LIVINGSTON MANOR, NY — In the late 1970s, video artist Mary Lucier pointed her camera at the sun. It was a revolutionary thing to do because, to most, it was a bad idea.

The sun scorched each tube, leaving a dark smear on the film. 

“You can’t predict the effect of the sun on technology,” Lucier said recently.

Sunrise: ‘Equinox’

The videos became “Equinox,” chronicling the rising of the sun over Queens across several days, ending in a blaze of heat, light and color. That work is now part of a retrospective of Lucier’s career, on view at the Catskill Art Space through Saturday, August 24. 

“Equinox” was just the start. Lucier has watched the effect of climate change, technology and humanity on the planet.

“Presented nearly 50 years later,” wrote CAS executive director Sally Wright on Instagram, “as we grapple with the impact of environmental degradation, the work underscor[es] the devastation of global change. In this context, the work is as much about the natural world degrading technology as the inverse—a city laid vulnerable to the impact of climate change.”

Mary Lucier spent most of her adult life in New York City, and still has a base there, but lives much of the time in Cochecton. She grew up in rural Ohio and has “always been interested in the out-of-doors,” she said. “When I was a child, we took drives on Sunday afternoons to ‘Mary’s Woods.’ It was very formative in my attitude to art and the landscape.”

Her work now reflects her experience—the country past and present, her travels and her time in the city—and concerns about the environment and what’s happening to the Earth now.

Landscapes

But it isn’t landscape art as most people think of it—the pastoral scenes of grassland and forests, humanity here and there, leaving few marks. Decorative. You might find the prints on motel room walls.

Landscape art had a heyday in the 19th century; the paintings depicted the grandeur of God, which suited the mood of the time. But as artists faced and processed two world wars and smaller wars, genocide, atomic bombs and the trauma that was the 20th century, pretty pictures of the great outdoors seemed, shall we say, less relevant. 

Lucier described a 20th-century attitude to landscape painting that saw it as being something less, “something perjorative.” Landscapes were pretty; they were redolent of the 19th century; they felt amateurish. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it was not where the 1970s were headed. There was “a shift from processed-based art to making a statement.” 

Consider “Ohio at Giverny,” which is part of the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s a video installation using seven monitors to contrast two very different places and honor people from Lucier’s life. “It’s the story of my uncle, who met his wife in Paris,” she said. It’s also about her aunt’s death in the 1970s. And it’s about landscapes—that of Ohio, marked with industrialization, and of Giverny, where Claude Monet lived and painted, staring into the sun.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) called it a “two-channeled study in light and color on landscape… an extension of the long tradition of landscape painting into the relatively new medium of video.”

Destruction: ‘Noah’s Raven’

“My work wasn’t ecological in the beginning,” she said. That changed after a trip to the Amazon, which led to “Noah’s Raven,” also on display at CAS. “That was about the burning of the rainforest,” Lucier said. 

In the early ‘90s, the destruction of the rainforest was less a part of environmental discussion than it is now. 

“Noah’s Raven” juxtaposes “the destruction of land and my mother’s body, the scars from cancer,” Lucier said. Trauma to the earth, and trauma written across her mother.

In the Amazon, Lucier absorbed what was happening to the rubber tappers—who had learned to take just a bit from the trees in Brazil, just enough. That carefulness, that awareness, gave way to the massive demands of industry and the call for rubber, more rubber, more everything. 

The presence of the older works in the retrospective forced, in some ways, a re-seeing. Putting the exhibit together was “a meditation on changes in art, changes in the world,” she said. Suffering, trauma, living and dying.

Survival: ‘Leaving Earth’

Yes, dying—and surviving. Also part of the exhibit is her newest work, “Leaving Earth,” which chronicles the death of her husband, painter Robert Berlind. “We spent his last year and a half adjusting. He saw the world spiritually and intellectually, and wrote his thoughts in a journal,” which she found after he died.

Those thoughts are randomly superimposed on video and images depicting Lucier’s “two landscapes,” she said. “Images of the city, here, detritus.” 

“‘And yet, I forget to fear death,’” she quoted. “I as the survivor, arranging [the words] to look like poetry. My experience of dying and surviving. It’s not sentimental; it resists sentimentality.” 

Life goes on after a death, but what will happen to those who live in the world as the planet burns? “Who will survive this?” she asked.

Mary Lucier’s works will be displayed at the Catskill Art Space through Saturday, August 24. The gallery is located at 48 Main St. For more information, visit www.catskillartspace.org/marylucier.