Tripping the light fantastic
Rowena Loverance reviews ‘Light Show’ at London’s Hayward Gallery
‘Light’, wrote Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth century, ‘is more exalted and of a nobler and more excellent essence than all corporeal things.’ From the ancient to the early modern world, it was a commonplace that light offered the best way of representing the unrepresentable, namely God. As recently as the beginning of the twentieth century, Holman Hunt’s Light of the World drew vast crowds on a world tour – seen, according to one estimate, by four-fifths of the population of Australia.
The impact of twentieth century science and technology on our understanding of light has, however, been profound. Science has illuminated its unsettling ability to behave both as a wave and as a particle; technology has taken us beyond simple incandescence, first to fluorescence and then to light-emitting diodes, LEDs. In the face of these assaults, how well placed is light, in the early twenty-first century, to continue to represent humanity’s more mystical understandings?
Light Show at London’s Hayward Gallery celebrates fifty years of artistic endeavour since the invention of LEDs in the early 1960s. Artists were quick to seize on this new medium, which could both transform space and alter viewer perceptions. The show intersperses pioneering works from the 1960s and early 70s with contemporary wonders and some which span the decades: Carlos Cruz-Diez has been working on his series of Chromosaturation installations since the 1960s. But this show offers the opposite of dry history: rather, to stroll around its alternating bright lights and dark corners is a bit like the experience of a huge family Christmas, with children of all ages unwrapping a series of ever more extraordinary presents.
One of the great things about light art is that it breaks down the distinction between the work and the viewer. Some of these pieces have to be viewed at a distance, like conventional paintings or sculpture, but many require total immersion. Iván Navarro’s Reality Show, 2010, requires the viewer to step inside a Tardis-like cubicle and experience being surrounded in three dimensions by mirror-like surfaces; to join with others interacting with Anthony McCall’s beam of light, You and I, Horizontal, 2005, was rather like taking a communal shower, though a good deal less embarrassing.
The sensation of being bathed is, I think, more naturally associated with water than with light. It was surprising, therefore, that not until the very last work in the show, Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a timeless garden, 2011, did any actual water made an appearance. In this magical piece, in which strobe lighting illuminates streams and fountains of water, the water droplets appear frozen in mid air, like a constantly changing ice sculpture.
The show works hard, however, not to be too otherworldly but to root itself in the here and now. One piece, which refers directly to twentieth-century science, is Conrad Shawcross’ Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV, 2009, where his constantly moving network of crystalline forms was inspired by Dorothy Hodgkin’s 1969 discovery of the molecular structure of insulin by working backwards from the diffraction pattern of x-rays bouncing off atoms. Several pieces draw on images of modern urban life, where the relentless presence of artificial light is often accused of upsetting our relationship with the natural world. In David Batchelor’s Magic Hour, 2004/7, a pile of discarded light boxes turn their back to the viewer to present an ungainly tangle of wires – but one surrounded by a halo of multicoloured light.
Above all, the exhibition reminds us that vision is the least reliable of the senses, that what we see, or think we see, is not always how things are. Some of these works deliberately conjure something out of nothing. Jim Campbell’s Exploded View (Commuters), 2011, presents a dense forest of flickering lights; the shadowy figures who tramp purposefully across it only reveal themselves to a few viewers, positioned at a certain distance, at a certain angle. And many pieces make full use of recent discoveries in optics, about how light can cause different neurological responses and changes in perception. Perhaps the most successful is Carlos Cruz-Diez’s beautiful Chromosaturation, 2008, which plays with the way the eye perceives colour by separating out the primary colours into three different light chambers; the colour density of each appears to change quite extraordinarily as one moves physically across the spectrum.
So, in face of this assault on the senses, how well does the spiritual heritage of light imagery hold up? Viewers of a religious sensibility will be forced to face the question, is there anything specifically spiritual about light imagery or are we also conjuring something out of nothing?
There is one useful reminder that light can be spiritual in more than one sense. The title of Cerith Wyn Evans’s three illuminated columns, ‘S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E’, 2010 (above left), suspended, as he says, ‘between heaven and earth’, references an epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, by American writer James Merrill, which was composed from messages transmitted by spirit voices during séances.
Then, of course, there is the intention of the artist and of the curator to take into account. One’s perception of Bridget Kowanz’s Light Steps, 1990, an ascending flight of fluorescent tubes, would have been very different had she been inclined, as she very well might, to call it ‘The Ladder of Divine Ascent’, like the famous icon from Mount Sinai, and if it had been displayed under a ceiling that conveyed a sense of infinity, or at least of ambiguity, rather than the Hayward’s aggressively coffered concrete. Similarly, Jenny Holzer’s MONUMENT, 2008, a column of endlessly circling bands of pink and purple LED scripts, with texts taken from the ‘war on terror’, might equally well have been entitled ‘Tower of Babel’.
Friends are, of course, likely to relate most closely to the work of James Turrell, though it is useful to be reminded of other artists pursuing a very similar course, especially Doug Wheeler, whose Untitled, 1969, belongs clearly to the same tradition. Turrell is represented in the show by an early work, Wedgework V, 1975. Turrell has specifically demanded that viewers should wait for fifteen minutes while their eyes get accustomed to his installation (while our monochrome ‘rod’ cells switch off and our colour-sensing ‘cone cells’ have a chance to make out the faint projected light). It requires the viewer to be patient and attentive, but sometimes one can’t be sure that anything is happening at all. Now, what other experience is that likely to remind Friends of?
Rowena is arts editor of the Friend.
Light Show is at the Hayward Gallery until 28 April.
Photo above: Cerith Wyn Evans, S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E (‘Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motive’s overspill…’) (2010) ©the artist, courtesy the artist and White Cube.
Photo below: Leo Villareal, Cylinder II (2012), ©the artist. Courtesy the artist and GERING & LóPEZ GALLERY, NY and David Batchelor, Magic Hour (2004-2007), ©the artist/DACS. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Leme, São Paulo.
All photos: Linda Nylind.
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