THE GLOBAL SALON.(installation art; various artists; Kassel, Germany)

Amid the hundreds of works in Documenta 11, an event that trumpets the artistic entropy and civic pep of today's international art institutions, I kept returning to a marvellous video installation--a digital short story, essentially--by the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila. "The House" is about a pleasant young woman going quietly mad one nightless Baltic summer at an old seaside cottage in a forest. She tells of the difficulty she's having in maintaining boundaries between her interior life and objective reality. Whatever she sees or hears outside the windows--her garden, her car, a passing ship--invades and commandeers her consciousness. Ahtila's stately, glorious color ...