Fragments of A Memory

FRAGMENTS OF A MEMORY Melinda Barlow Mary Lucier, Last Rites (Positano),Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, New York he last stop on a long journey from Alaska to the Amazon depicted in Noah' Raven (1993), a video installation by Mary Lucier, might be a place but is actually a person : out of the cracked, red earth of a cassiterite mine comes the warm skin of sculptor Nancy Fried and, after that, a soft, wrinkled abdomen with a long, deep scar. The scar belongs to Lucier's mother, Margaret L. Glosser, and marks the site of a surgical procedure for the ovarian cancer that claimed her life in 1992. However, in this ambiguous image which looks, at first, like another ravaged landscape, she lives, breathes, and becomes a part of her daughter's complex rumination on the environmental crisis and its impact on the human body. Installed at the Toledo Museum of Art one year after Glosser's death, Noah's Raven is dedicated to her memory. Later the same year, Oblique House (Valdez) (1993) was built in an abandoned car dealership in Rochester, New York, as part of Montage '93, International Festival of the Image. In many ways a companion piece to Noah'sRaven, Oblique House brought together four stories told by three women and one man, all of whom lived through the earthquake that devoured Valdez in 1964 as well as the massive oil spill that blackened her shores in 1989. Shown in tight facial close-ups vastly slowed down on monitors nestled in the corners of a small sheet rock house, these survivors remained silent until visitors approached the motion-sensors controlling their speech. Once activated, they shared their experiences in voices processed to enhance resonance and pitch, sometimes singing solo, often in a chorus, as visitors composed and rearranged their requiem for Valdez. In March of 1995, Last Rites (Positano), Lucier's latest work, will occupy the Lennon Weinberg Gallery. Once again plumbing her mother's life for material, Lucier returns this time to Margaret Glosser's first twenty-one years, exploring her childhood in Ohio, her life as a young woman in Europe, and her move back to the United States as a divorced parent on the eve of World War II. Of primary importance in this personal narrative is the period when Glosser lived with her first husband and their U 49 Mary Lucier, LastRites (Positano),1995. Photo from installation: Margaret,1935. Photo: Courtesy Mary Lucier, Lennon, Weinberg Gallery. 50 U PERFORMING ARTS JOURNAL 49 Mary Lucier, Last Rites (Positano), 1995. Photo from installation: Positano,1936 Photo: Courtesy Mary Lucier, Lennon, Weinberg Gallery. Mary Lucier, Last Rites (Positano),1995. Installation element: Victorian loveseat. Photo: Courtesy Mary Lucier, Lennon, Weinberg Gallery. BARLOW / Video Installations U 51 infant daughter Jesse in the small Italian town of Positano for several months in 1935-36. As Lucier writes in a proposal for the piece, "The idea of Positano in my mother's recounting of her youth came to have almost mythic resonance as an icon of exalted but ambiguous status. It came to signify both the fulfillment of an American romantic longing and the ultimate failure of that ideal to sustain a productive and rewarding life."' To create her new work Lucier has listened many times to the familiar tale of Positano as told by her mother and then retold by her older sister Jesse, her uncle Samuel Beer, and a Positanesi woman named Maria di Lucrezia who helped care for Jesse when she was an infant. This process began in 1988 when Lucier recorded nine hours of audio interview with her mother shortly after her first cancer surgery. Video interviews with her other family members and Maria have been taped more recently . From this pool of information Lucier has distilled several more key stories which recur in slightly differing versions in everyone's conversation: the story of her grandmother's death, which left young Margaret motherless at age five; the story of Jesse's baptism, and the story which, for Lucier, sets the tone for her mother's life, the story of the day when, at eight or nine and unable to swim, Margaret jumped into Lake Galion at the...