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PhD dissertation
Cultures of Light: Contemporary Trends in Museum Exhibition
My general areas of investigation in this study are the art and science of light in a museological context. Light can affect human perceptions and emotions, focusour attention, create a visual mood and may be used to perform an investigative function. It can also be employed as a tool to represent an act and as a medium. These are the cultures of light that I will investigate in this study. The central question this study seeks to explore is how do museums operationalize the agency of light? I hypothesize that agents deploy light in such a way that it not only transmits messages that are sometimes narrative, but also, in a somewhat coded way, has a formative function. I will argue that light is being used in new ways as a tool by museum staff, artists and other agents to facilitate and guide interpretation. In this study I investigate light as a cultural concept from a cultural analytic perspective. It is my intention to extend the wider academic discussion of light from an artistic medium to an exhibitionary tool, to the more specific uses of light as an investigative tool. I conclude the study with the exhibitionary medium of shadow, or the absence of light.
Chapter outline
In the first chapter my analysis of contemporary lightworks situates the theoretical concept of light within the framework of the production of art and its relation to art history. I begin my analysis by discussing light as what has been called a “semantically empty” medium, capable of affecting the perceptionof the viewer. In thischapter I investigate works by artists such as Dan Flavin’s untitled (to Henri Matisse), Joseph Kosuth’s Neon Electrical Light and James Turrell’s afrum-proto, all of which were constructed in the 1960s. More contemporary lightworks I survey are Seth Riskin’s Blue Light for György Kepes, Ann Veronica Janssens’ Red, Yellow and Blue, Carsten Höller’sLichtwand, Olafur Eliasson’s 360° Room for All Colours and Mischa Kuball’s Private Light/Public Light, all ofwhich, in one way or another, emit their own variation on the theme of light. I also analyze installations of Yayoi Kusama’s Dots Obsession: New Century and Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment. Here, in order to understand the way light can affect the viewer, I trace the use of light from an art-historical perspective as an artistic medium from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present day in order to lay the foundation for discussing light as a narrative tool in the following chapter.
I examine the intertwinement of narratology and theatrical lighting in the second chapter. This chapter investigates the way the effects of light can augment the narrative of an exhibition. Rather than examining contemporary art, as in chapter one, this chapter takes the illumination of a contemporary exhibition of eighteenth-century costumes, furniture and decorative arts, organized in tableauxvivants, as its primary object of study. The analysis utilizes Bal's narrative theory as set out in hervolume Narratology: Introduction tothe Theory of Narrative in order to uncover the ways in which light plays a role in not only the individual tableaux, but also to bring together into a narrative the whole exhibition, which unfolds in a suite of period rooms within the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Understanding how light narrates, or what it says to the viewer, lays the foundation for examining more specific uses of light within the museum environment. The third chapter investigates the specific use of ultraviolet light as an investigative tool and atmospheric medium of illumination. After first discussing the physical nature of ultraviolet light, this chapter investigates the way three significantly differentexhibitions use ultraviolet light to expose various attributes of their displayed objects. The first exhibition, Fluorescent Minerals from the Permanent Collection at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia, explores the way curators have used an invisible medium as a pedagogical tool to instruct viewers about the scientific principles of mineral fluorescence and, at the same time, expose the hidden aesthetic beauty of the natural world. Next, I study how contemporary artist Regine Schumann deploys ultraviolet light to create a disconcerting “landscape” of colour and light. The third exhibition I consider is a didactic display and below-the-surface look at a specific group of Piet Mondriaan's paintings known as the “Trans-Atlantic group”. Here, I examine the way ultraviolet light is used, non-invasively, to look below the surface of paintings in order to uncover the ways in which this particular group of paintings was changed by the artist from its beginnings in Europe to its eventual formal completion on the North American continent. Finally, I examine the notion of the “boundary object”, as conceived by Susan Star and James Griesemer.I consider the possibility of ultraviolet light as a particular kind of boundary object where, through the activeagency of light,a translationof information between different communities of practice within the museum environment takes place. The final chapter looks beyond the medium of light to illuminate the ways in which shadow is deployed as both an exhibitionary and artistic medium. Here, I investigate not only specific types of shadows which appear as darkened shapes on surfaces, but also the relative darkness that can communicate a suggestion of something, or performs a formative function in relation to the artwork. Shadows are considered from the standpoint of how they influence our perception. I first discuss their theorization by Classical scholars such as Plato and Leonardo da Vinci through the framework of Victor StoichitaandMichael Baxandall. Second, I consider three examples of the use of shadow in an exhibitionary environment. I discuss first the shadow cast by a fully-weighted ALARM missile displayed in the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. Next, I discuss the way Constantin Brancusi deploys shadow in conjunction with his sculpture Prometheus. Lastly, I discuss the case of Larry Kagan’s shadow artworks, where shadow is a medium necessary for the completion of the artwork. This chapter demonstrates how the luminous environment of the exhibition space is not only comprised of the effects of light, but that the effects of darkness and shadow also play an important exhibitionary role.