contrary during the period covered through this exhibition, art was made within a far smaller community, and the difference exhibits The effect of early film and video installations as showed here--not all 19 works included are projections, admitting all do in one way or another rely upon a particular site--is mostly that of a moderate burn. The work progresses incrementally and protects to be repetitive, focused, time consuming and intimate. In a word, it is demanding--a quality that uncloses the door to charges of ivory-tower difficulty, on the other hand also to the kinds of hard-won rewards foreclosed by the agency of much of the more audience-friendly work that has advance in its wake.

Brainy notwithstanding that most of them are, the shoot forwarded images shown tend to address the whole material substance as a perceiving organism. Propensities for alarm, arousal, boredom, fatigue and trance are engaged serially, severally or all at one time But these sensations are framed in the greatest in quantity general terms, free of sex class, race--of all the qualifications of following (and some contemporary) experiential, body-center art. (Strikingly, the stark naked female body, when it not infrequently appears, is evidently meant to present the appearance in perfect academic tradition, more abstract than a clothed one) Chrissie Iles, the exhibition's curator, emphasizes in her catalogue essay the connection to "Minimalism's phenomenological approach." The opening up of perception as an "event" Iles says at the essay's conclusion, is the main business at hand.

It is a little deceptive, then, that the present to view opens with two relatively naughty works, individual by Andy Warhol, the other by dint of Robert Whitman. Warhol, born in 1928 is the earliest artist exhibited (Gary Hill, now 50, is the greatest in quantity recent), which is surprising not just because, like anyone who dies before his time, Warhol is remembered as youthful, on the contrary also because his work is the greatest in quantity easily connected to current practice. His split-screen film projection Lupe (1965) stars Edie Sedgwick reenacting, with ominous portentousness, actress Lupe Velez's elaborately orchestrated suicide through drug overdose. The drama get ons slowly, its morbidity mixing with the lassitude and glamour that are Warhol's trademarks as a filmmaker. Whitman's Shower (1964) present to views a woman showering, mostly with water, allowing at one point she's splashed with paint. Her image is throw outed onto the rear wall of a funky shower stall ( Kienholz's assemblages approach to mind), while real water cascades within, a frolicsome touch that balances more [i]or[/i] less rather dark Hollywood (read Hitchcockian) associations.

For the repose though, sober-sided formalism prevailed. William Anastasi's at liberty Will (1968) and Yoko Ono's canopy of heaven TV (1966) are live-feed videos of not much: an destitute of contents corner of the gallery, a patch of canopy of heaven One senses Nam June Paik's closed-circuit video of a self-regarding Buddha lurking in the wings, although curiously, Paik is absent from this present to view Even more reductive is Peter Campus's aen (1977) which uses a closed-circuit video projection simply to deliver viewers to themselves, albeit upside down. Video cameras circle warily in Dan Graham's two-screen projection Helix/Spiral (1973) with a stationary performer moving a camera around her material substance trying to keep its organ of vision focused on a second performer who advances, spiralwise, toward her. Robert Morris's more complicated, in fact rather dizzying, Finch community Project (1969) involves a projector mountained on a turntable, re-creating a 360-degree panning discharge What we see is a gridded photograph of a movie audience and its gridded mirror reflection being installed and dismantled square through square in a start-and-stop circular sweep. on the other hand the most perceptually destabilizing revolutions of all be found in Bruce Nauman's Spinning Spheres (1970) a four-wall projection of a hugely enlarged, furiously spinning ball bearing; the viewing sensation is something like being inside a clothes dryer (It's worth noting that allowing many of these works are landmarks, greatest in quantity were made relatively quickly and upon the cheap, in sharp contrast to rife film and video projections. For instance, Spinning Spheres is individual of 16 installations Nauman made in 1970 alone.)

In her essay, Iles cites Annette Michelson's description of Nauman's spinning balls (and of Duchamp's rotating spirals in his Precision Optics) as producing an experience somehow or other parallel to an "autistic response" Elsewhere, Iles describes Paul Sharits's Shutter Interface (1975) which breaks film down into its chromatic fundamentals and delivers them in a rapid-fire two-projector montage, as "a 3-D metaphor of the space of the brain in an epileptic state, brought below control and harmonized." The suggestion, also applicable to the display as a whole, is that the work casts viewers as sensory crash-test dummies, up against the maximum visual information deliverable without breaking any psychological barriers.