Light Art
For several months, I’ve been trying to piece together some comments on the topic of light art. I must have been waiting for something to show up that I could get genuinely excited about. This finally happened last month when I went to a theater production at the Straight Theater. It happened to be a new play, “Room Beyond the Closet and Other Voices in the Same Room,” by John Fisher, but its extremely effective integration of light and sound called to mind other theatrical happenings scattered over the past year in which lights have been incorporated in an entirely new way, as an integral part of the total dramatic texture.
While the limitations of light art, at least in the sense of light shows spread over the walls of the big dance halls, are becoming increasingly obvious, its potential as an exciting new element in theater, dance and other forms of more “total” artistic experience are just beginning to be seriously explored.
It is doubtful if lights have ever been, or even can exist as an independent art form. Various people have been trying various things: Don Flavin’s geometric construction of fluorescent tubes, Joseph Riccio’s boxes of changing light and color, Steve Waldeck’s lightening-like electrone “events.” These are basically extensions of sculpture and painting, working with various properties of light but neglecting others, such as its existence as an energy force involving the dimension of time, or its ability to transform the remotest corners of an environment. Like a painting or sculpture, even though they are programmed with all kinds of changes, you look until you get tired of looking, with Riccio’s “Kolectra” boxes probably taking honors for making you want to look the longest.
The big light shows, as they first grew up in the rock dance halls, were inseparable from the music, the dancing, the vibrations of the crowd, not to mention one’s own particular state of consciousness before entering the auditorium. They were, in a sense, an extension of the art of scenic stage design, projecting it onto an environmental scale which involved everybody as actors in an event that obliterated the line between theater and reality. One might say the same was even true of the sound; whatever musical qualities distinguished one group from another, or came across clearly over recordings and FM, the emphasis was on the sound as sound, amplified into a physical, absorbing presence.
This was back in the days when everybody danced, or did Some Thing. Now, with everyone sitting around on the floor, the lights become more independent, more of a spectator art, but in doing so, they also lose much of the old impact; they are a little like mobile murals, a kinetic scenic backdrop around a stage where nothing is happening. This sometimes even becomes true of the sound, which resembles a musical overture for an event that doesn’t follow.
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