ART REVIEW
Vietnamese Voices Against a Whir of War
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: August 12, 2010
In slumberous mid-August thousands of visitors fidget and drift through the Museum of Modern Art, finding almost everything worth photographing and almost nothing worth more than a point-and-shoot glance. But in one gallery — basically a wide glorified corridor — people tend to stop, focus, even settle down in front of a three-channel video by the Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Le projected across a long wall.
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
“Projects 93: Dinh Q. Le” at the Museum of Modern Art includes a helicopter built from scratch, right, and a three-channel video by Mr. Le.
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Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Dinh Q. Le’s video at MoMA, “The Farmers and the Helicopters,” intersperses noisy war scenes with recent interviews with Vietnamese people.
Titled “The Farmers and the Helicopters,” the video is partly and spectacularly about the Vietnam War. We first see a panning shot of forests and rice paddies in aerial view. Then helicopters arrive, swarming, landing, lifting off, buzzing and shuddering through the sky, spewing men and rockets, crashing explosively, then rising to buzz some more. Classic shock and awe.
Interspersed with these noisy scenes are recent interviews with Vietnamese people. A former Vietcong soldier recalls how, more than 40 years ago, he shot at an American chopper to make it go away, and it did. A woman describes her first sight of an American helicopter around the same time. She was so disconcerted as it hovered over her that she could only look up at the pilot and smile.
A younger man, a self-taught mechanic named Tran Quoc Hai, speaks of his lifelong infatuation with such flying machines. He says that after studying old examples in Vietnam war museums and doing some Internet research he teamed up with a farmer friend and built a helicopter from scratch, for commercial use, but also to serve as a positive symbol of his country in the contemporary world.
As it happens, we can see this symbol firsthand; it’s installed in a gallery next to where the video is playing. And the two pieces constitute Mr. Le’s solo show, part of MoMA’s Projects series.
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