Project: Light (Art)

Light in Art


Europe's Light Region

The modern Ruhr metropolis is Europe’s light region: The Centre of International Light Art Unna presents spectacular room installations by artists such as James Turrell, Mischa Kuball, Keith Sonnier, Jan van Munster, François Morellet, Christian Boltanski and Olafur Eliasson in the underground
rooms of the former Linden brewery in Unna. More than 150 permanent art works and light installations were created by artists, architects and designers in public spaces. Amongst them are Dan Flavin’s work of light art at the Wissenschaftspark Rheinelbe, the Yellow Markers by Mischa Kuball in Bönen and Kamp-Lintfort or the light productions by Jonathan
Park at the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord.

Light has been fascinating artists for centuries: during the baroque period, they were elated by light and shade, at the end of the 19th century the impressionists discovered light as an element of design, left their studios and painted in nature.
Dealing with artificial light in the 20th century created a new genre: light art. Artists started understanding light as medium and material, allowing them to deal and get to terms with the phenomena and problems of present and past.

verjux
Michel Verjux, O.T., 2004 (Photo: MWK)

Texts on Light Art

LIGHT – Origin and mirror of culture
by Matthias Wagner K

In the beginning, only nature determined man’s daily routine. Sun divided day from night, in its light the first humans were able to do their work, with sunset every activity stopped. Darkness, as an obstacle to visibility, was at the same time an obstacle to human learning, culture and science. Only when he learned to handle fire did man bring light to darkness and thus give rise to his cultural development. Being able to turn night into day represented man’s first triumph over the laws of nature. The cultural history of mankind is therefore also and above all the history of light. The physical phenomenon of light is able to provoke a high state of excitement, namely by
stimulating the senses from outside and giving rise to emotions and feelings from inside – which means that it ties up a great amount of attention. Attention, however, is a central power for managing the processing of information, as it controls selection in a competition not only of impulses acting on the brain but also of those areas processing them. Attention is a primary resource of our information society, our culture, of art. Every artist is interested in – one might even say dependent on – getting attention for what he or she does and subsequently publicises. This is why light is a suitable material for artists to be able to deal critically with social contexts.
 
From a purely aesthetic aspect of materials, one might obviously call light art all works using luminous objects or those declaring light itself as the object of viewing.
However, it is necessary here to disassociate from illumination or light design. This disassociation ensues in consequence of a definition of art as fuelled by the context of works, by the artists’ subject-related, temporal and geographical, social and political perspective in their use of the physical phenomenon of light. With a view to the creation of a work of art here and now, this requires artists to analyse phenomena and problems of the present, to reflect on historic and current facts or, in other words: to critically examine the contexts surrounding us.
 
Light art is also an art form that makes use of light’s technical possibilities in order to enlarge its own power of experience, that creates spaces and places for remembrance, history, resistance and poetry – and that sees itself as sensual arena of thought and experience.
 
 
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