Art Expanded, 1958–1978

II

Walker Living Collections Catalogue

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Plugged In,Turned On

The Electronic Light Art of Light/Motion/Space
Tina Rivers Ryan
Abstract
The 1967 Walker exhibition Light/Motion/Space inducted audiences into the dazzling world of light-as-medium. Featuring light-based art from the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, the show broke attendance records at the Walker and at its subsequent venue, the Milwaukee Art Center. Looking back through historical photographs pulled from the archives and new documentation of recently conserved works of art, art historian Tina Rivers Ryan acts as our guide through this groundbreaking exhibition. The archival capsule includes original installation images from the era as well as new moving and still images of works from the Walker’s collection.
Citation
Rivers Ryan, Tina. “Plugged In, Turned On: The Electronic Light Art of Light/Motion/Space.” In Art Expanded, 1958-1978, edited by Eric Crosby with Liz Glass. Vol. 2 of Living Collections Catalogue. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015.
http://walkerart.org/publications/art-expanded/light-motion-space.

Walker Art Center ©2015

Martin Friedman on Light/Motion/Space, excerpt from a Walker Art Center promotional film, 1969. Walker Art Center Archives.

Since the days of the caveman, artists have used pigment both to reflect nature and their own emotions. But only in this century have artists successfully treated light itself as a medium, and only in the last decade has the manipulation of light been recognized as an art form. —“Techniques: Luminal Music,” Time magazine, April 28, 1967

Light and Movement. Light as a Creative Medium. Current Art. Art Turned On. Sound Light Silence. Light in Art. Light and Motion. Starting around 1965, museums in Europe and across America began mounting exhibitions devoted to a new trend: the use of real light to create art. Though prefigured by the kinetic light sculptures of the European avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, the light art of the 1960s—which often deployed new materials such as plastics and phototransistors—was a Space Age phenomenon, reflecting both the ubiquity of electric light and the rise of consumer electronics. One of the most significant exhibitions of the new movement was Light/Motion/Space, which was presented by the Walker Art Center and the Milwaukee Art Center (now Milwaukee Art Museum) between April and July 1967. The show comprised roughly sixty to sixty-five works by forty-two artists and was supplemented with lectures by artists Otto Piene in Minneapolis and Jack Burnham in Milwaukee. The Walker also offered Piene’s four-hour spectacle The Proliferation of the Sun at its opening, and the avant-garde dance Light Associations in its galleries; fittingly, both featured performers operating lights in motion in space.

Aside from garnering press attention (including a mention in Time magazine’s article on “Luminal Music”), the show set new records at both museums, including those for overall attendance, single-day attendance, and number of tours at the Walker.

1 Even Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a former Minnesota Senator, attended the show. Among the most discussed works were the aluminum-paneled Strobe Environment by the New York–based collective USCO, and Dr. Gerald Oster’s Instant Self-Skiagraphy, which used a strobe light to imprint visitors’ shadows on a phosphorescent wall. Together, these works reflect the growing popularity of interactive environments as well as the strobe’s allure as a symbol of our increasingly frenetic, media-saturated lives.

Light/Motion/Space developed out of another exhibition, Lights in Orbit, which was held at New York City’s Howard Wise Gallery from February–March 1967, where it also broke attendance records. In 1962, Howard Wise had loaned a collection of thirty contemporary paintings, mostly by European abstract artists, to the Walker; their new joint venture reflected the Howard Wise Gallery’s evolved identity as the premier exhibitor of technologically oriented art in America, if not the world. Before settling on a new name for the expanded show, Wise wrote to Walker director Martin Friedman and suggested Light! Light! Light! and Light-Licht-Lux, reflecting that the exhibition’s works were energetic spectacles, and that many of them were of international origin.

2 In fact, roughly half of the artists in Light/Motion/Space were also included in the groundbreaking show Kunst Licht Kunst (Art Light Art) at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands the previous year.

As the catalogue for Lights in Orbit indicates, another hallmark of the show was that its artists were just as likely to have a background in the sciences as the arts. Many used cutting-edge materials such as laser beams, irradiated plastics, and polyester films coated with a “monomolecular” layer of aluminum. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the works required an unusual amount of energy for an art exhibit, and were prone to mechanical breakdowns; one astute museum director asked the Walker if an engineer would travel with the works “to keep all these objects in light, motion, and space.”

3 While many critics admitted that judging the artistic merits of such novel work would require new criteria, they agreed that, for better or for worse, light art was the art of the future. As one writer for The Milwaukee Journal noted, “Now, real social and economic power belongs to engineers with circuit diagrams. Art should also concern itself with minute exchanges of energy and information.”
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Ultimately, Light/Motion/Space offered visitors a recognition of this new world order and a vision of how art might continue to be relevant under its conditions. In his essay for the show’s catalogue, curator and critic Willoughby Sharp observes that “the electric age has created a new environment constituted of such media as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and TV.” Parroting media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose influence could be traced throughout the show, Sharp goes on to argue that “these media have restructured our sense ratios.”

5 If that is true, then art can either help us adapt to our new sensorium or offer its own models for how we sense our world and understand our place in it. The works in Light/Motion/Space did both, lighting the way for art that aims to shape our experience of technology today and into the future.

Tina Rivers Ryan is an art historian and critic specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Art in America, Art Journal, and Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media as well as several books, including anthologies from Oxford University Press and Düsseldorf University Press. Online, her writing can be found on numerous websites, including Artforum.com, Artsy.net, and Smarthistory.org. She holds degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California, and her work on the emergence of new media art was supported by a research fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  1. At the Walker, overall attendance reached almost 90,000 visitors; single-day attendance neared 4,200); and 293 tour groups viewed the exhibition. At the Milwaukee Art Center, overall attendance came close to 39,000 for the run of the show.

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  2. Letter from Howard Wise to Martin Friedman, February 22, 1967. Walker Art Center Archives. Folder: Light/Motion/Space: Correspondence: Howard Wise 1966–1967.

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  3. Letter from Merrill Rueppel, Director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, to Martin Friedman, February 17, 1967. Walker Art Center Archives. Archives. Folder: Light/Motion/Space: Circulation 1966–1967.

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  4. Michael Kirkhorn, “Light/Motion/Space/Light/Motion/Space,” The Milwaukee Journal, July 16, 1967, 4.

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  5. Willoughby Sharp, “Luminism: Notes Toward an Understanding of Light Art,” in Light/Motion/Space (exh. cat.) (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1967), 2.

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