Taken one by one, his photos are hit or miss. People will line up and mug as if for a school-yearbook photo. (A shot of kids lined up in the spray of a fire hydrant is a witty variation.) But his directing (or what I imagine is directing) could also be more subtle. Men gather on the sidewalk outside a candy-and-cigarettes shop playing checkers — it looks as if Harris had just happened on the scene, but note that the on-lookers crowding around the gameboards all conveniently stand behind them so as not to block Harris’s view.
It’s when his work is seen as a whole that Harris’s achievement comes into focus. As a photojournalist, he’s set apart by his connection to his subjects. He’s an insider portraying his own neighbors, and that gives his work the warmth and familiarity of family photos. Sometimes his photographs even remind me of Norman Rockwell — in a good way. The two men share a generous, amused, empathetic eye that’s apparent in Harris’s shot of an officious young crossing guard halting a group of kids at a sidewalk edge, or his photo of a tiny boy in too-big boxing gloves sitting in the corner of a boxing ring forcing a smile as a tear rolls down his cheek. But the connection is bigger than that. At the heart of both artists’ work is an optimistic vision of community — and perhaps America — as a nourishing, tolerant, welcoming place. These images may depict our many difficulties and divisions, but they bring out our best selves.
Two selections of videos on view at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center serve as a mini survey of the history of video art since the 1960s. Both draw works from the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, which is said to be one of the finest private collections of new-media art, and from the New Art Trust, which the California couple founded in 1997.
The main event, “Sounding the Subject,” comprises five videos loosely based on the theme of sound in video. The best piece is Nam June Paik’s exquisitely simple TV Buddha, a re-creation of an installation Paik first made in 1974. A video camera stands behind a monitor recording the image of a bronze Buddha sitting across the room; the result plays on the monitor. The footage is live, but unless someone walks between the statue and the camera, you wouldn’t notice — it might as well be a still picture. Paik short-circuits a basic element of video — it records things happening over time — while suggesting a sort of mystical eternally present instant. The piece is by turns funny, eerie, and mind-blowing.
In Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s 2002 The House (Talo), a woman gets out of a car, walks into a house, and worries about the car following her into the house; then a little car drives by on the wall. A cow appears on TV before wandering into her living room. “Time is random and spaces have become overlapping,” the woman says. There’s one magical moment when she flies through a forest. The film comes off as riff on Luis Buñuel.
The other videos feel like experiments that might once have been groundbreaking but now just seem tedious. David Hammons’s Phat Free (1995-’97) opens with two minutes of clanking and a dark screen. Finally, the image comes up and the noise is revealed to be the artist kicking a pail down a city sidewalk. Whatever.
