precolonial casino: Light Show tricks meaning out of physics and biology

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

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Anthony McCall, You and I, Horizontal (2005) (Image: ?the artist/courtesy of the artist and Spr?th Magers, Berlin & London. Photo: Linda Nylind)

You know an exhibition is likely to be good if it contains work by the Danish-Icelandish artist Olafur Eliasson. And if its theme is light, it would be criminal not to include him.

The strobe-lit piece by Eliasson (below) tops off a new exhibition at London?s Hayward Gallery, Light Show. Model for a Timeless Garden is reminiscent of a banqueting table, with a feast of water fountains in place of heaving trenchers and goblets.

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Olafur Eliasson, Model for a Timeless Garden (2011) (Image: installation view, Kiev, 2011/Studio Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Dimitry Baranov)

The flashes of light capture the tumbling water, freezing it in time. But the water?s constant burbling persists through the sporadic illumination, adding an element of coherence to what is an otherwise disorienting experience.

Light Show?s 25 artworks play with the medium we rely on for sight, changing our perspective from seen objects to a more intangible form of energy - perturbations and packets (think particles and digital) that communicate between the observer and the artist.

The effect is to immerse us in the exhibition, heightening our awareness not only of the focus of the artworks but of our surroundings - all of which are touched by and perceived through light.

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Carlos Cruz-Diez, Chromosaturation (1965-2013) (Image: ?the artist/DACS/Cruz-Diez Foundation. Photo: Linda Nylind)

This immersion is most complete in Carlos Cruz-Diez?s emotionally challenging Chromosaturation. The work is composed of three blank rooms illuminated in blue, red and green. You can enter only through the blue or green rooms, and the effect is peaceful and fairly negligible. Moving on to rooms of different colours, though, initially overwhelms every other sense - the colour screams and suffocates. Why?

The work plays with the three types of colour receptors in the eyes, tuned to the three colours in Cruz-Diez?s rooms. Acclimatising the eyes to just one wavelength of light means that one of the three types of cones in the retina is working hard while the other two take it easy.

It takes a while for eyes to adjust to a new environment - think about how your vision improves when you have been in a darkened room for a few minutes - and it?s this latency that Cruz-Diez exploits to such effect when we move quickly between rooms.

James Turrell?s Wedgework V plays with the same concept, but using darkness and light. You enter the work down what seems in the blackness to be a long passage, emerging into a viewing space which looks out onto a space guillotined by muted lights into wedges at various depths.

Turrell has transformed a real space into something ethereal, but it?s unclear whether the space is real, or an optical illusion. The longer you stay, the more you see; the longer I stayed, the more I wanted to walk into this geometric wonderland of light and explore.

Just as Turrell makes light seem somehow solid to create an otherworldly experience, so Anthony McCall?s solid light installation, You and I, Horizontal (photo at top), challenges you to engage with the light by giving substance to the insubstantial. His trick is to use haze machines and bright light to create a sculpture of light in a dark room.

Cerith Wyn Evans, S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E ("Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motive?s overspill?") (2010) (Image: ?the artist/courtesy the artist and White Cube. Photo: Linda Nylind)

But nothing makes light more tangible though, than Cerith Wyn Evans?s S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E, (?Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill underlying motive?s overspill??): the afterthought in the title is a quote from James Merrill?s supernaturally inclined epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover. When the hundreds of tiny bulbs on his three columns pulse bright, a wave of heat fills the gallery space - calling your attention to the light, even if your back is turned.

It?s interesting that except for Evans?s work this marriage of light and heat has been largely neglected. Historically, the two have been closely linked - think of sunlight, candles, gaslight. Only now that our connection to electricity has developed all the way to LEDs and LCDs can we decouple these two forms of energy - giving a coldness to strange new structures.

Light Show lives up to its ambitions extraordinarily well by making us aware of the medium of light. But by highlighting this traditional resonance of light and heat, and standing in the first room of Light Show, Evans?s work poses another, equally fundamental, question: what is light to you?

Light Show runs at the Hayward Gallery, London, until 28 April.