Luminal Music

Some day all art must come to light. --Matisse

Along with everything else, art has gone electric. It was bound to come in an age when light bulbs turn winter into spring in the greenhouses, when man's best-hidden viscera are laid bare and shining beneath the surgeon's spotlights, when murders have been witnessed on the television screen, and when the newest mind-expanding drug, in the words of one user, "makes your body feel like a conductor for tens of thousands of volts."

From coast to coast, no major exhibit of contemporary art these days is complete without the zap of neon, the wink of a wiggle bulb, the spiral shadows of alumia or the ghostly glare of minimal fluorescence. M.I.T.'s Hayden Gallery was jumping last week with the flickering lights of Venice Biennale Prizewinner Julio Le Fare's black-and-white Pulsating Lights and other works of artists exploring light as an artistic medium. For the Los Angeles County Museum's forthcoming "American Sculpture of the Sixties" show, electricians were readying Stephen Antonakos' Orange Vertical Floor Neon, Chryssa's Fragments for the Gates to Times Square II and an untitled work by Dan Flavin. At the heart of the U.S. pavilion at Montreal's Expo 67, technicians were putting into place Robert Rauschenberg's brand-new illuminated watt-chamacallit.

Moths to a Candle. The new luminal art has suddenly emerged as both international and popular. Some 80 artists from 20 countries were represented at the mammoth and highly successful "Art-Light-Art" show staged at Eindhoven last September by Philips' Lamp of The Netherlands. A record 42,000 visitors showed up when Kansas City's Nelson Gallery staged a month-long "Sound Light Silence" show last November. The minuscule Howard Wise Gallery on Manhattan's 57th Street was jammed to its sockets with 20,000 visitors when it displayed 36 artists from nine countries in its "Lights in Orbit" show this February. The same show, with 20 exhibits added, is currently breaking all attendance records at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Critics may rail at the technological supercharge of the "light brigade." Artists wail at the fragility of their new medium (fuses blow, bulbs burn out). But almost any exhibit that lights up in a gallery draws people like moths to a candle, or like children gazing into a burning hearth. In the following color pages, TIME reproduces the work of twelve luminal artists (and one luminal committee), photographed in galleries and studios in the U.S., France, West Germany and Britain.

Lutes to Lumia. For all its science-fiction appeal, the use of light in art is not exactly new; all art depends on light in one way or another. Light rays mold the light and shadows on the surfaces of sculpture, reflect from pigments to give the eye its impression of form and color. But in traditional art, color is constant, not kinetic. And even the purest oil or watercolor pigments inevitably reflect not pure color, but a mixture of colors. The present-day luminist's dream of both movement and purity has had to await the 20th century, with the full development of the incandescent bulb, the fluorescent tube and the movie projector, which has made the sustained use of artificial light possible.

One of the earliest pioneers was a former lute player, Danish-born Thomas Wilfred. In 1921 in New York, he built a kind of visual Wurlitzer, which he called the Clavilux. By moving sliding keys, he activated a battery of projectors behind a translucent screen. He became so skillful that he was able to create what he called lumia compositions--slowly evolving, shifting, glowing abstract patterns. At the Weimar Bauhaus, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy between 1922 and 1930 devised a polished metal and clear plastic Light Display Machine. But such items remained isolated curios ities. It took the 1950s and 1960s to attract a whole spectrum of artists to the medium.

Modulated Nudes. Today, says one of the new luminal artists, the U.S.'s Preston McClanahan, "light is the language of our time." Greek-born West Germany's Heinz Mack declares: "Physics is the same to me as a tube of oil paint to other painters." Explains M.I.T. Theoretician Gyorgy Kepes, a onetime Moholy-Nagy collaborator: "In everything and everywhere, we are surrounded by the technical factors that produce light, and we are no longer frightened by them."

Added to that is the whole 20th century experience of abstract art, from cubism through abstract expressionism, which has taught many that art need represent neither a thing nor an emotion; luminal art, though radiantly handsome, generally does neither. Pop played a role in making commercial techniques acceptable. Peter Myer, 32, constructed Transit Orb out of cello phane designs and polarized plastic filters, which are more commonly used for sunglasses. Manhattan's Earl Reiback, 31, a onetime nuclear engineer, even has fun in taking an object--one of six different nudes--and then modulating the image into total abstraction. To accomplish this, he built his Luminage Projector from two standard Buhl "Carrousel" projectors, altering their machinery so that a full complement of 160 slides would modulate gradually, "sensuously," in one continuous cycle. To achieve his abstract patterns, he painted the slides with transparent chemicals, then aimed a laser beam at some, bombarded others with gamma rays in a reactor to alter their stress patterns. The nudes were photographed in light cast through the slides; their bodies are not painted.

Psychedevotional at Ohm. Op art has conditioned gallerygoers to accept art that visually leaps from the wall to assault the optic jugular. Much luminal art is similarly turned on. The USCO group of Garnerville, N.Y., can induce the hallucinatory traumas that occur in some LSD trips by means of blinding strobe lights--the visual equivalent of the electronic scream at the end of the Beatles' record Penny Lane.

Light art is also showing up in the world of discotheques and happenings, wherever the emphasis is on being with it in the here and now. Manhattan's Jackie Cassen, 28, and Rudi Stern, 30, designed the environmental light projections for Timothy Leary's psychedevotional Death of the Mind. Thomas Tadlock, 25, is the author of a winking, blinking color organ. It can be hooked up with a hi-efi, responds with a special yellow bulb when it hears the voice of Mick Jagger, looked very much at ohm last summer performing in a Manhattan discotheque.

Not all the light artists were homegrown in psychedelic land. Most of them have tried their hand at forms of conventional painting or sculpture, but they are likely at the same time to have Ph.D.s in physics, to have worked as display artists or rocketry engineers. Among lumina's leading lights:

sbBritain's John Healey, 72, an inventor and former manager of a textile-processing business in London. In the past 14 years, he has developed his moving prismatic geometric light abstractions which are now exhibited as art and are also in use in London's University College Hospital to soothe patients.

sbGregorio Vardanega, 43, a native of Italy, studied painting and sculpture in Argentina, now works in Paris, where he shifted seven years ago into luminous constructions, like his blocklike, architectural "chromatic progressions." His goals in art are to produce "precision, harmony, cleanliness and order."

sbBritain's Takis, 42, is a philosophic Greek who began his odyssey into space-age media in 1954, while waiting at the Calais station. He became fascinated by "the signalization of the railways. I thought how dramatic this 'signalization' was, how necessary a part of our century." Ever since, he has been putting together odds and ends of old army tanks, trucks and planes to form cryptic beacons, panels of flashing green, violet and red aircraft-landing lights, needles that sing with an electronic Zorba whine.

sbTexas-born Frank Malina, 54, now a UNESCO adviser on astronautics in Paris, was a cofounder of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Starting out to make "a little bridge" between science and art, he began with strings, wires and painted plastic screens. He calls his finished squiggly luminal needlepoint paintings "Lumidynes," has built some ten feet high.

sbWest Germany's Heinz Mack, 36, one of the Group Zero, abandoned painted abstractions in 1953 to study philosophy and logic for three years at the University of Cologne. Artistic illumination came to him in 1959, when accidentally, he stepped on a piece of aluminum foil on a sisal rug, was delighted with the light reflections on its newly embossed surface. Today he uses plastics, spotlights, rotors, polished aluminum foil and nubbled glass to recapture this "amazing, profoundly changing" phenomenon, says that "to me, light plays the same part that color used to play for painters."

sbWest Virginia-born "Pete" McClanahan, 33, graduated from the Cincinnati Art Academy, did displays for the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan before beginning light constructions in 1964. His classically simple Cloverleaf employs relatively elementary wiring and hidden fluorescent tubes. McClanahan believes that "the promise of light is incredible to contemplate, but it may be disastrous for some at first, until the use of the medium is mastered, as classic Oriental drawing must be mastered, by constant training."

Distant Music. The 64,000-volt question about the use of light as a medium is, of course, whether it can produce great works of art or will remain merely intriguing decoration. Certainly luminal art is dazzling, far more mysterious than the jeeringly antisocial comment of pop, far more alive and sprightly than two dimensional op. Yet, like op, it often seems to be all surface and no content. In part, the problem lies in the novelty of the art and the difficulty its practitioners find in rising above the welter of technological gimmickry. But, unless some way is found to build luminal constructions far more durable than the present variety, museums in the year 2500 are going to be even more strapped for examples of 20th century light art than museums today are for genuine Leonardos.

"The only limitation that I see in it." says Thomas Wilfred, now 78, "is that those who try it just don't have the vision to use it." As far as M.I.T.'s Gyorgy Kepes is concerned, the problem is largely one of newness: "Renaissance artists like Uccello and even Leonardo were as much interested in discovery as in the poetry of the discovery. There was a joy in the discovery and a joy in that joy."

Yet the luminal artists are keenly aware that if their art is to succeed, they must develop it a good deal further. "The power that will make it last," observes McClanahan, "is the power of the individual artist to transmit his humanity to it." Says Thomas Tadlock: "We are at a stage now in light that is comparable to music when the first man took a stick and banged on a hollow log." Under the circumstances, even the hint of distant music is to be heralded.

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