"Moving Pictures" at the Guggenheim

As if that weren't enough, the museum has also come under considerable heat in the press. Last winter, Voice critic Jerry Saltz loudly called for the director's resignation. In June, Times art writer Deborah Solomon skewered Krens, the institution and its wheeler-dealer board of directors in a Sunday Magazine profile that left the museum looking more like a stressed-out junk-bond firm than one of the nation's premier arts institutions.

So it's a little surprising to recently find a bit of magic left inside the old Frank Lloyd Wright pillbox. Just when it seemed safe to quit visiting the one New York museum that has embraced product franchising and financial leveraging to suffocation, the Guggenheim returns with a doozy of a show?one that is artistically safe, curatorially pointless but, nevertheless, astoundingly good. It's as if Martha Stewart, the beleaguered guru of keeping up appearances, actually devoted an entire show on the Food Network to great food. What are the odds? Really?

But there it is. The exhibition "Moving Pictures" is a brazen stopgap intended to plug up a seven-month hole in the Guggenheim's busted schedule. That it also turns out to be a show worth seeing at least twice would seem to be, under the circumstances, something next to miraculous.

A large, nearly exhausting exhibition of photography, film and video that takes up most of the Guggenheim's trademark rotunda, "Moving Pictures" includes 150 works by 55 artists made, more or less, during the last 30 years. Its point is simple, almost too simple, really, to animate a major museum show. Focusing on the widespread use of reproducible media in the art of the last decade, it looks to illustrate the following bromide: that contemporary art's addiction to the buzz of mechanical reproduction "has its roots in the late 1960s and 1970s, when artists incorporated photography and the moving image into their conceptually based practices." Like duh!

Organized by chief curator and deputy director Lisa Dennison, whose name is notoriously difficult to find anywhere in the exhibition literature (Expecting a flop?), and drawn entirely from the Guggenheim's permanent collection, "Moving Pictures" is less a curated exhibition with a specific argument than a display of big-ticket items checked off on three decades' worth of the Guggenheim's shopping lists. As is, without any extra adornment, it is the largest, most complete exhibition of photography and video seen in the U.S. in recent memory. The fact that it is also handsomely and functionally designed by Hani Rashid makes it nearly possible to forget the dank claustrophobia of the Guggenheim's previous all-black "Brazil" show.

An exhibition like "Moving Pictures" is innately interesting, both for the art on display and the insight it gives into the inner workings of a museum like the Guggenheim. Not unlike a tour of Graceand, it offers art tourists a glimpse of how the other half lives?in this case, the massively endowed institutional half. "Would I have bought that?" is a question that acquires new relevance in this sort of exhibition. The more disturbing query?"How can anyone take this shit seriously?"?also turns out to be a fair challenge in a show where, essentially, the museum's officially purchased taste and the public's curiosity meet and greet.

According to art history textbooks, the late 1960s and early 70s were a time when conceptual artists took up photographic and video cameras to document private actions that a tiny minority accepted as meaningful art. Presented on the second level of the museum's rotunda, the work of early performance artists Vito Acconci (raw images of himself hiding his prick to look like a girl), Ana Mendieta (paper and emulsion records of indentations made by her body in various landscapes) and Marina Abramovic (a leaden video of the artist scrubbing a human skeleton over and over again) look, 30 years later, like exactly what they are: artless visual representations of muddled utopian thinking.

Representing, in the words of critic Robert Rosenblum, the era of the showman-artist, these artists' signed photographs and videos, and those of other folks like Hannah Wilke and Robert Smithson, serve to this day the role of pricey self-advertisements and saintly relics. So much for the end of the art object. The one exception that confirms the rule: Bruce Nauman, whose four-screen video of himself putting on makeup strikes the signature psycho note he has kept pickax-sharp throughout his career. The one performance-and-body oriented conceptualist who eschewed big causes and heavy symbolism, his influence, like that of David Lynch in the film world, is as pervasive as his insights are genuinely unsettling, ambiguous and unweighted by political, social or environmental claptrap.

To tell the truth, these artists were no more precursors of today's highly narrative photography and video than the Neanderthals of the Lascaux cave were influences on the painting of the Sistine Chapel. But that's not what the textbooks say. The correct chronology, they contend, runs from Ana Mendieta through Cindy Sherman to the work of Rineke Djikstra; from Smithson to Robert Mapplethorpe to Thomas Demand. Of course the links exist, but overall the equation doesn't add up. Being there first, as Joan Collins' five husbands know quite well, does not always guarantee establishing a proud and uncontested lineage. And influence is not really the same thing as being the first kid on the block with a new toy.

Elsewhere, "Moving Images" is full of visual razzmatazz, both of the still and kinetic kind. There are photographic installations of the late 70s and 80s by Christian Boltanski and Sophie Calle; no-frills catalog photography by Bern and Hilla Becher and the work of their students, Candida Hofer, Andreas Gursky and the two Thomases (Ruff and Struth); the constructed photographs of James Casebere, Oliver Boberg and Gregory Crewdson, in miniature and movie-set sizes; the annoyingly vacuous work of fashion plates Wolfgang Tillmans and Vanessa Beecroft (Has anyone ever considered the salacious and performative connections between her corporate art and the povera junk of Acconci?); the videos of young hipsters Patty Chang, Trisha Donnelly and Steve McQueen.

In the last department, two standout videos alone make "Moving Pictures" worth visiting. The first consists of a staged fight between a mother and daughter that British artist Gillian Wearing twists into knots by running backwards. The second is a brilliant piece of work by the French videographer Pierre Huyghe. A restaging of the real-life crime of John Woytowicz, the gay bank robber whose foiled heist was the basis for Sydney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon, Huyghe's "Third Memory" mixes up past and present, fiction and reality, until it arrives at an eerie crossing that is pure, weird, unlocatable simultaneity.

"Moving Pictures" is the kind of art exhibition people have been waiting years for the Guggenheim to host. A show about the art, as opposed to architecture, schmatte, motorcycle design or the besottedness of power, it demonstrates that even this flagship of corporatespeak can turn tail in a bum economy and go back to doing what it is supposed to do. Promote art, that is, collect good work and think. This lively exhibition will be the face of the Guggenheim for the next five months. Whatever happens after that is anybody's freaking guess.

"Moving Pictures," through Jan. 12 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 5th Ave. (89th St.), 423-3600.