LIGHT ART IN ITALY 2009

Gisella Gellini Francesco Murano

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This is the second edition of ‘Light Art in Italy’, requested by the publisher after the success of the first one in 2007.We still aim to valorize and to convey the ex-pressive and artistic values of lighting, one of the excellences of Italian Design. In the words of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, one of the most important collectors and experts ofLight Art: ‘We are not aware that, if we are what we are today, it is thanks to the Past; it is the Past that allows us to live our lives and improve our future. If memory was lost, we would go back to being wild animals, as we were some millions years ago.[…]Knowing the context in which an ‘artwork’ is born is also very important. Art is the expression of the ideas, of the political, social, cultural and philosophical conditions of a certain society.’

Gisella Gellini PREAMBLE

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Light Art has today in Light Design, for-merly more reluctant to welcome what wasonce considered a degenerated use of light sources. To the theme of the passage from provocation to norm Francesco Murano de-dicates his introduction to show how, from the disruption of the classical scene carri-ed out by the Russian Constructivists and by the Italian Futurists, an experimental art was born. It evaded from the labora-tories, from the artistic circles and the gal-leries, and today it differs in innumerable ways and perfectly integrates itself in the indoors and outdoors of our daily living.

The first edition was written in Italian, but this year we decided to publish the volume inEnglish, to allow its wider circulation abro-ad. Francesca Della Morte unraveled the very entangled skein of the texts, written by the different artists that are hardly as good with words as they are with brushes, or, as in our case, with light sources. The graphics remained simple, effective and recognizable, which are all needed qualities when illustra-ting artworks that should be, and often are, ‘self-explicitating’. In the meanwhile, public and private, local and urban exhibitions de-dicated to Light Art have multiplied; to the now historical shows in Turin and Salerno, the Light Exhibition Design (L.E.D.) festi-val added, promoted by the Municipality of Milan. Several educational institutions that offer classes and courses of Lighting Design participated to the L.E.D. contest, proving the high degree of pervasion that

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In the first edition of ‘Light Art in Italy’ we tracked down the remote origins of the spec-tacular use of light in ancient Greek theatre. But to understand the passage from the alre-ady sophisticated and tonic use of luminous sources on stage to their conscious employ-ment in an autonomous form of art, it is not less fundamental to know the contribution given to this evolution by the Russian ar-tists and theoreticians in the ‘creative’ and relatively free period following the October Revolution. As a matter of fact, many were the Russian constructivist artists that investi-gated new expressive characteristics of the-atre lighting; already in 1913, even Kasimir Malevic directed the comedy ‘The Victory of the Sun’ by Kruc‘nych Matjusin using light to cut clearly the actors’ bodies in a cubist

INTRODUCTIONFrancesco Murano

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decomposition. Great importance was given by a director like Tairov to the luministic ef-fects obtained through spurts of ‘chromatic energy’; in certain cases, such as in ‘Kšnig Harlekin’ by Lothar (1917), in ‘Die Prin-zessin Brambilla’ by Hoffmann (1920), and in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1921), he used light to emphasize the theatricality of his shows, with phantasmagoric effects. Anyway, the most representative conception in the com-plex and intense activity of those years, and certainly the most substantial, was proposed by Mejerchol’d, the inventor of Biomechani-cs; he intended to make the actors’ body an autonomous instrument of signification, with a conventional semantics of its own, freed from the traps of naturalistic imitation and from the reigning limits of representation and realistic scenography. The tight relationship with Majakovskij and the Russian futurists on the dramaturgical side, and that with the

constructivists and the most advanced, aware and new waves in the Russian Figurative Art, like Tatlin and others, gave to the director a wide range of possibilities, texts and images of absolute originality and great significan-ce. Its stage, stripped of all the traditional articulations and reduced to the perimeter walls, became filled of proper structures, conceived for every performance, like the costumes and every other tool of the show, carefully evaluated according to the drama-turgical and scenic requirements. Therefore, even lighting was reprocessed and laid bare, reduced to an element of the complex scenic ‘score’, in which every element was connec-ted to the others without losing its autonomy, but, on the contrary, finding new stimuli and possibilities. The light sources, the projec-tors and the lamps were, at last, installed and sometimes handled ‘on sight’, to isolate, to highlight or, instead, to unify and to include

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the single moments of the show and its com-ponents (actors, objects, places and spaces). In Italy, after Duilio Cambelotti’s attempts to undertake a reform of scenography inspired by the plasticity of Appia’s theatre, the the-atre lighting and the raw light received their stimuli from the futurist theatre posters. The main commandments of the futurist theatre were to put on stage ‘all the discoveries (ho-wever improbable, bizarre or antiliteral) that our genious is making in the subconscious, in the never defined forces, in pure abstraction, in record and psycho-madness[…][and]to tune the public’s sensitivity exploring, rou-sing, by every means, the laziest branches; eliminating the preconception of coming to the fore, throwing nets of sensations betwe-en stage and public; the scenic action will overrun stalls and audience’. It will be Gia-como Balla to realize luminous theatre shows according to the futurist dictates. From the

scenic synthesis on Hell, he will recover the promethean tradition of liturgical drama, as it appears in the plot directions in his sketches of ‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Uni-verse’ (1914, reported by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco). In 1915, Enrico Prampolini writes the manifesto ‘Futurist Scenography and Co-reography’, in which he states that ‘the stage will not be a colored background anymore, but a colored electromechanical architectu-re mightily vivified by chromatic emanations of luminous source, generated by electric floodlights with multicolored glasses, analo-gously coordinated to the psyche that every scenic action requires. The luminous irra-diation of these colored beams and surfaces of light, the dynamic combinations of these chromatic vanishing points will give won-derful results of pervasion, of intersection of lights and shadows, creating voids of aban-don or luminous bodies of exultation. Let’s

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invert the parts of the illuminated stage, let’s create the illuminating stage.’ This is a first clear definition of luminous figures, namely elements that have a defined formal charac-ter, in order to stand alone as protagonists of a luminous event, regardless of their power to make the environment, in which they are or in which they are projected, visible. The intrinsic spectacularity of light is ‘traceable and we tried to follow it in the flames of py-res, in the simulations of flames in theatre, in the frenetic exploding of fireworks’. This spectacularity of the pre-ordered repetition of what Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti defines the ‘visible forms in their making and inva-riably renewable, as in cinema and in auto-matic shows’ joins the development of ligh-ting; as Sedlemayr very clearly notices, ‘from lighting, in different moments of history, ari-ses an art that compose its lights using lu-minescent sources, or encompassing them as

composing element’. One of these moments is represented by the show ‘Feu d’artifice’ by Stravinsky, staged on 12th April 1917 at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome. As Elena Povole-do reminds us, the scene consisted in a com-position of abstract forms, namely volumes built with wooden frameworks covered with strongly and clashing colored cloths. Every shape was surmounted by another very co-lorful, but transparent one, shining with lam-ps on the inside. The human person was ex-cluded from stage and replaced by effects of colored lights, rapidly changing according to the rhythm of the music (in 15 minutes there were over 60 changes of lights) and determi-ning the movement. It was the ‘color on the move’ of Futurism. The light changes were obtained using a control panel with switches that was connected to the electrical system of the stage and settled in the stage whisper’s pit. There were Balla and Dagilev directing.

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The experiment aimed at solving both a pain-ting and a scenographic problem by breaking the unity and the traditional equilibrium of the scene (a need already felt in a different way by Appia and Craig), but it didn’t con-tinue in those years, yet it marked the begin-ning of the modern Light Art. As a matter of fact, Light Art can be considered as a work of synthesis between scenography and art, a true staging of light in which the specta-tor feels to be part of the space for which and in which light lives, as it appears in the pages of this book.

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16 Mario Airò: LOTO (LOTUS)19 Nino Alfieri: BETONIERA COSMICA (COSMIC CONCRETE MIXER)20 Peter Beyli: ILLEGIBLE NOTES23 Marco Brianza: LONGEST DAY: REPLAY24 Arthur Duff: LOVE LETTERS27 Hans-Peter Feldman: SCHATTENSPIELE (SHADOW PLAY)28 Richi Ferrero: LUCE NERA (BLACK LIGHT)31 Piero Fogliati: FORME DI BUIO (FORMS OF DARKNESS)32 Marco Gastini: L’ENERGIA CHE UNISCE SI ESPANDE NEL BLU (THE ENERGY THAT UNITES EXPANDS IN THE BLUE)35 Peter Greenaway: THE WEDDING AT CANA36 Anish Kapoor: GLOW39 Mary-Anne Kyriakou: THE VEIL40 Impression Lighting: ANGELUS NOVUS43 Federica Marangoni: THE THREAD44 Anthony McCall: BREATH47 Jens J. Meyer: ORBITA IN LUCE (ORBIT IN LIGHT)48 Tatsuo Miyajima: SPIRITS IN THE WATER WITH CUBAN ARTISTS51 Iván Navarro: RESISTANCE52 Lygia Pape: TTÉIA55 Donatella Schilirò: TRANSITUM56 Paolo Scirpa: LA LUCE è TRA NOI (LIGHT IS AMONG US)59 Massimo Uberti: UNTITLED60 Nanda Vigo: SURYA63 Haegue Yang: VOICE AND WIND64 Chu Yun: CONSTELLATION n. 368 AV-AscoltiVisivi: COMPOSIT71 Antonio Barrese: ALBERO DI LUCE (TREE OF LIGHT)

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72 Carlo Bernardini: LA LUCE CHE GENERA LO SPAZIO (THE LIGHT THAT GENERATES THE SPACE)75 Daniel Buren: LA CABANE ECLATÉE AUX 4 SALLES (THE FRAGMENTED 4-ROOM HUT)76 Livia Cannella: ...ROMA ERA... (...ROME WAS...)79 Castagna & Ravelli Studio: LUCI FUTURISTE (FUTURIST LIGHTS)80 Ofri Cnaani: DREAMS AND DRAMAS83 Michele De Lucchi: LE PUNTE DI MILANO (THE TIPS OF MILAN)84 Chiara Dynys: DIETRO DI SÉ (BEHIND ONESELF)87 Nicola Evangelisti: LIGHT BLADE88 Alain Guilhot: PASSERELLES DE LUMIèRE ENTRE MEMOIRE ET MODERNITÉ (LIGHT LINKS BETWEEN MEMORY AND MODERNITY)91 Kristin Jones: TRILOGY. THE SHE-WOLF AS SHAPE OF TIME92 Ottonella Mocellin, Nicola Pellegrini: FORSE POSSIAMO ANCHE FARE UNA MAPPA PER NON PERDERSI (MAYBE WE CAN ALSO DRAW A MAP NOT TO GET LOST)95 Giuseppe Morando, Valentina Mammoli, Katrien Stakenborgh, Antonella Cheche: PULSE96 Renato Jaime Morganti: LIQUIDSPACES99 Mario Nanni: LA LUCE DELLA MUSICA (THE LIGHT OF MUSIC)100 Bruce Nauman: VICES AND VIRTUES103 Johannes Pfeiffer: LABYRINTH104 Antonio Picardi: ASCOLTARE IL SILENZIO (LISTENING TO THE SILENCE)107 Marinellia Pirelli: UNTITLED108 Roberta Riboldi, Sara Maroto Hebrero, Byung Ok Lee, Walter Bonanno: FIESTA DE LUZ (LIGHT PARTY)111 Bernardì Roig: HERR MAURONER112 Daniel Simonini, Lorenzo Marini, Fernando Gonzalez Sandino: THE LIGHT ORCHESTRA115 Carolina Sterzi, Xenia Skampaviria, Afroditi Maria Varveri: THE CHERRY ORCHARD116 Patrizio Travagli: WARPED PASSAGES

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