SUBLIMITY IN THE ART OF THE LIGHT AND SPACE MOVEMENT Megan Friel Abstract In the 1960s art moved away from the idea of universal beauty towards a new aesthetic experience, a concept of the sublime which could accommodate the tensions of modernity. A strong example of this new experience can be seen in the works of the Light and Space movement, which emerged in Southern California in the 1960s with the intention of bringing a heightened awareness to our own perceptions of light and space. The movement’s artists accomplished this through large-scale installations that provided the viewer with an overwhelming sensory experience that can be characterized as the modern concept of the sublime. This paper explores the transition from an experience of the beautiful toward an experience of the sublime by applying the aesthetic theories of Kant, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard to the art of the Light and Space movement. I examine the question of whether the aesthetic experience is still a factor in art, and what it was about the historic moment of the Light and Space artists that drew us to work that simultaneously invites us to lose ourselves and seeks to re-sensitize us to an experiential way of being. In a subtle way after the fall of formal beauty the sublime was the only aesthetic experience left to modernism. - Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 197 IN the radical history of modern art, we have shared capacity to judge beauty as it was left the idea of universal beauty of the Kantian during Kant’s humanist period. Adorno’s idea enlightenment –but did we leave the aesthetic of the aesthetic experience reflects his views experience there with it?1 Does an embodied on the oppressive state of modernity; it is aesthetic experience still exist in modernism? about dissonance. The modern aesthetic Theodor Adorno described the modern experience is about the embodiment of the aesthetic experience as “the experience of tense space between reality and unreality, something which spirit does not have yet between the visible and the invisible.3 either of the world or of itself. It is the experience of the possible, as promised by its The work of Light and Space artist James impossibility. Art is the promise of happiness, Turrell embodies this tension in its exhibition a promise that is constantly broken.”2 Here the of light as a physical presence.4 Through an aesthetic experience is no longer one of a exploration of Turrell’s work and a consideration of Light and Space artists and thinkers Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler we 1Robert Irwin “Lecture for Richard Grey Visual Art Series” (Chicago Humanities Festival, Chicago, IL 9 November 2008). Robert Irwin speaks on reduction 3When referring to the modern aesthetic and the radical history of Modern Art. experience, I am looking at modernity as the period http://www.chicagohumanities.org/ Genres/Arts- of time roughly paralleling the period of modern And-Architecture/Robert-Irwin-Richard-Grey- art, from the 1960s through the 1970s. Visual-Artist-Series.aspx 4 James Turrell, “Mapping Spaces,” in Theories and 2Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 196. Press, 1996), 574. © Megan Friel, 2013. Originally published in Explorations: The UC Davis Undergraduate Research Journal, Vol. 15 (2013). http://UndergraduateResearch.UCDavis.edu/Explorations. © The Regents of the University of California. can view the work of the Light and Space truths sought by modernism.6 The aesthetic movement as an embodiment of modernist experience is a sensory one. Through art we philosophy of perception and the sublime. The are able to take in sensory information and Light and Space artists create seemingly conceptualize something that is not quite infinite hyper-minimalist installations tangible in the physical world, something comprised of nothing but space and light, slightly removed. Adorno articulates this in his whose presence is both abstract and concretely statement, “The question of truth in art comes real. Within these installations viewers lose into view when a non-existent is seen to rise as their footing and are, for an instant, lost in in if it were real.”7 Here we see art’s ability to an infinite and overwhelming space. This access something that nature cannot; it powerful sensation--like being lost in the abyss accesses abstract and absolute truths in a way of the ocean, or shrouded in heavy fog –is an that makes them concrete enough to be experience of the sublime. comprehensible. Through the aesthetic experience, art mediates our abilities to The installations of the Light and Space conceptualize an idea and our ability to movement have the overwhelming and almost perceive it through our senses; it bridges our frightening qualities Immanuel Kant rational and sensing capabilities.8 designated as sublime. Yet it was not until well after Kant’s period that the sublime was The art of the Light and Space movement discussed as a property of art.5 With this focused with great concentration on the space distinction in mind we must view the work of between our reasoning and feeling capabilities. the Light and Space artists as an embodiment It did this by extracting fragments of not of the historic sublime, but of the experiences of living, distilling them to their modernist sublime, as reinterpreted by purest form, and returning them to the viewer Theodor Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and in a new and accessible form. Jean-Francois Lyotard. These theorists saw the sublime in the the abstract, and in momentary In my attempt to unpack the aesthetic displacements from the physical world. experience provided by the works of the Light Through the writings of these theorists and a and Space movement it is most productive to consideration of the influence of technology view the beautiful and the sublime not as we see the work of the Light and Space artists distinct categories, but as two ends of an as embodying the modern sublime in its aesthetic spectrum. Albrecht Wellmer suggests presentation of an abstract experience that is that in Adorno’s aesthetic theory the beautiful simultaneously numbing and re-sensitizing. and the sublime are not opposed to one another, but that for Adorno the sublime The Sublime, Absolute Truth and Aesthetics signifies “a condition of the possibility of what, under conditions of modern art production, In order to explore the experience of the might still be called ‘beauty’: the sublime sublime in the Light and Space movement, we must first consider the aesthetic experience and its relation to the idea of the absolute 6 Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernists” in The Anti-Aesthetic, Ed. Hal Foster (New York: New York Press, 1998) 67. 7 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 122. 8 Paul Guyer, "18th Century German Aesthetics", 5Galen A. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ed. Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics , 222. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2008 Edition). UCDavis | EXPLORATIONS: THE UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL Vol. 15 (2013) M. Friel, p. 2 becomes a constituent of artistic beauty.”9 The power of light’s presence is echoed in This notion of the sublime as a means to access Doug Wheeler’s description of the intention of something of the beautiful helps to explain the his “light encasement” RM669 (Figure 1), a residual beauty of the sublimity in the works piece that encases a large square in diffused of the Light and Space movement. light causing the encased area to read as a void. Wheeler says of his work, “I want the The Light and Space Movement spectator to stand in the middle of the room and look at the painting and feel that if you In Southern California in the 1960s, a group of walked into it, you’d be in another world.”12 artists strove to create works that would bring While this glowing, otherworldly quality is a a heightened sense of awareness to viewers’ common thread across the works of the Light perceptions of light and space. Known as the and Space movement, they are not simply an Light and Space movement, their work reduces escape from the physical world. They are art to its purest elements, light and space, intended to re- sensitize viewers to an removing the hierarchy that is inseparable experiential way of being. Dawna Schuld from narrative imagery and presenting the explains how the works allow the viewer to viewer with a direct bodily experience rather a observe their own knowledge and perception representation of a bodily experience.10 This idea is eloquently summarized by Light and Space artist James Turrell in his statement that in his work “Light becomes the revelation rather the of revelation.”11 Figure 1 Doug Wheeler, RM 669 (1969). 9Albrecht Wellmer, “Adorno, Modernity, and the Figure 2 James Turrell, Skyspace (2006) Sublime,” in The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays © James Turrell. Image source: www.portlandart.net/ on Adorno and the Postmodern, ed. Max Ptensky archives/2009/03/the_black_squar_1.html (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 115. 10Robert Irwin “Lecture for Richard Grey Visual Art Series.” Irwin explains that in representation art the objects in the painting cannot have the same value 12Quoted in Robin Clark, introduction to because they have attached cultural significance. Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, ed. 11James Turrell (Garage Center for Contemporary Robin Clark (Berkeley: University of California Culture, Moscow, 4 August 2011). Press, 2011) 31. UCDavis | EXPLORATIONS: THE UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL Vol. 15 (2013) M. Friel, p. 3 being shaped reality more directly.