style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>The nature of electricity is
movement and, generally speaking, when electricity is used as an element in art,
it moves. Film, video, and amplified music are all "moving" arts that
are perceived over a length of time. This element of time creates a context
that is easily assimilated into our day-to-day existence, because everything
that we do is stretched out in time. Art that does not move has a chance to
break that pattern and create a situation that heightens the awareness of
perception.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>Two shows from the Ace Gallery, the
David Hammons show from last Spring, and the Keith Sonnier show that is up
through December 03, both use electric light as a primary element of the art.
Sonnier uses neon, incandescent, and florescent lights as materials to
construct his sculpture. Hammons turned lights off to provide the complete
absence of light. Both shows provide examples of this particular power that is
at the essence of the still arts.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>The Sonnier light sculptures are
from the late sixties and early seventies. Most of these pieces are created
with neon. The neon tubes are simply shaped and wired together to create linear
sculpture of colored light. The lit tubes are displayed as nothing more than
themselves, containers of light that surround planes of colored air and radiate
into the atmosphere around them, lightly tinting their surroundings. The
physical hardware, tubes, wiring, and transformers, are left bare, as objects,
their presence made more surreal, more sensual, bathed in their own radiant
light. The sound of the electricity that emanates from the hardware almost
snaps the air around the gas filled tubes and the electrical transformers.
Walking around a room filled with these pieces is an exploration of not only
physical objects radiating light in a room, but also an exploration of what it
feels like internally to be alive in that room at that moment in time.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>The Ace Gallery is a huge,
cavernous space, with large openings in a long wide corridor that open into
vast exhibition spaces. This allows for big installations, or in the case of
the David Hammons show, lack of installation. Hammons simply turned the lights
off and invited the art viewers to view nothing except vast areas of complete,
black darkness. Viewers were given small flashlights that emanated a dim blue
light, enough to illuminate the area a couple of feet in front of their step,
but other than that, there were no other objects to contemplate, and there was
nothing for sale.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>I missed the opening, but I can
imagine the space filled with points of blue light reminiscent of Bush Senior’s
famous "thousand points of light" vision. But walking through the vast
empty darkness alone, with the small blue light used sparingly was an
extraordinary, sensual experience. At one point, with the use of the flashlight
to momentarily illuminate a small area around me, I could imagine what it might
feel like to be a burglar, alone in a strange house. But stepping slowly,
cautiously into total darkness was exhilarating. My body was filled with
vibrating anticipation, a kind of reaching out into darkness, trying to detect
mass, a wall, a doorway, the end to this vast void.
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style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>In both shows, the experience of
perception was exhilarating and enlightening at once, a moment where intellect
and sensation merge, a moment where human consciousness is Nature.
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