MURRAY GUY GALLERY
453 West 17th Street
September 13 - October 19, 2002

As our government obsesses with Oedipal urgency about the latest redefinition of war and editorials repeat the code word quagmire, an understated exhibition examines the mythology and fantasy undergirding popular memory of that other US adventure, Vietnam. English artist Fiona Banner, currently a nominee for the Turner Prize, is best known for THE NAM, 1997, a blow-by-blow account of six Vietnam movies in the form of an unpunctuated, thousand-page tome. She's represented here by gigantic enlargements of two pages from this book, a recording of her own voice reading it aloud, and a delicate print, like a star chart, that reduces the script for Apocalypse Now to pure punctuation.

Meanwhile, An-My Lê, who left Saigon in 1975 at age fifteen, contributes black-and-white photographs from her series "Small Wars," 1999-2002, shot during reenactments staged by Vietnam buffs in Virginia and North Carolina.

Ann Lislegaard, a Norwegian, brings the only color into the room: a circle of red light projected low on the gallery wall, which swells and fades like a blood pulse.

- Frances Richard