Aglow With The Old

'Artificial Light' Show Pulses With Flashbacks To Familiar Images

"Growth (Survival)" by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla , with many, many words by Jenny Holzer and fern by nature. (By Travis Fullerton -- Vcuarts)

RICHMOND "Artificial Light" is a memorable and noisy show. Unlike paintings, which shut up, its electric works of art whir or clunk or clatter. They fill a whole museum, the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University. But since there are only six of them they're easy to recall.

This is how I remember them:

There are (1 and 2) the waterfalls; (3) the light-led walk; (4) the glowing thrones; (5) the window-as-a-movie; and (6) the icy moon on high.

Their poetics are intentional. The installations may come with on-off switches, share the scale of the stage set, and look as new as new can be, yet all feel somehow gentled by old romantic themes from old museum art.

If it weren't about a waterfall, Spencer Finch's piece would seem a stripe painting on a light box. The stripes are like those on abstract canvases from the 1960s; the light box is the sort you see in backlighted ads in airports. The waterfall arrives when you decode the piece's title -- "Kaaterskill Falls (July 30, 2006, 12:37 p.m.)."

Kaaterskill was an ur-site for the painters of the Hudson River School, who trooped there as if on a pilgrimage. Its deep romantic chasm shows up in the middle of Asher B. Durand's famous "Kindred Spirits" (1849), a canvas now on loan (through Feb. 10) to the National Gallery of Art. One source of its fame is the brouhaha it raised last year when the New York Public Library sold it off to a Wal-Mart heir for more than $30 million.

The canvas may be gone, but Kaaterskill's still there, and Finch set off to see it. His colored stripes suggest its moss greens and blues. He took a light meter along, and the readings that he took there are also reproduced. His stripes, you notice now, are not precisely parallel. As they fall, they thin and swell. Finch cut his gels by hand. Their colors seem to flow.

The second of the waterfalls -- "Growth (Survival)" by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla -- does not evoke the Catskills. This one, instead, cites the spooky, ferny-frondy jungles of Henri Rousseau. Calzadilla and Allora like to use the art of others as a raw material. In this case they have borrowed a wordy electronic piece by wordy Jenny Holzer, which flashes streaming blue banalities ("words tend to be inadequate," "you are a victim of the rules you live by") as it slants out from the wall. Holzer's crawling words are hard to read; one reason is the big staghorn fern suspended right in front of them. Here's another truism: Art is supposed to nourish. So is "Growth (Survival)." Its flashing LEDs, we're told, put out enough blue light to keep the staghorn fern alive.

The thrones on view are black-light neon. They're by Iván Navarro. Actually both sculptures are full-scale reproductions -- in bent glass, not chromed tubing, and without the leather straps -- of a Bauhaus-modern chair designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925. In the darkness of their darkened room, Navarro's "Black Electric Chairs" glow an eerie purple, and summon the black-and-purple electric chairs from Sing Sing in Andy Warhol's art.

"Dead Reckoning," Nathaniel Rackowe's light-led walk, cites even older images. With industrial materials -- corrugated sheeting, metal rails, motor drives -- Rackowe has built a corridor 46 feet long. Overhead, a 500-watt light bulb pulled along by gears proceeds down the corridor at walking speed from one end to the other, urging you to follow, evoking the magis' journey to the manger and wooden ships at sea.

Also motorized, and loud, but nostalgic in another way is the piece by Douglas Ross. "Picture Motion" uses daylight through a window to suggest the silent films, their slightly jerky action, their headache-causing flutter. Imagine a venetian blind whose slats are made to spin until they fill the room with the stroboscopic flicker of silent-movie light.

"Overhead Projection" by Berlin's Ceal Floyer is the least elaborate, and the most effective piece in the show. All Floyer has done is this: she's put a common light bulb (60 watts, uncoated) on an overhead projector. Marcel Duchamp's mental art, especially his clear glass sphere filled with "Paris air," is remembered. So is something older. The elegant and colorless image she's projected suggests a bloodless moon metaphysically considered (say by Casper David Friedrich) in the icy German night.

Light art used to wow us when it was still new. Once upon a time, people stared at test patterns just to keep watching TV. Though amazing in the '60s, the psychedelic light shows of rock-and-rollers aren't amazing anymore.

That's the trouble with new art. Its novelty soon dies.

But waterfalls flow on in our imaginations, as do jungle shadows, guiding stars and moons. These artists understand that, and their understanding unifies "Artificial Light." New bottles but old wine.

Artificial Light is on view in Richmond at the Anderson Gallery of Virginia Commonwealth University, 907 1/2 W. Franklin St., through Oct. 29. A joint effort of VCU and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, "Artificial Light" was curated by John B. Ravenal, the Virginia Museum's curator of modern and contemporary art. The show will travel in December to the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Fla., and a full-color catalogue will be published at that time. The Anderson gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and from 1 to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. For information call 804-828-1522. Admission is free.