"What am I looking at?"
I wondered the same thing as I heard these words, in a child's voice, rise from the darkness surrounding me. Along with a couple of other visitors at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, I was sitting on a bench inside artist James Turrell's "Milk Run," an installation consisting of what first appears to be an almost pitch-black room. Gradually, after your eyes adjust to the dark, it becomes clear that the far wall is lighted -- but barely -- by recessed fluorescent bulbs that give it the eerie, faintly pinkish glow of a bathroom door left ajar in the middle of the night.
It's a fair question, and one I'm sure the museum doesn't mind being raised by its exhibition. Called "Refract, Reflect, Project: Light Works From the Collection," the show itself proposes it, with a panel of introductory wall text stating that, throughout the history of art, "light has been linked to fundamental questions of vision and perception."
Like Turrell's piece, seen previously as part of the 1999-2000 "Regarding Beauty" show, several of the works are making reappearances from recent installations and will look familiar, if not unwelcome, to regular visitors. Giovanni Anselmo's "Invisible," for instance, which projects the Italian word for "visible" on a passerby's torso, is still fresh in my mind from the "Arte Povera" show of a few years ago, but I was glad to cross its path -- quite literally -- again. Other art, such as Jesus Rafael Soto's "Two Volumes in the Virtual," a sculptural construction from 1968 that uses light falling on an array of wooden dowels to create the illusion of solid forms, held more surprise.
Some work feels flashy and, quite frankly, a little silly. Adam Peiperl's "Astralite 7," for instance, in which plastic gewgaws swim in a water-filled glass globe lit by blue light, looks like something you might buy at the Sharper Image to decorate your rec room.
Despite the preponderance of so many shiny things -- Olafur Eliasson's motorized "Round Rainbow" light show and Jim Hodge's mirror-mosaic "View" are but two eye-dazzlers -- "Refract, Reflect, Project" is more about getting the viewer to reflect than about the art. Its goal, in other words, is conceptual, and it wants us to think, both about the meaning and the mechanics of seeing.
--Michael O'Sullivan (March 16, 2008)
Shining Examples
At the Hirshhorn, Light Works That Click
By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, February 19, 2007; Page C01
"Light works," though an awkward term, is the one the art world uses pointing to those works of art in which light itself, wondrous and weightless, is a substance and a subject. Light works aren't that hard to find. If you scan the bristly landscape of the art of the past 50 years you'll find them sprinkled all over. Lots of them have cords and light up when you plug them in. Many are theatrical. They catch your eye.
"Refract, Reflect, Project: Light Works From the Collection" at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents 23 of them. The museum has been buying them ever since it opened in 1974 -- sunlight pieces, neon pieces, projections, DVDs, room-size installations. These are some it picked.
Associate curator Anne Ellegood arranged some good juxtapositions in the show.
Here's a classic light work -- Dan Flavin's " 'monument' for V. Tatlin" from 1967. Its stiff fluorescent tubes glare with minimalist hauteur. Next to it is a wheelbarrow by Ivan Navarro.
Few light artists get famous. Flavin (1933-1996) is a notable exception. His touring retrospective, now headed for Los Angeles, was at the National Gallery of Art in 2005. His "Tatlin" doesn't blink or grin. It stands as stiffly in its brightness, as upright and severe, as a sentinel at attention. Flavin made his sculpture out of seven fluorescent fixtures bought right off the shelf, but it's not about the hardware store or anything so lowly. It has higher things in mind. It proclaims its own augustness.
The wheelbarrow next to it, though also an assemblage of long cylindrical light bulbs and factory-stamped metal, is earthier by far. Navarro's barrow, "Flashlight: I'm not from here, I'm not from there," made last year, has sweat in it, and mud. The stonebreakers of Georges Seurat and the harvests of Vincent van Gogh are what it calls to memory, not the high abstractions of postwar New York. Both pieces are light works, but they come from different times (when Flavin made his "monument," Navarro was a kid of 5 growing up in Chile), and they cite different ideals. Flavin's theme is lofty purity. Like many artists working now, Navarro wants us to remember the hard plight of the poor.
Both pieces are light works, as you can't help notice, and both are plugged into the wall, but soon you think: So what? The longer you compare them, and the more they veer apart, the less their light bulbs matter.
When electric art was new it seemed a thing apart. Not so very long ago its novelty was thrilling. But novelty's got problems. The shiver of the new, though much valued by the art world, doesn't last long.
The oldest work shown -- Thomas Wilfred's "Study in Depth, Opus 152" of 1959 -- was amazing in the '50s, but isn't anymore. Its technology's gone clunky. Its clattering machinery, and light-organ projections, now look like antiques. I kept thinking of the olden days as I wandered through the show.
The innocent and hopeful bygone 1950s were, as I remember them, the heyday of light work. Especially in Chicago. On steamy summer nights there the programmed colored lights of the Buckingham Fountain were endlessly entrancing. Equally compelling was the beacon overhead, the Palmolive Building's beacon, a 2-billion-candlepower beam that, high above the city, swept across the sky. It looked like something out of Batman. Its immensity was stunning. You could see it from Indiana. They turned the beacon off in 1981. I doubt it would wow now.
Time has been as hard on the laser art that Rockne Krebs began exhibiting in Washington 40 years ago. Krebs's city-changing, huge, emerald-green structures, part line-drawing, part sculpture, were exceptionally beautiful. He'd made them out of laser beams that seemed afloat in the night sky. But laser beams were new then, and they aren't new anymore. Too many rock concerts and Super Bowls and casinos in Las Vegas have drained away their magic. The black light in the Hirshhorn's show, its neons and fluorescents, have been similarly dimmed by the harsh lights that pollute our nights. We've seen too many high-beam headlights, too many light-box ads, too much bright TV.
Electricity's become just another resource in the arsenal of artists. Would the "Four Colors Four Words" spelled out in glowing neon in a Joseph Kosuth wall piece from 1966 tell us less, or more, about the old entanglements of language, thought and vision if he'd written them in paint?
Shining bolts of lightning zapping through the sky are overwhelmingly impressive. But they're considerably less so when -- as in "Enlighten" (2000), a Christoph Giradet DVD in the Hirshhorn's exhibition -- you see them on TV.
The light the exhibit's objects share and point to and manipulate becomes almost incidental as the show progresses. It's not the light that matters. What matters is the art.
In 1980, the great Hiroshi Sugimoto set up his still camera in old-time movie palaces and photographed whole films without closing the shutter. In the pictures that resulted (four are in the show), the theater's seats are clearly seen, as are the baroque decorations and elaborate proscenia, but where the movie ought to be all you see is white. "This is not simply white light," he writes, "it is the result of too much information. So too much is nothing, which makes sense to me."
One of Robert Irwin's famous cast-acrylic discs from 1967, which casts exquisite shadows as it floats before the wall, is also beautiful. So, too, is the glowing space of James Turrell's "Milk Run" (1996), a paragon of subtlety. Olafur Eliasson's "Round Rainbow" (2005) may be most beautiful of all.
It looks simple: A spotlight on a tripod. The spotlight's beam, first narrowed by a round hole in a screen, then passes through a turning disc of clear acrylic glass before it hits the wall. The disc has a beveled edge, as if it were a porthole rimmed with a round Newtonian prism. What this apparatus makes is not simple at all: accelerating, bending, multicolored spectra and on the flat white wall circles of light that become twists of light. What produced all this beauty? Nothing very much, just Newton's theory of optics. But that beauty is undeniable, regal and majestic.
Also admirably simple, and twinkly, and successful is Jim Hodges's "View" (1998), a two-panel 12-foot canvas coated edge to edge with small irregular tiles. The tiles are made of mirror. With every move you make "View's" shivering reflections dissolve and reassemble the space in which you stand.
This is not a new idea. Irregular glass tessera, small tiles of clear glass backed with gold or silver foil, and angled from the wall, were already sending out their shimmering reflections from the halos of the saints in Byzantine mosaics 12 centuries ago.
"Refract, Reflect, Project" remains a show worth seeing. All visual art is light art. All cave paintings, all drawings, and all Old Master oils could also be thought light works. Testing this is easy. Douse the torch or block the windows, throw the switch, or blink, and they are not there, they're gone.
