ART IN REVIEW
ART IN REVIEW; Krzysztof Wodiczko
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: October 13, 2000
'The Hiroshima Project'
20 West 57th Street
Through Oct. 21
Well known for his nighttime slide projections of politically subversive images on public monuments, Krzysztof Wodiczko has increasingly and problematically turned his practice toward a kind of public psychotherapy. This exhibition features a 20-minute video documenting a project carried out in Japan that was intended to heal the bomb-damaged psyche of the people of Hiroshima. Mr. Wodiczko was commissioned to produce the piece after winning the Hiroshima Art Prize, given to artists dedicated to world peace.
The video shows ghostly images of different people's hands projected over a river onto a wall at the foot of the A-Bomb Dome, a building that survived the 1945 blast and is now preserved as a memorial. As the hands gesture and fidget, voices relate harrowing personal experiences of the bomb and its effects. A woman talks about people dying in the irradiated water of the river; a man shows and tells about a bicycle lock found with the remains of his father; a survivor tells how she was discriminated against by people outside Hiroshima.
One can only imagine how Mr. Wodiczko's therapeutic theater affected the 4,000 people who attended its showing. Perhaps there were some for whom it was emotionally transformative. It may be unfair to judge by the video shown here, but two thoughts come to mind: a series of straightforward interviews with people in Hiroshima would be more powerfully informative than Mr. Wodiczko's portentous spectacle; and Mr. Wodiczko's appropriation of Hiroshima's trauma for his own avant-garde program, however well intentioned, seems presumptuous. KEN JOHNSON