The highlight of Su-Mei Tse’s multipart installation at Peter Blum (the Golden Lion-winning artist’s first show in the US) is an enigmatic möbius strip composed of two adjacent video loops. In one, we see an endless multitude of French street sweepers (balayeurs) engaged in the existential-absurdist task of cleaning the desert floor, their elegant green brooms sweeping sand into piles that neither wax nor wane. The audio track, recorded on the streets of Paris but paradoxically sounding more like the perpetual waves of the ocean, overlaps with that of a second video in which the artist, who was trained as a classical cellist, perches on the acid-green edge of a grassy cliff, playing to an audience of sheer alpine rock faces. Her bow pauses, the mountain echoes back, while the balayeurs continue their endless sweeping. What is the sound of the desert being swept? And where does the echo begin and the music stop? Like video-age koans, the works propose questions that seem meantless for answering than wondering and puzzling.
