Impermanence in Light & Space

by Roberta Serpolli

Introduction

If we widen our vision to the horizon that stretches out before us, immense and immobile, or if we on the contrary fix our gaze on the tiny and unstable image that passes alongside us, we will perceive very different things.
The image is a firefly of transitory intermittences, the horizon bathes definitive states, the immutable times of totalitarianism or the finite times of the Judgment in light.
To see the horizon, the beyond, means not to see the images that come to graze us.

The firefly as emblem of the image defines the quality of transience, the element that makes us see the images that graze us. It is in this sense of fleeting yet revelatory phenomenon, in which permanence and contingency coexist, that the radicalism of the artistic research of Light & Space in the years between Sixties and Seventies is to be found.
The Sixties saw a gradual change of perspective. Artists were abandoning the autonomy and isolation of minimalist sculpture in favor of the concept of indefinite installations, as witnessed by for instance the works of Richard Nonas and Jane Highstein in which “the ephemeral determines the form of the installations, so that the value of the work is distributed along the succession of effects caused by it on the floor, on the walls, on the street and on the pavement.» Inthis transition, which also involves conceptual art, it is the very nature of the work, according to its various declinations, which is consigned to the territory of transience and temporariness. Historically retraced to the context of dematerialization, according to Lucy Lippard’s definition, these elaborations imply a process of abandonment of the object and of derivation from an idea or from a concept. The phenomenological aspect of the works of some conceptual artists, as for instance Robert Barry’s use of gas and other immaterial elements, sees a development towards a dematerialization of the image. Exploring the intangible quality of art, even the void is elevated to a primary component of artistic research. As Barry indeed asserts: «Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world».
In the phenomenological research that was conducted in California as of the Mid-Sixties, in its specific character, the element of transience focuses on the psychophysical and perceptive element of the spectator, which is subject to the changing atmospheric conditions. The experience of transience is linked to the specific moment in which the perception takes place, which is never the same and which may undergo an infinity of declinations of meaning. In this cognitive context the natural elements, light and color determine the transitory quality of the experience. These elements make the artist experiment with the empiric declinations of the ephemeral and their relations with scientific phenomena. And this is suggested by the self-same term “ephemeris”, which stands for the plates on which scientific observations of natural phenomena were once registered.
The preconditions for the transition from objectual to phenomenological art were created in the artistic evolutions of the mid-Sixties. In minimalism the relationship between work, spectator and surrounding space gave rise to an overturning of the previous optic-visual canons, in the approach to art, in favor of the intuitive and perceptive element. In spite of this, Donald Judd emphasizes, with his Specific Objects, the tangibility of the modular object, even if he deprives it of the conventional notion of sculpture.
In the same years, the research conducted on the West Coast of the United States focuses on the immaterial aspects of visual perception. Between 1963 and 1954 Robert Irwin proceeds with a series of painting experiments, resulting in the series of Dot Paintings, which lead him to investigate vision through the use of patterns made from pure pigment which, when seen from a distance, produce a completely white canvas. The abandonment of painting on canvas, as of 1968, represents an important turning point in the work of the Californian artist, who in the next two years focuses on producing round and curved structures in aluminum and acrylic, the Discs, where the perceptive doubt is triggered by the phenomena of refraction and fading.
At the same time an artistic research unfolds in Southern California; it develops in a number of directions, from works gathered under the name of Finish Fetish(among the artists we find Peter Alexander, De Wain Valentine, Laddie John Dill, Helen Pashgian and, for some aspects, Larry Bell) to the art of the Light & Space (which was, by some critics of the Seventies, even considered to feature the character of a movement). The term is conventionally used to indicate the art of Irwin, precisely, as well as that of James Turrell, Eric Orr, Douglas Wheeler, Michael Asher and Maria Nordman, who however has never seen herself as part of it.
In fact, in the late Sixties we witness a transition from experimental works of a pseudo-perceptive character featuring the new materials made available by the industry, including polymers, to environmental perceptive actions (immersive, often illusionistic and transitory) where light and space take the place of the object. Even if the definition Light and Space contributes to define the Californian art scene in history, the later concepts of Perceptual Art andPhenomenological Artprove particularly apt as definitions of all the phenomena subject of study, and of the different artistic approaches. If we dwell on the etymology of the word “phenomenon” (from ancient Greek: ϕαινόμενον, or that which appears), the connection between phenomenology and context of the ephemeral is enriched by further significances that are particularly relevant to the work conducted by the Californian artists. Moreover, while the two components – light and space – are predominant in the research of some artists, they are associated with a focused and continuous research on materials and new technologies.
In this sense, the work of Larry Bell is quite emblematic of the relations established by many of these artists with the aerospace industry. In the glass cubes he produced as of the second half of the Sixties, the artist gradually developed a technique of vaporizing the glass with metallic substances, which allowed him to achieve quite complex optical and perceptive effects.
This use of new materials, characteristic of the cultural environment of Los Angeles, led to his participation in the Art and Technologyprogram organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967-71). Among the 64 artists who participated, we also find James Turrell and Irwin who carried out a series of experiments on sensorial deprivation and ganzfeld (total field of vision) in collaboration with Edward C. Wortz, psychologist working with the aerospace company Garret Corporation, which conducted research on the psychophysical conditions of astronauts on behalf of NASA. Although Bell’s contribution to the program did not result in any work of art, he worked together with the engineers of the Rand Corporation for a short period, with the intention of making his interest in perceptive psychology converge with the technological products of the industry. Unlike Irwin, under whom he has studied, Bell has never produced architecturally structured environments. In the mid-Seventies he worked with the environmental dimension, producing very large works featuring the use of iridescent metallic films, creating transparencies and dematerializing visual effects.
While artists like Larry Bell focus on the process of transformation of materials, through highly specialized technical procedures, from his very first creations James Turrell works on the architectural structure of the environments with a luminaristic-structural aim. Unlike Irwin, who begins working with painting, then gradually arriving at a process of phenomenological reduction, Turrell works on the concept of immateriality from the very beginning. This principle is analyzed with the Afrumseries (from 1966), inwhich the projection of cubes in the exhibition space creates a visual-perceptive illusion caused by the uncertainty associated with the creation of a geometric form that is introflexed or projected outwards. The artist’s experiments made him ideate perceptive and architectural spaces created by luminaristic effects, the Mendota Stoppages (1969-74), which no longer exist but which could once be experienced in his studio in Santa Monica. In fact, as the artist points out, the light creates an architectural space, and it is in an interior that its potential may be fully realized,not out of doors. Thus, the immaterial valence of the light combines with its ability to create spaces. Moreover, in Turrell’s work the phenomenological-perceptive effect is achieved through highly material processes: the construction and deconstruction of special environments in order to favor the relation with the natural elements, as witnessed by works as Skyspace I andVirga (1974), purpose-made for the Eighteenth-century mansion of the spouses Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza di Biumo near Varese.
Giuseppe Panza, a person spiritually inclined towards an artistic research focused on essentiality, became interested in the Californian artistic milieu already in the late Sixties, when Robert Irwin introduced him to it; in those years it was the New York art scene that acted as catalyst for the art world. In Los Angeles he found fertile ground for his innovative way to collect art. In fact, after he had returned to Italy he became a patron of the arts; from 1973 to 1977 he offered Irwin, Turrell and Maria Nordman a number of rooms in his mansion, for installations which were to become permanent. Villa Panza has since then been one of the few places in Europe, not to mention the United States, where the visitor can experience his or her own psychophysical perceptions through Light & Space works. Indeed, the collector recognizes, on several occasions, a significant evolution of creativity in the art of Los Angeles: namely a transition from the representation of space and light to their use as physical and immaterial elements in relation to the interior faculties of Man. In fact, in 1976 he participates, curating the section featuring American environmental art, in the pioneering exhibition Europa America. The determined abstraction, 1960-1976, opened a few months before Ambiente Arte, the famous exhibition wanted by Celant at the XXXVII Venice Biennial.
Panza commences his collection of works by Irwin with the Discs. After this important series, the artist begins his production of site-conditioned works including, among others, the works installed in the mansion at Biumo. This transition to the environmental dimension, with interventions in the exhibition space, characterizes Irwin’s contribution to what may be considered the first exhibition of Light & Space, namely “Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space: Four Artists” held in 1971 at the museum of the UCLA University of Los Angeles. Not long before this exhibition, the artist had presented an exhibition at the MoMA in New York of 1970, where he presented – in one of the less prestigious spaces of the museum – Fractured Light – Partial Scrim Ceiling – Eye-Level Wire, one of his first Scrim Pieces. In the two installations, Irwin made good use of his experiments on the process of sensorial reduction and introspection, which had characterized his participation in Art and Technology.
The lack of concrete visual references that distinguished these environments by Irwin reveals an interest in the researches on immateriality conducted by French artist Yves Klein, who staged a radical reductionism with his workLe Vide presented at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris in 1958. On that occasion Klein “represented” the immaterial through a void by means of a procedure that we may define tautological in the sense that, referring to his monochromatic canvases, he painted the wall with the sensibility of a painter.
Regardless of how much they may owe to this kind of artistic research, the environmental works of Irwin – but also of Michael Asher, another protagonist in the Californian art scene, proceeded in the direction of a phenomenological pragmatism: in other words, they do not refer to anything but themselves.
Klein sought a powerful reverie, as in the rooms described by Bachelard […]. What was startling about Irwin’s and Asher’s rooms was not their reverie or projection of the infinite but their finite clarity. They were not cloaked in mysticism. They were naked. They made you notice and want to question everything about them as structures. […]. The light of these rooms was a natural fact, neither overtly dramatic nor spiritual.
The phenomenological condition experimented by Irwin proceeded apace with his interest for the phenomenological aesthetics of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, which is evident not only in his body of writings but also in his activity as a teacher, in which context he participated in numerous conferences on the psychology of perception in the course of many years. These philosophical speculations have given rise to the definition of the concept of “impermanent” as synonym of “ephemeral”, referring to his artistic research, which is clearly inspired by post-structuralist thought:
Seeing concepts as propositions, open posture for change. Flexible, allowing for the dynamics of change. Questions over answers – process over product – allowing our assumptions of meaning to exist equally in transient and momentary acts – inclusion of phenomena.
The very dynamics of change mentioned in this passage determine the relationship of the spectator with the environmental work of art, based on “perceptive doubt” and on the changeable conditions of experience. This research has focused on the relationship between art and science, the basis of the Art and Technology program. If we consider the consequences of this initiative on the work of not only Irwin but also Turrell, it becomes clear that the scientific-perceptive experiments conducted on that occasion has not been the means through which one has succeeded in reconfiguring the artistic language, but rather represented one of its possible applications in a phenomenological environment. As to this aspect, the considerations of Edward C. Wortz, the psychologist of perception who worked with both, are illuminating. Interviewed by Douglas Davis on the relationship between the work of the two artists and perception, the NASA scientist asserts:

More than the work, I see a relationship in their general philosophy with perception per se. In their general attitude and perception of life. That’s one of the conceptual problems in the project.

This general attitude to perception implies the creation of a potentially infinite work, not only due to the continuous changes in atmospheric and sensorial conditions they provoke in those who experience it, but also due to the continuity of this experience beyond the exhibition space. This characteristic, as Dawna Schuld observes, today remains one of the most important components of phenomenological art:

We are left to consider the work in terms of the dynamics of perceptual engagement. […] we take the work with us: our heightened senses, now attuned to the subtleties of the conscious fringe, encounter a more vivid world than the one we left behind.

Alongside the investigation of the phenomenological element, some artists who may be associated with the Light & Spacemilieu have resorted to spirituality in the experiential significance of their environmental projects. In that sense the Zero Massproject (1972-73) by Eric Orr represents a new meaning of ephemerality, something which emerges both from the impermanence of the material used, paper, and from the “proto-materialism” of the spectator’s visual experience. These components are linked to the artist’s interest for Zen Buddhism, which leads him to conceive environments as placed for meditation.
When telling about his experience of Zero Mass in the space of the Cirrus Gallery of Los Angeles in 1974, Giuseppe Panza virtually takes us back to this spiritual and immaterial dimension of Orr’s work:

The room seemed completely dark. We had been told to sit down on the floor, on some cushions that we had to grope around to find because the darkness was total, and wait. It felt like we had to wait for a very long time. Finally, the darkness began to lift, some shades were becoming visible, but only shades, nothing concrete or recognizable. […]. I happened to look at my hands, and was greatly surprised to realize that they too had become shades. It was as if they were no longer mine. I was surrounded by a weak light that came from all directions […] I had become a shadow. My body no longer existed. It was something that had lost substance. […]. I had entered the unreal world of souls; all I had left of my own was my conscience. The only immaterial entity that distinguishes us from everything else.
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Georges Didi-Huberman, Come le lucciole, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2010 (original editionSurvivance des lucioles, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009), p. 69. The italics also appear in the original text.
Germano Celant, Una collezione ideale, in Marco Magnifico, Lucia Borromeo Dina (edited by), Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza e la collezione Panza di Biumo, Milan, Skira, 2001, p. 45.
The first text in which this process is defined in terms of art critique is the article signed by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, The Dematerialization of Art, “Art International” (February 1968), p. 44. The following volume contains a collection of writings referring to the period from 1966 to 1972: Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 1973.
This aspect of Barry’s work has been analyzed by Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Cambridge (Mass.), The MIT Press, 2003),pages 95-110.
Robert Barry in Ann Goldstein, Anne Rorimer (eds.), Reconsidering the object of art: 1965-1975, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, 15 October 1995 – 4 February 1996) Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995, p. 70.
Consider, in particular, the overcoming of the formalist approach of art critic Clement Greenberg.
See, in this regard, Robin Clark (edited by), Phenomenal, California Light, Space, Surface, exhibition catalogue (La Jolla e San Diego, Museum of Contemporary Art, 25 September 2011 – 22 January 2012), Berkeley and San Diego, University of California Press; Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011, p. 89.
The terminological question has been studied in depth by recent studies which have cast light on the limits of the definition but also its historical connotation: Donna Conwell, Glenn Phillips, Duration Piece: Rethinking Sculpture in Los Angeles, in Rebecca Peabody, Andrew Perchuk, Glenn Phillips, Rani Singh (edited by), Pacific Standard Time. Los Angeles Art 1945-1980, exhibition catalogue (various venues 1 October 2011 – 5 February 2012), Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011, pp. 186-230.
As Douglas Davis with considerable foresight points out Douglas Davis, Art and Technology – The New Combine, “Art in America”, 56, n. 1 (January – February 1968), pages 25-34.
Maurice Tuchman (edited by), A report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1967-1971, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971.
With regard to the analyses of the first works contextualized to the entire production of the artist, reference is made to the recent retrospective: Michael Govan, Christine Y. Kim (edited by), James Turrell: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 26 May 2013 – 6 April 2014; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1 June – 18 October 2014; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 12 December 2014 – 6 April 2015; with simultaneous exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 9 June – 22 September 2013, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 21 giugno – 25 settembre 2013), Los Angeles, Munich and New York, Lacma DelMonico Books, 2013.
Turrell has dwelled on this aspect in the recent interview: Guggenheim Conversations with Contemporary Artists: James Turrell with Michael Govan, video, Youtube, Guggenheim Museum, July 12, 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox00pFnKS7g.
Europa America: l’astrazione determinata 1960/1976, curated by Flavio Caroli, exhibition catalogue (Bologna, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, May – September 1976), Municipality of Bologna 1976.
The following artists participated in the exhibition: Peter Alexander, Larry Bell and Craig Kauffman.
The full title of Klein’s exhibition wasLa spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide. For an examination on the intangible in Klein see: Denys Riout, Yves Klein: Expressing the Immaterial, Paris, Éditions Dilecta, 2010.
Michael Auping, Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Light and Space, in Robin Clark (edited by), Phenomenal… cit., p. 88.
A considerable part of the texts for conferences and seminars are published in: Robert Irwin, Notes Toward a Conditional Art, edited by Matthew Simms, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011. In these texts, the recurrent philosophical references are Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, as analyzed by Matthew Sims, Introduction: Irwin’s Writing, ivi, pages 1-19.
Robert Irwin, Lecture Notes, ivi, pages 61-66, here p. 64.
James Turrell/Robert Irwin/Edward Wortz: The Invisible Project, in Douglas Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Between Science, Technology, and Art, New York, Praeger, 1973, s.p.
Practically Nothing: Light, Space, and the Pragmatics of Phenomenology, in Robin Clark (ed.), Phenomenal… cit., p. 121.
The definition is attributable to Thomas Mc Evilley who has analyzed the concept of «proto-materialism» in the work of Orr, see: Journeys In and Out of the Body: Proto-Materialism of Eric Orr, “Images and Issues”, 2 (Spring 1981), pages 14-19.
Ricordi di un collezionista, Milano, Jaca Book, 2006, pages 161-162.