Rapturous

Paul Chan: The 7 Lights
The New Museum
April 9 - June 29, 2008

Our first encounter with the transfixing projected work of Paul Chan was "1st Light" (2006), our favorite piece in the otherwise-awful 2006 Whitney Biennial. This winter we ran into this work again at the ICA Boston. Naturally, we were looking forward to seeing more at the New Museum.

With contemporary art chockablock with sloppy assemblages and hipster nihilism (see the New Museum's "Double Album" show), this lyrical and thought-provoking exhibit of Paul Chan's work is a welcome ray of hope.

One of three current shows at the New Museum and located in the medium-sized 3rd floor gallery, the exhibition represents the U.S. premier of New York-based Chan's "7 Lights" cycle, which was completed over the last three years and debuted at London's Serpentine Gallery.

The video works are projected mainly on the floor, often resembling light from a window. Each looping piece is 14-minutes long and represents a single day -- with a dawn of colors giving way to stark black-on-white animated forms populating a weird apocalyptic dreamscape in which assorted objects float skyward. It's fun to pick them out: In "5th Light" (2007) its violent things -- guns, grenades, bullets, luggage, a map of the United States, and in "3rd Light" (2006), projected across a long Last Supper-style wooden table are images of food -- an apple, a spoon, grapes.

Defying this anti-gravity tableau are human figures dropping from above, evoking 9/11. Deflecting any literalist interpretation, Chan's bad-dream vision connects these jumpers to what he calls a "reverse Rapture" -- inverting the idea of the evangelical elect ascending to heaven, leaving worldly possessions behind. This light vs. dark dichotomous dystopia also references Biblical Creation, with the structure of the cycle itself calls to mind Genesis: six projections ("he rested on the seventh day"). In the beginning, there was light.

An activist who has done politically-minded works, including films about Iraq and New Orleans (as well as the amusing audio piece, Lite Rock/Leftist Talk), Chan is certainly tweaking fundamentalism, but it's also a kind of Plato's cave shadow play of images from our post-2001 collective psyche, reflecting these scary, mixed up, reality distorting times of endless wars, climate change and peak oil.

In "2nd Light" (2006) a tree is stripped bare of its leaves by a stick-and-rag-carrying army -- a dark comment on humanity like something from Cormac McCarthy. "4th Light" (2006) shows a spider surviving as storm of building materials (hammer, measuring tape) ascends, its web quivering in the wind.

The literal lightness of the floating objects balances the work's otherwise dark subject matter with a figurative lightness. How can you not smile at an apple floating through space, Newton be damned?

Chan has said that the silent cycle and its strange, haunting physics of movement proffer a kind of visual music. Underlining this point, the grouping includes several framed works of sheet music collaged with shreds of black paper. Provocative, poetical and musical, these works are of the moment and here to stay.