Press
Intriguing works in light and space
By Christopher Knight
Herald Examiner art critic
“Light and space,” It is said, are to Southern California art of the 1960’s and 70’s what gestural abstraction and the all-over image are to the New York School of the 50’s. Painting, sculpture, hybridized works, and, most importantly, installations of the period responded with the particular – and peculiar – qualities of atmosphere in the region. Robert Irwin stretched translucent nylon scrims across empty rooms, DeWain Valentine suspended acrylic rods that brought shifting daylight indoors, James Turrell, cut picture windows in the wall that looked into empty rooms filled with a nearly tactile atmosphere of ambient light. The ephemeral history of such temporal installation work is as vague and, by now, mythological as the most ancient art that has not survived the erosion of time. By their very nature, most light and space installations are as short lived and chimerical as a passing cloud.
“California I: Light and Space,” an exhibition of sculpture, paintings, photographs, drawings, and one small environment, is on view at the Lonny Gans Gallery, 21 Market Street, through March 31. It does not, as the gallery’s press release claim’s, “define the California movement and place it within the context of international contemporary art.” As an object-oriented exhibition (this is, after all, a commercial gallery with limited space and a need to have objects to sell), “California I” must omit the environmental installations that have become the hallmark of the movement it seeks to define. If anything, the show points out the need for a larger, full-dress exhibition to explore the light and space phenomenon. But that is the kind of show only an institution can orchestrate.
What the exhibition does offer is a number of intriguing works that provide clues to the larger concern of area artists involved with light and space as materials. In general, the movement has been claimed as the first wholly unique contribution to contemporary art made by Los Angeles artists. When the need to give the movement historical validity arises, French Impressionism is dredged up as the logical witness, with its tireless explorations of reflection, color, transparency, and the transient perceptual phenomena of light. But such a linkage rests on superficial similarities. Ignoring not only vast stylistic differences, but what I think is a fundamental attitude as well.
Consider, for instance, Laddie John Dill’s untitled work from 1975. It consists of a long shelf of sand, mounded and scooped into a terrarium landscape. Standing peaks and valleys are sheets of glass, set in an ordered arrangement of six L-shaped pairs along the length of the piece. Argon light from a hidden source illuminates the top edge of the planes of glass that are parallel to the viewer, causing linear reflections of light on the abutted glass. This reflected light appears to cut through the mounds of sand piled against the glass, or to float like laser beams over the miniature landscape. While an Impressionist landscape, built from a brushy, tactile haze of paint, dissolves its subject into an ecstatic blur of color. Dill’s piece employs a hard, precisely ordered, classically arranged, and measured configuration with all the clarity of a mathematical diagram. To this nearly mechanical arrangement, Dill fuses almost mystical overtones. Light, of course, has an ancient history of mystical associations, and here it links the transparency of glass with the opacity of sand (from which glass itself is made.) The reflected beams of light illusionistically piece both solid and void.
The differences between Dill’s tabletop landscape and, say, a Monet poppy field are greater, and more profound, than any similarities. Dill’s piece is a contained and a sharply delineated vessel for metaphysical meaning and, as such, is well within the realm of an American tradition of art embodied in Luminist landscape painting of the 19th century. In the canons of modern art, all roads lead back to France, and it has only been in recent years that other sources, including our own long-ignored painting of the last century, have been considered. Although Impressionist paintings focused on light, in substance it tended to dissolve the haystacks, cathedral facades, and urban streets it depicted into the flicker of a moment. Luminism, on the other hand, maintained an indissoluble attraction to physical things, fusing objects and a metaphysical light into a transcendentalist vision; time froze in a concentrated eternity. This Emersonian blend of reason and faith has been succinctly described as the blending of the real and the ideal. Art historian Barbara Novak, without question the most articulate spokeswoman for the 19th-cetury American art, has put it this way; “If we say that impressionism is the objective response to the visual sensation of light, then perhaps we can say that Luminism is the poetic response to the felt sensation… The conceptual nature of the American vision is one of the most distinguishing qualities of American art. It is accompanied by a strong feeling for the linear, for the wholeness of objects that must not rationally be allowed to lose their tactile identity—to be lost or obscured by the flickering lights and shadows of the European tradition.”
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Intriguing works in light and space
By Christopher Knight
Herald Examiner art critic
“Light and space,” It is said, are to Southern California art of the 1960’s and 70’s what gestural abstraction and the all-over image are to the New York School of the 50’s. Painting, sculpture, hybridized works, and, most importantly, installations of the period responded with the particular – and peculiar – qualities of atmosphere in the region. Robert Irwin stretched translucent nylon scrims across empty rooms, DeWain Valentine suspended acrylic rods that brought shifting daylight indoors, James Turrell, cut picture windows in the wall that looked into empty rooms filled with a nearly tactile atmosphere of ambient light. The ephemeral history of such temporal installation work is as vague and, by now, mythological as the most ancient art that has not survived the erosion of time. By their very nature, most light and space installations are as short lived and chimerical as a passing cloud.
“California I: Light and Space,” an exhibition of sculpture, paintings, photographs, drawings, and one small environment, is on view at the Lonny Gans Gallery, 21 Market Street, through March 31. It does not, as the gallery’s press release claim’s, “define the California movement and place it within the context of international contemporary art.” As an object-oriented exhibition (this is, after all, a commercial gallery with limited space and a need to have objects to sell), “California I” must omit the environmental installations that have become the hallmark of the movement it seeks to define. If anything, the show points out the need for a larger, full-dress exhibition to explore the light and space phenomenon. But that is the kind of show only an institution can orchestrate.
What the exhibition does offer is a number of intriguing works that provide clues to the larger concern of area artists involved with light and space as materials. In general, the movement has been claimed as the first wholly unique contribution to contemporary art made by Los Angeles artists. When the need to give the movement historical validity arises, French Impressionism is dredged up as the logical witness, with its tireless explorations of reflection, color, transparency, and the transient perceptual phenomena of light. But such a linkage rests on superficial similarities. Ignoring not only vast stylistic differences, but what I think is a fundamental attitude as well.
Consider, for instance, Laddie John Dill’s untitled work from 1975. It consists of a long shelf of sand, mounded and scooped into a terrarium landscape. Standing peaks and valleys are sheets of glass, set in an ordered arrangement of six L-shaped pairs along the length of the piece. Argon light from a hidden source illuminates the top edge of the planes of glass that are parallel to the viewer, causing linear reflections of light on the abutted glass. This reflected light appears to cut through the mounds of sand piled against the glass, or to float like laser beams over the miniature landscape. While an Impressionist landscape, built from a brushy, tactile haze of paint, dissolves its subject into an ecstatic blur of color. Dill’s piece employs a hard, precisely ordered, classically arranged, and measured configuration with all the clarity of a mathematical diagram. To this nearly mechanical arrangement, Dill fuses almost mystical overtones. Light, of course, has an ancient history of mystical associations, and here it links the transparency of glass with the opacity of sand (from which glass itself is made.) The reflected beams of light illusionistically piece both solid and void.
The differences between Dill’s tabletop landscape and, say, a Monet poppy field are greater, and more profound, than any similarities. Dill’s piece is a contained and a sharply delineated vessel for metaphysical meaning and, as such, is well within the realm of an American tradition of art embodied in Luminist landscape painting of the 19th century. In the canons of modern art, all roads lead back to France, and it has only been in recent years that other sources, including our own long-ignored painting of the last century, have been considered. Although Impressionist paintings focused on light, in substance it tended to dissolve the haystacks, cathedral facades, and urban streets it depicted into the flicker of a moment. Luminism, on the other hand, maintained an indissoluble attraction to physical things, fusing objects and a metaphysical light into a transcendentalist vision; time froze in a concentrated eternity. This Emersonian blend of reason and faith has been succinctly described as the blending of the real and the ideal. Art historian Barbara Novak, without question the most articulate spokeswoman for the 19th-cetury American art, has put it this way; “If we say that impressionism is the objective response to the visual sensation of light, then perhaps we can say that Luminism is the poetic response to the felt sensation… The conceptual nature of the American vision is one of the most distinguishing qualities of American art. It is accompanied by a strong feeling for the linear, for the wholeness of objects that must not rationally be allowed to lose their tactile identity—to be lost or obscured by the flickering lights and shadows of the European tradition.”
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