Janene Higgins & Elliott Sharp’s Street Art

Outside the gallery White Box (whiteboxny.org) on 26th Street off 10th Avenue in Manhattan is a little installation that brings new meaning to the phrase “street art.” It’s called “Video Box” and from a distance it looks vaguely like an ATM machine.

In fact it’s a monitor with speakers and it’s currently playing “Tunnel Vision” (2006), a four-minute loop of images (subway scenes, defocused color fields and other urban motion studies) shot by Janene Higgins (echonyc.com/~myrakoob) and set to a skronky noise-music by Elliott Sharp (elliottsharp.com). Higgins has collaborated in the past with musicians Ikue Mori, Alan Licht, and Zeena Parkins, among others.

When I wandered by on Saturday evening, there wasn’t much street life with which it might have mingled, despite the large number of galleries open late, but it cast a nice glow on the immediately adjacent areas and the sound drifted further afield than it might have otherwise.