BY ARIELLA BUDICK
Newsday Staff Writer
"Magical" is a word we often use to describe a particularly satisfying artistic experience, but we don't usually mean it literally. We expect creative products to move us but not to exert their power through spells and incantations. Even so, art has long been associated with the supernatural, from Anasazi petroglyphs to the chorales of Bach. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, many people expected it to renew its shamanistic role by soothing, healing and calming their souls.
"Strange Powers," an exhibition presented by the nonprofit art group Creative Time in an unused floor of a Lower East Side tenement, takes the connections between art and the paranormal as a given. All of the artists here have opened themselves to influences from other worlds with varying degrees of skepticism.
The point of the exhibit, organized by Laura Hoptman and Peter Eleey, isn't to convert us into believers, but to show that art need not be a navel-gazing endeavor limited to the banalities of everyday life, as so much of it has lately been. It can open our perspective to take in what Hoptman, in her catalog essay, calls "the straightforward description of the profound."
Not everything here meets that high standard, but there is enough that is engaging, stirring or creepy. My favorite is Sophie Calle's video (in collaboration with Fabio Balducci) documenting her adventures with a Parisian clairvoyant. At the beginning, Calle asks the psychic, Maud Kristen, both to predict and direct her own future.
Kristen refuses, telling the artist she will tell her "where and when" but not "what." Calle agrees, and, per the psychic's instructions, sets off for the seaside where she meets an eccentric old lady and receives a text message from a friend who happens to have the same last name as this remote and unprepossessing village. "It seems the universe has accepted us," the psychic pronounces.
On one level, we know it's simply a pleasing mix of coincidence and clever narration, but Calle weights the story with playful portent. Her bewitching imagination has once again concocted an intoxicating blend of detective work, anthropology, voyeurism and eccentric creativity.
Nearby is a dark empty space called "The Ghost of James Lee Byars." The artist whose ghost presumably occupies this cloaked closet made the work in 1969 when he was still alive, and at that point it probably seemed like a quasicomic gesture. Now, nine years after Byars' death, it is far from funny. The silent blackness hovers menacingly, magnifying every ruffle of fabric into a supernatural roar. I couldn't bear to stand for more than a minute in that haunted chamber - and I don't believe in ghosts.
Before the exhibit opened, Miranda Lichtenstein brought in a local psychic, whom she videotaped "clearing" the space of spiritual detritus, a ritual that looks as humdrum as doing the laundry.
Scottish artist Euan Macdonald brings home the mundaneness of spirituality with a life-size video of his former landlady, a perfectly ordinary blue-haired biddy and self-described healer, standing before a curtain, blandly dispensing good vibrations.
Viewers who can't make it down to the Lower East Side might raise their gazes on their way through Times Square, where, until Sept. 30, Macdonald's video will promote mass healing from a mega-screen.
STRANGE POWERS. Through Sept. 17 at 64 E. Fourth St. between Bowery and Second Avenue, second floor. Open 4-7 p.m. Thursday and Friday, noon-7 p.m. weekends. Admission is free.
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