Liisa Roberts
Lehmann Maupin
New York, New York
January 4 - February 1

In the 1960s and '70s, when artists first began to work with video, the mere novelty of the medium and the fact that it was appropriated from the visually powerful and influential world of mass media seemed enough. Video was lodged swiftly within the lexicon of art but, by and large, most artists employed it without making radical alterations. The flat, immobile screen and the passive viewer/active transmitter relationship established by broadcast television companies were replicated in video made by artists. The result is that, in art, videos quickly gained a reputation for being overly didactic, long, and boring.

In recent year, however, video has become more like any other medium. It is treated as a material that can be broken down, manipulated, and reconfigured. Sculptural installations that incorporate video force a more active relationship between video and the viewer by eliminating the space that divides the two. In Gary Hill's work, for instance, the cathode ray tube is frequently separated from a support structure and suspended or arranged on the ground so that the viewer has to examine the changing video frames at close range. In order to experience the work, the viewer must occupy the same pocket of space as the video. Hill suggests a way of conjoining the body of the viewer with the medium (and, conversely, he often works with video images of the body). Tony Oursler goes a step further, projecting video images onto stuffed fabric that looks like bodies. In his case, video literally becomes a body.

But film in art is different. By and large, film has mostly eluded being molded and manipulated into sculpture-like assemblages. It remains in the same place as video in its early days in the art world, with the space between viewer and film-image intact. Given its nature-moving pictures formed by a beam of light projected against a flat surface-the viewer usually has to remain below or behind the projector (away from the screen) in order not to sully the film-images. So making film more "sculptural" is a tricky proposition.

With Trap Door, however, Liisa Roberts has created a three dimensional film installation that can be circled, observed at close range, and even touched without affecting the projected images. Enclosing three 16-millimeter film projectors in a triangular corral, Roberts uses rear-screen projection to display images that can be seen from either inside or outside the screened-in area. Close-up images of a woman's hands held in front of her chest making slow, cryptic gestures akin to genuflection or sign language are interspersed with shots of anonymous countryside from a moving train and occasional bursts of text: "later," "you," "far," "here," "me," "now."

A fourth projector, separated from the original cluster of three, uses a long screen and traditional projection (elongated CinemaScope, to be exact). The film on this projector features a nineteenth-century bronze sculpture, which resides in Central Park, of three figures holding hands. The camera circles the sculpture rapidly, but the film has been spliced so that, in film parlance, the "narrative is thwarted"-from the viewer's perspective, no rotation around the sculpture is ever complete. Words-"then," "her," "there," "near," "him," "sooner"-synchronized to appear at the same time as text on the adjacent triangle of screens, flash on and then disappear. The text itself cuts into the already disjointed "narrative" made by the camera circling the sculpture, emphasizing the formal nature of film: the static, individual frames that together make up the moving image, and the splice of the editor, who makes narrative appear seamless by piercing together separate film strips.

As is usual in film, the viewer who walks through the space between the screen and the projector spewing images of the Central Park sculpture imprints her shadow/body onto the image, disrupting the picture. But Roberts purposely juxtaposes this "old" method of viewing and projecting film with a "new" one that allows the viewer to approach moving pictures and examine them at close range. In essence, Roberts gives the triangular group of screens traditional video properties (back projection), while retaining, with the one projector, an element of traditional film.

Roberts is essentially a formalist: her work is both in film and about film. She takes great pains to illustrate how the medium works, juxtaposing a traditional model (the singular projector) with an oppositional one (the triangle of screens) just to prove her point. But there is also a structuralist point being made here, since Roberts treats film as a language that is inextricably connected to spoken and written language, as well as to narrative, through which speaking and writing develop. Added to this are the ambiguous hand gestures of the woman in Trap Door that serve as a bodily language. An act of communication is occurring; even if we can't "read" her gestures, we interpret her actions, somehow, as language.

Film, language, and narrative: all three unfold in time, and it is the slow, subtle pacing of monosyllabic text and stark images that makes this clear in "Trap Door." Roberts may be a formalist who tugs and pulls at her medium in order to draw sophisticated conclusions, but, in the end, her work has a quiet, accessible beauty that makes it quite captivating. The rhyming of images-bodies "live" and sculptural, simple text, and bucolic vistas filmed from a speeding train-with the whirring of cameras and projectors and the rushing frames of the film itself may be a distinctly formal exercise, but Roberts' finer theoretical points. Like a beautiful foreign language you hear and enjoy, but don't understand a work of, the visual aspects of Trap Door are both soothing and arresting. They are like any of the structures (film, narrative) that Roberts describes: machinations that both make and hide meaning, that open unexpectedly, like a trap door.

-- Martha Schwendener, Brooklyn, New York

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