The Dark Sides of Light and Space

In 1971, the University of California, Los Angeles, Art Galleries presented an exhibition designed to acknowledge an aesthetic, if not a movement, specific to Southern California at that time. It included four artists: Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and Craig Kauffman. The show’s title summarized the characteristics of their work, qualities shared by the work of a number of other local artists of the region: Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space. We have come to know this phenomenon as the Light and Space movement, light being the presumably pivotal glue holding these bodies of work together.

The movement drew international attention for its carefully formed, translucent, light-absorbing plastics, its glass sheets coated with subtle tinted colors and bathed in gallery lighting, and its room-sized installations in which architecture became a container for light. Doug Wheeler embedded voids of light in walls, beckoning us into another portal. Irwin’s illusive scrims generated subtle glows that made the shape of the room feel more fluid. James Turrell’s skylights cut open the ceilings of rooms, allowing natural light to breathe new life into architecture. In all of these cases there was a sense of ethereality, openness, and release. It was like going to Minimalist heaven through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “primacy of perception”—a cleansing of the mind’s eye. The artworks had a luminescent beauty that felt like a perfect abstract portrait of a parched, sun-soaked region looking out at the space and light above the Pacific Ocean.

This view was an oversimplification that persisted for decades, to the point that some of the press releases devoted to the aesthetic read like sales pitches for a day at the beach. Only in recent years have we come to explore different angles into the movement.¹ Maybe it’s my advancing age and increasing crankiness that makes me want to remember the dark sides of Light and Space, even to the point of seeing its overall development as an evolution into various shades of psychological, phenomenological, and spiritual darkness. From a certain viewpoint, even light can be dark.

Bruce Nauman arrived in Southern California from the Bay Area in 1969, bringing an edgy, discomforting quality to Light and Space. Like the artists mentioned above, Nauman was a pioneer in creating special rooms of light that immersed the viewer, but he didn’t take you to heaven, unless heaven feels like a vague headache. Untitled (Variable Lights/Extreme Bright Lights), a room in a critically acclaimed survey of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1972, addressed the strange banalities of both light and space in many museums. Nauman had the exhibition technicians install as many light cans as they could find, spaced evenly around the ceiling of the room, most of them facing down, so that you walked into a volume of very bright, institutional light pounding down on the empty space. The atmosphere was banal and felt hot. It was an empty room, but somehow oppressive.

Nauman’s light resonated less with Merleau-Ponty than with Fritz Perls’s Gestalt psychology. Perls’s research revolved around the way the human personality deals with spatial situations, especially those that are not constructed in organized or appealing ways. Nauman’s comments on his work of that period reflect a similar interest: “What really interested me is what is it about certain spaces that makes us feel uncomfortable, and what do we do and what emotions do we have when we sense a room is not right. I didn’t want to escape that condition. I wanted to go right to it.”²

The artist’s famous Green Light Corridor (1971)—a long narrow corridor that allowed one person to walk or, in some cases, squeeze themselves through it essentially sideways—countered the apparent ethereal openness of Irwin’s and Turrell’s installations with a beautifully nauseous compression. What initially looks like a rich, material slice of green atmosphere is altogether different once you enter: the light intensifies into a darker emotion. About halfway through, you begin to feel the weight of the green fluorescent light and the compression of the narrow corridor. It’s not a feeling of release; it’s more like a feeling of entrapment.

Fluorescent yellow was one of Nauman’s preferred colors in the early ’70s, because, he later said, “It can be so bright it goes kind of dark, and can be unsettling. Also, it doesn’t work well with other light. It gets a little squirrelly.” He did two works—Installation with Yellow Lights (1971) and Yellow Triangular Room (1974)—in which rooms were filled with yellow fluorescent light from long tubes that hung above the viewer.³ The rooms, constructed within the gallery space, had no ceilings. In both cases you entered out of rooms lit by cool, white gallery lighting; the adjustment was not dramatic but it was annoying. You felt a strong need to blink your eyes, a reflex that didn’t really help. In the psychology of color, a certain intensity of yellow is considered appealing and joyful. Taken up another degree, though, yellow becomes a color of caution, and very bright yellow induces nervousness and agitation. These rooms did the latter. Moreover, if you looked up to the open ceiling, where the yellow fluorescent and cool white gallery light mixed, you would see purple and some dark spots.

Nauman left Southern California in 1979, but he carried the dark side of LA light with him. Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care, presented at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1984, consisted of a series of intersecting black Celotex tunnels with yellow lights hidden in their black interiors. Looking for those lights from the ends of the tunnels, you couldn’t tell whether the light was emerging or diminishing.

It was often the seeming outliers of Light and Space who offered some of the greatest rewards. But they made you work for it, and no one more so than Maria Nordman—undoubtedly the most mysterious and, some would say, the most cantankerous of the artists associated with the movement, which she denied being a part of at all. Light was a key part of her art in the early ’70s, but she was very stingy with it. I almost felt that she had a love/hate relationship with it. She once told me she disdained electric light.

In the 1960s, Nordman had worked as an editorial assistant for the architect Richard Neutra. The essential characteristic of Neutra’s simple, minimal buildings was the employment of glass panels and doors that allowed light to flow freely into his California homes. As an artist, Nordman was less generous with her light, distilling Neutra’s rooms of broadly painted light into seriously dark rooms with tightly controlled channels of light that you had to discover with great patience.

One of the best-known of Nordman’s architectural interventions, at the gallery of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), involved an experience that everyone who visited seems to remember differently. My recollection is that you entered a long hallway that led to a larger darkened room. At the end of the hallway was a mirror that over the course of the day directed subtle amounts of light very slowly across the room. I didn’t stay all day, but most of the time I was there was spent in darkness or semidarkness, just waiting.

 “I spend much of my time in darkness,” Nordman told me later, referring to the studio that she called a “work room”: an anonymous, sealed-off storefront on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles.⁴ For me this was the heart of the Nordman experience. Large glass display cases on both sides of the entrance were like Light and Space vitrines where she experimented with light and darkness by covering the glass with various types of paper; she used movable walls to work similarly with the rest of the building. I visited her work room twice in the early-to-mid-’70s. There was a mystical, mad-scientist quality about the project. In some respects it was a performance between herself and the viewer: she would greet you at the entrance on Pico and escort you to an anteroom—a small, simple space with little or nothing in it. After a few minutes of quiet conversation she would open a door to another room and ask you to enter by yourself. When she shut the door behind you, the room was pitch black.

I remember being alone in her darkness, and trying to get out of the room after about five minutes. She patiently encouraged me to stay for at least fifteen or twenty minutes. I can’t remember ever spending that much time in the dark when I have been awake, and I came to appreciate darkness in a new and animated way. Over time, the room’s atmosphere changed from a deep dark space to a kind of flickering gray. The experience became a collage of illogical perceptions involving spatial density, architectural scale, and the possibility of emanating light coming from somewhere, but you could never figure out from where. Like Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, which are not precisely black but a layering of dark colors, the experience involved seeing some semblance of light in extreme slow motion. Nordman was embedding light in her darkness. I later found out that she made her black atmospheres more dense by painting the interior walls of her rooms with black latex paint that was absorbent to light.

This was a new kind of space, and a new kind of materiality. For the most part, the luminous branch of the Light and Space movement created glorious perceptions of an evanescent physicality. The materials either gleamed in their luminosity or seemed to disappear into the light of the room. The dark side of Light and Space seemed to transfer this “disappearance” to the viewer’s body. There is something sublime—scary, but exciting—about experiencing your mind, eyes, and body moving through the densities of darkness. Looking up through the open-air ceiling portals of Turrell’s rooms at night, when there are no stars, you feel yourself being pulled or transferred into a sublime darkness.

There is darkness and there is darkness, and the heart of darkness of the Light and Space movement took place in a small locker on the University of California at Irvine campus during the height of the Light and Space movement. It could be argued that every movement begins to reform itself, even attack itself, the moment it recognizes that it might be a movement, and sometimes the revisions are radical. For Chris Burden’s Five Day Locker Piece (1971), the young graduate student had himself padlocked into one of the school’s small portfolio lockers for five days with little water and no food. Burden later told me he didn’t know what to expect. Part of the time it seemed like full awareness, he said, and part of the time hallucinatory.⁵

Some will argue that Five Day Locker Piece had nothing to do with the Light and Space movement—that Burden’s art was a bridge too far from the luminous beauty of Irwin and Co. At that early point in his career, many thought Burden either a masochist or a shock master, or both. Those would have been people who didn’t know him and didn’t sense his understanding of developments in art and of how an artist can address them. Burden was always sensitive to context, and Five Day Locker Piece framed his knowledge of and reaction to the movement in a brilliantly intense way. Irwin, Kauffman, and others associated with Light and Space taught at UCI, and Burden kept abreast of their work. It wasn’t lost on him that one of the most interesting events in the development of the Light and Space aesthetic began in a very dark place, when Irwin and Turrell spent time in one of NASA’s anechoic chambers, which were used to prepare astronauts for the deep darkness and silence of outer space.

Five Day Locker Piece also reflected the darkness of its time, framed by racial unrest and war. For some of us thinking about the locker, it was hard not to think also of American prisoners of war locked in small cages in Vietnam. But that is another essay. Obviously we couldn’t experience Burden’s isolated performance except in our imagination, which we project into the photograph of the outside of the locker that ultimately represented the work. In so many ways, that image represents the imagined darkness of our minds looking for light. Burden wasn’t sure he could see any light in that locker, but he thought he might have seen some little beams shooting through empty screw holes.

I thought of Five Day Locker Piece as a potential end of Light and Space. Of course it was not—the movement would go on to balance darkness with light in what many saw as a transcendental experience. In fact, a term often used in describing the experience of this art used to be “transcendental.” For a time, the work had a pseudo-religious following. The critic Jan Butterfield, who wrote the first book on the movement, was also one of the first to suggest religious connotations.⁶ This made many of the artists nervous. Irwin said, adamantly, “I don’t make religious art.”⁷

Nonetheless, you couldn’t deny a certain spiritual aspect to the work, even on its dark side. Both Irwin and Kauffman attended the Zen Center of Los Angeles at least once, and both talked about incorporating “shadows” in their work, which was often very subtle. The artist Eric Orr was also attracted to the dualities of dark and light in Zen. His work Wall Shadow (1968), originally created on the pavement in front of the Eugenia Butler Gallery, was an early example of making dark a full partner with light. Part sculpture, part performance, it included the construction of a cinderblock wall, positioned so that one side of the wall would catch the sun while the other would create a shadow. The completion of the work involved painting the ground shadow gray and then deconstructing the wall, leaving the painted ghost of the shadow as the piece.

For the series Zero Mass, begun in 1969, Orr used paper to explore different ways of creating a sense of zero mass. For the version of the piece that I saw at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2012, he hung photographers’ background paper from the ceiling to create a dramatically simple oval chamber. Suggesting a black hole floating in a museum gallery, the work was indeed transcendental: Zero Mass is a perfect title, not only because of the delicate nature of the paper room but because the darkness seemed to absorb your body. There was a subtle feeling of floating. Eventually, tiny pricks of light began to show through the paper walls, like distant stars; no longer claustrophobic, you were made to feel inseparable from a much grander space. Zero Mass might have been Light and Space at both its darkest and its most intimate.

One of the beautiful aspects of Light and Space was that it was capable of allowing darkness in, however little that is acknowledged in the literature around the movement. In fact, darkness was critical to the movement. Even Irwin had his dark side, particularly in his later installations, when he employed darkness through line and layering in concert with light and color. I saw Irwin at the opening of Cacophonous, an installation of vertical fluorescent lights at Pace Gallery, New York, in the spring of 2015, and was surprised to see a lot of black lines and panels inserted into the compositions. I asked him about them and he said, “You have to have some darkness. It holds the light together.”⁸ I rest my case.