Euan Macdonald

July 19-September 30, 2006
Times Square
Image: Euan Macdonald

Part of Creative Time’s summer group exhibition Strange Powers, Euan Macdonald’s simple video raised questions about whether seeing is in fact believing. A woman emerges through an orange curtain and slowly proceeds to the middle of the stage. She stands alone, perfectly still, hands clasped. Her fixed glance is direct and intense, yet unthreatening. Depicted in real time from a fixed camera angle, with the most minimal of action, the video’s simplicity and focus compelled viewers to watch in anticipation for more to be revealed.

But as in much of Macdonald’s meditative work, almost nothing happened, at least nothing that appeared immediately visible. It is the title of the work—Healer—that leads one to consider the possibility that this seemingly mundane and elusive performance might be something more. Indeed, the video’s subject was a psychic healer whom Macdonald met in New Zealand, and who has practiced healing for most of her life. Whether or not they had time to consider whether they believed in such a practice, those who crossed Times Square under Macdonald’s video received some small gesture of her healing work.

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Pawel Althamer and Arturmijewski, James Lee Byars, Sophie Calle and Fabio Balducci, Center for Tactical Magic, Peter Coffin, Jennifer Cohen, Anne Collier, Christian Cummings, Trisha Donnelly, Douglas Gordon, Brion Gysin, Friedrich Jürgenson, Joachim Koester, Jim Lambie, Miranda Lichtenstein, Euan Macdonald, Jonathan Monk, Senga Nengudi, Paul Pfeiffer, Eva Rothschild, Mungo Thomson; Laura Hoptman and Peter Eleey, curators

July 19-September 17, 2006
64 East 4th Street
Image credit: Justin Ouellette

Strange Powers assembled pieces by more than twenty internationally acclaimed artists whose work explores the transformative power of art through a variety of magically charged manifestations. While a number of exhibitions have examined aspects of the occult and the spiritual, Strange Powers showcased artworks that were made to actually have a paranormal effect on the world, including spells, talismanic objects, and apparitions conjured and transcribed.

Extending the show to Times Square, Euan Macdonald’s video portrait of a healer simultaneously offered its subject’s positive psychic effects to the wider public on the last minute of every hour as The 59th Minute video on the Panasonic Astrovision.

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