Susan Hiller at Gagosian - New York - Brief Article

Five big, good-looking, candy-hued square videos were projected on a gallery wall, tinted electric blue, yellow, orange, pink and green. Each showed a separate video vignette of a Lolitaesque young girl exercising telekinetic powers. Gratification was instant. Susan Hiller appropriated the footage from Hollywood films for her latest piece, "Psi Girls." A juvenile Drew Barrymore incinerates all manner of things with her innocent, vulturelike gaze in Firestarter; a smoldering, malcontent private-school coed seems to sublimate hatred of (or desire for) a female classmate by concentrating intensely, psychically balancing a pencil on her desk in The Craft; a prepubescent Matilda gleefully floats spoons, Cheerios and poker chips in the air, just because she can.

A floor-shaking soundtrack of gospel clapping and drumming grew from a stark, minimal rhythm to a frenzied, dervishlike crescendo. Then it abruptly cut out, giving way to static noise before the scenes switched to a different color and place on the wall, and the two-minute cycle started again. Audiences sat mesmerized in the airconditioned darkness, pinned in place by the surround-sound spectacle for at least a few turns through the two-minute, synchronized loop. The exhibition was produced in association with Panasonic, presumably enabling the uncommonly satisfying, polished display.

The "Psi Girls" are sexy, but they aren't erotic in the borderline-pornographic manner of Jock Sturges's and Sally Mann's photography; they're seductive in a wholesome, grrrlish, PC way. Insofar as they fuel a fantasy of having special, mystical brain control over a universe full of domineering boys, grown-ups and other nuisances, the "Psi Girls" might be considered good role models, icons of healthy female volition and individuation, rather like the Powerpuff Girls, Xena Warrior Princess, Dark Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The clips Hiller expropriates for her show, however, don't read much differently from how they did in their original movie contexts. The biggest mutation is the addition of different colors--an oddly modernist esthetic strategy for an artist like Hiller, who is generally known to posit a markedly political, postmodern agenda. But even though the apparatus of filmmaking is not elucidated and girlhood isn't subverted, the show was perfectly enjoy able. And maybe it's best to admit that sometimes Hollywood has something (besides money) on the art world. On a July afternoon in Chelsea, perhaps it's nicer to just cede some moral ground, sit back and enjoy the show.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group