Conclusions on Light in Art from a very personal point of view
Over the last 5 months I have looked at the use of light in art. It is a huge subject since light has played an integral part in the art of many cultures over the millenia. Here, at the risk of being too wordy, are my thoughts on how light plays a vital part in art and what, for me, is the most successful.As I try to draw conclusions from my thoughts on light in art I realise how many omissions there are in this log.
Some omissions are deliberate because they are not relevant, or I do not wish to focus on them, some I do not have room for and some may be oversight…
Light is the basis of life on Earth so it has always been special/spiritual. The Egyptians thought of the Sun as the eye of the god Ra, ‘Everywhere among the remnants of ancient Egypt are hints of this fundamental awareness of light – materials that attract and reflect the sun, luminous surfaces that gleam, glitter, glow, shine. Obelisks were capped in gold and some were completely sheathed with it.’ [pg 9 Hess & Ashbery, Light: From Aten to Laser – see bibliography]. They faced the pyramids in white limestone and angled the faces so that ‘on the shortest, darkest day of the year, when the sun was weakest, lowest in the sky, and might seem to be dying, the pyramids were at their brightest, gleaming like mirrors held up to the sky’. [p17 Hess & Ashbery]
In early Christian art gold is conceived as light materialised. Mosaics used optical devices – squinches, pendentures and curved surfaces – to increase the quantity of light.
Stained glass has been used for centuries in churches/cathedrals to imbue the space with spiritual qualities and instil reverence in the congregation. Today abstract images are often used in place of narratives – I feel the spiritual quality lies in the use of colour and light more than the imagery. John Piper started creating stained glass windows in the 1950s. Matisse, Leger, Rouault, Braque, Chagall and Albers have all been drawn to stained glass.
There seems to be an interrelationship between stained glass and illuminated manuscripts – sample sheets from the Saint John’s Bible currently being produced were on display at the V&A recently, and I was reminded very much of stained glass windows.
Piper’s design for the West Window at St Paul’s in Bledlow Ridge is a rhapsody in many shades of blue – I was reminded of Hockney’s stage sets for The Rake’s Progress that were bathed in blue light giving a surreal look to the fantasy setting.
Da Vinci then later Caravaggio and Rembrandt moderated their colours to create drama through contrast in tone – chiaroscuro. Turner used light in a completely different way whilst the Impressionists were intrigued by the changing light playing across their subjects. Post World War II American artists incorporated light in their work. The Ellsworth Kelly exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery had one piece in particular that seemed to emit light in a way that some of Mark Rothko’s works do.
Eighty years ago Albers and Moholy-Nagy were using light and reflective surfaces – their recent exhibition at Tate Modern showed their fascination with new technologies – whilst at the Bauhaus they were able to experiment with many processes. These same skills have now become more craft than fine art, just as the making of stained glass windows has.
When a technology is new artists pounce on it and use it in their art. When it has become commonplace then its use is relegated to the status of craft. Despite this I wanted to experiment with some of the same techniques and so I created some glass tiles after Albers, sandblasting them and using pva glue to mask where I wanted to preserve the transparency..
More recently there has been a plethora of artists that have dabbled in light - for example: artists using neon lights and text [Bruce Nauman, Cerith Wyn Evans, Tracey Emin], artists who use the radiance of light [Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick] and artists who project light [Tim Noble & Sue Webster].
I think that I can classify works using actual light, as opposed to light in painting, in four different categories:
Reflection Richard Long’s 20:50 sump oil installation from 1987, James Turrell’s early work using deflected light.
Projection Tim Noble & Sue Webster’s Miss Understood and Mr Meanor.
Light passing through Albers’ light boxes
Emitting light Dan Flavin’s and Richard Box’s fluorescent tubes, David Bachelor’s glowing bottles and screens.
I think, at a stretch, I may be allowed to include Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field – his intervention in the landscape – in this last category.
For me the real difference is between those works that emanate light towards the viewer, bathing us/immersing us in light, and those where the light is projected away from the viewer. The latter seem flat and uninteresting by comparison.
Outstanding for me was the Dan Flavin exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, where on entry the viewer was confronted by a network of green fluorescent tubes. I sat down, back against the wall to drink it in. As I sat there the ‘greenness’ of it became less and less as my eyes (or rather brain) adjusted to the light. The white stair lights shone mauve, which I believe is the complementary to the green. As I walked around I became obsessed by staring at the neon lights then closing my eyes to see the complementary coloured after image. Seeing all those works together made such an impact and allowed me to truly appreciate Flavin’s art.
At the same time there was an exhibition called Backdrop in the Bloomberg Space. Outstanding amongst these was Candelabra 3 by David Bachelor, where he had used 500 recycled plastic bottles, each lit by a single bulb.
The brightness of objects is all relative. At midnight a handkerchief looks white but it emits very much less light than the same handkerchief at noon. The observed brightness of an object depends upon the distribution of brightness across the visual field.
To achieve the sensation of ‘glow’ an object must possess a brightness value well above the scale established by the rest of the field.
My bottle lights glow – they glow even in daylight, but especially so in the dark. I am not a fan of works being large for the sake of it, but this is one case where scale is vital. Bachelor’s work succeeds because he gathers 500 lights like my example, and they span two floors in a perfect atrium setting.
Richard Box’s Field of 1301 fluorescent tubes works because of scale. Even if my tube had lit up when I planted it next to the electrical substation it would have been puny in the extreme.
Bachelor talks of wanting to ‘transport’ the viewer by immersing him in the light and hue generated by his works – he likens it to cinema or a musical composition where viewers are held enthralled, involved in the event.
That is the quality I most admire in all these works.
posted by Lynda Cornwell @ 11:30 am
1 Comments:
Lynda: A very comprehensive and clever analysis of light in art and cultures and the way you cathegorized it into 4: reflection, projection, emitting light and light passing through. Thanks for opening up this research for all of us and introducing new artists and revisiting others.
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