light

SOMEONE SITS AT A TABLE, PLAYING WITH MATCHES, SEEING HOW LONG THEY BURN. A TV MONITOR GLOWS BLUE, ITS COLOUR CAUGHT IN A GLASS OF WATER ON THE TABLE.

Have you ever seen Derek Jarman’s film Blue, which he made not long before he died? It is what it says it is – blue – a blue screen, as formal and ascetic as an Yves Klein monochrome; and some voices, talking about war and death and the shadow of a doubt and the colour blue. The film takes place as much in your head as it does on screen. 'Imagine the unrepresentable', it invites, 'it is an infinite possibility'. On the soundtrack, we hear fragments of the diary Jarman wrote while undergoing treatment for HIV-AIDS in a London hospital: stroppy, lamenting, funny. ‘The Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn’t attached to a drip …’ he says. He returns again and again to the experience of encroaching blindness. He describes ‘the shattering bright-light of the eye-specialist’s camera that leaves an empty sky-blue after-image … darkness made visible’…

In a book about colour, and light, John Berger wrote that, “Blue is sad, blue is memory and nostalgia, but blue is also affrontery and impudence. Blue is prize. No public one. Intimate prize. Blue says, outrageously and absurdly: I am yours, or you are mine! And no other colour can judge us. Charlie Parker became Bird because he knew about Blue…” (I send you this cadmium red).

Darkness. Dunkelheit. Obscurité.

The naked eye can see a candle in the dark 14 miles away.

In One-Way Street, in a section entitled ‘Arc Lamp’, Walter Benjamin wrote just one sentence: ‘The only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope’. Elsewhere in the same book, he writes: ‘Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance’.

The French word for a sunflower is ‘tournesol’; it turns towards the sun ...

There is a phenomenon that occurs in the mountains when a climber’s shadow falls on clouds because the sun is in a low position behind the climber. In the right conditions, coloured rings are seen around the shadow. This phenomenon is called the ‘Brockenspekter’: Brocken being the name of the mountain where the effect was first recorded. A similar effect occurs in aeroplanes when the sun projects a shadow of the plane on to the side of a cloud, where it is framed by a bright circular rainbow. This effect is called a ‘glory’.

The ‘leader’ and ‘return stroke’ in cloud-to-ground lightning. Rain shadows. Halos. Coronas and parhelia (also called ‘mock suns’ or ‘sun dogs’). Moonbow and fogbow. Sunpillar. The green flash. All optical phenomena; weather and light.

Flying over Iran late one night last October on my way to England from Australia, I passed over the city of Isfahan – where exquisite carpets are made, where my father was made, it’s his birth place. I remembered that a flaw is built into the design of every Iranian carpet, for only Allah is perfect, then wondered what was the flaw implanted in my father, and whether it was hereditary – when from up here the city was laid out in twinkling perfection, a carpet constellation of lights in the desert night.

I meant to talk about light, and I seem to be talking about blindness and meteorology and origins and imperfection … The wheels fall off. Much clapping. Let’s start again.

If a green light and a red light are shone onto a surface at the same time, what colour do you think is produced? Yellow. If we add a third colour – blue – it will change again - and produce - white. White light. A mixture of colours, in particles and waves. Where two of these primary colours overlap, they produce a third colour which is called a ‘secondary’. There are three secondary colours: blue and green produce cyan; red and blue produce magenta; and of course red and green produce yellow. In various combinations, the primary colours – red, green, blue – can make almost any other colour. So for example a colour television picture is made up of tiny strips of red, green and blue light.

All visible things give off light, but they do it in two different ways. Some objects are light sources; in other words, they actually produce light. Some plants and animals can make their own light. Planktonic fish, for example, use self-generated lights to confuse enemies, find a mate, or lure food: their phosphorescence is typically blue-green.

Okay, okay, let’s take a more familiar example: a torch produces light by using electrical energy to heat a filament.

If a torch is shone at a face, the face gives off light as well. But here the face is not a light source. It is simply reflecting the light that’s been made elsewhere.

When a ray of light hits a reflective surface, it is bounced back. The way in which it bounces back depends on whether the surface is flat, convex or concave, and whether it is still or moving.

Have you ever heard the story of Signora Anna Monaro, ‘the Luminous Woman of Pirano’? It was in newspapers all over the world in 1934, and has been much discussed since then. Over a period of several weeks Signora Monaro, a bed-bound asthma patient, emitted a radiant blue glow and flashes from her breasts as she slept. This bioluminescent phenomenon was witnessed by a number of doctors and medical specialists; it remains unexplained.

A number of toxicology textbooks discuss so-called “luminous wounds”, sometimes with reference to luminescent bacteria, sometimes relating this strange effect to biochemicals contained within bodily secretions. Luciferin and luciferase, and a substance called ATP (adenosine triphosphate) are normally kept apart in the body, but when they coincide they give off a low-level luminescence. The same process produces light in glow-worms and fireflies.

Luciferin. Luciferase. Lucifer, the light bringer (from ‘lux’, light, and ‘ferre’, to bring or to bear). ‘Helel ben Shahar’ in Hebrew: ‘the star of dawn’. The angel who fell to earth. Or was he pushed …

I became inexplicably electric after breaking my arm in February 1976. For two days my hair stood permanently on end, and whenever I touched people I shocked them with powerful discharges. TV sets and lights flickered in my presence, and watches stopped. I was so highly charged with static that I could light up bulbs simply by holding them. It worked with both screw-in and bayonet bulbs ....

I meant to talk about light, and I seem to be talking about anomalies, angels, freaks …

In general, light travels in straight lines. If light hits the surface of a mirror, it is reflected and leaves at the same angle. If something blocks beams of light, some rays are impeded, others carry on as before. This produces an area without light: a shadow.

In 1885, as a way of providing the city of Paris with permanent daylight, an architect and engineer called Sébillot proposed the construction of the ‘Colonne-Soleil’, an electrical sun tower 360 metres high. Sébillot imagined light penetrating into every house and apartment, as well as flooding all public spaces throughout the night. It seems that the tower was motivated in part by the civic authorities’ desire for surveillance, using light as a tool for maintaining public control: visibility as disciplinary mechanism, en-light-enment as order. Sébillot’s machine for erasing shadows was never built.

Over the past few years a Russian aerospace company called Space Regatta Consortium has been designing a giant mirror that it plans to launch into space to reflect sunlight down to Earth, appearing up to 10 times as bright as the full moon. Ultimately SRC’s goal is to launch up to 200 similar reflectors, only much bigger - each one up to 70 metres across – in order to bring bright sunlight to the Arctic and Northern Hemisphere cities during the dark days of winter: London, Brussels, Seattle, Kiev, Montreal …

Recent research suggests that half the population of the European Union, 80% of people in the USA, and a quarter of all people world-wide cannot see the night sky. Only 2% of Britain remains unaffected by so-called ‘sky glow’ or ‘light pollution’ - from security lights, floodlights, the 6.2 million street lamps turned on every night. And 55% of the present generation of British children cannot see the Milky Way, its light obliterated in the last mili-second of its journey. We are enveloped in a luminous fog that’s blinding us.

The hottest stars in the universe give off a blue-white light …

A PENCIL IS PUT INTO THE GLASS OF WATER

When light passes from one substance to another, it is bent, or ‘refracted’. When refraction occurs, an object seems to change shape, because the light rays bend as they leave the water and enter the glass and then the air. The amount of bending is very precise. In 1621 the Dutch mathematician and astronomer Willebrord Snell found that there was a characteristic ratio between a beam’s ‘angle of incidence’ (its angle before bending) and its ‘angle of refraction’ (its angle after bending). Snell’s law shows that every substance has a characteristic bending power – its ‘refractive index’. The more a substance bends light, the larger its refractive index. Water has a refractive index of 1.3, which indicates that light travels about 30% more slowly through water than through space.

Light is traveling through this water at about 225,000 kms (or 140,000 miles) per second.

A FEW DROPS OF MILK ARE RELEASED INTO THE GLASS OF WATER

In the far north and the far south, the night sky sometimes lights up with luminous curtains of coloured light known as ‘auroras’: the ‘Aurora Borealis’ or Northern Lights, and the ‘Aurora Australis’ or Southern Lights. These fluorescent lights appear when high-energy electrons from the sun, emitted most intensely during solar flares and carried in the form of ‘solar winds’, are funnelled in streams towards the North and South Poles by the Earth’s magnetic fields. There they collide with atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, and flare into appearance. Colours range from pale green to combinations of red, green, yellow, blue, and violet. ‘Aurora’ is the Latin word for dawn.

The enormous influxes of electrons associated with aurorae cause rapid fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field that in turn may induce significant electrical currents in long conductors such as telephone wires and power lines. Sometimes, power supplies are affected, and communications disrupted. On the 13th of March 1989, for example, electromagnetically induced currents from an aurora that was visible throughout Northern Europe and North America caused a power blackout in the Quebec area.

When white light is shone through a glass of water containing a few drops of milk, blue light is scattered by the tiny particles in the water. Red light is not scattered, and just passes through. This effect is called Rayleigh scattering. It makes the liquid glow, and gives it a blueish tinge. Smoke sometimes has a blueish colour caused by Rayleigh scattering from tiny particles of ash.

“Blue is sad, blue is memory and nostalgia, but blue is also affrontery and impudence. Blue is prize. No public one. Intimate prize. Blue says, outrageously and absurdly: I am yours, or you are mine! And no other colour can judge us. Charlie Parker became Bird because he knew about Blue …”

PAUSE: THEN PLAY CHARLIE PARKER'S 'My Old Flame' …

(Text for Forced Entertainment’s Marathon Lexicon, co-curated by Tim Etchells & Adrian Heathfield; Mousonturm, Frankfurt, 2003, and Riverside Studios, London, 2004:
© David Williams/FE)

shuttle 15: colouring

'"Transparency, ah, there's the miracle". Transparency, the legacy of the desert where there is no colour, but where the light is large, open, with a transparent quality in which all colours are present at the same time, as possibility. In the desert, Edmond Jabès says to Serge Faucherau, "nothing is there as simply blue, but as a possibility of blue". And just as piling on colour leads to transparency, so "we pile up images and images of images until the last, which is blank, and on which we all agree"' (Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002, 99)

'The wonder of the heat is metaphysical. The very colours - pastel blue, mauve, lilac - are the products of a slow, geological, timeless combustion. The mineral quality of the earth breaks through the surface in the crystalline flora. All the natural elements here have known their ordeal by fire. The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others' (Jean Baudrillard, America, London: Verso, 1988, 137)
____________________________

'The plane drones away. Closing the hood of her car after putting in the water, Daria looks up, squinting, then drives off toward some purple-mountained majesty - a majesty that Antonioni, at one point, had thought to change. Production designer Dean Tavoularis was in Barstow with his painter, Roger Dietz, engaged by the filmmaker in conversation about those distant 'lavender grey' mountains.

"Can you make those red, from there ... to there?" Antonioni asked.

Tavoularis said to Dietz, "What about a crop-duster?"

Tavoularis: "I checked around and there was a bi-plane, kind of à la North by Northwest. And I said: 'Get as much red powder sent from LA, from Hollywood, as you can', and Roger put the red powder in the big bins for the chemicals they would normally use, and I instructed the pilot. 

Watching through binoculars, from where the camera would be, as the plane made several passes over the mountains, I noticed no particular change. 'Do it again', I said. Again, no change. Then, 'What about liquid? Can we get another plane that has a liquid system instead of powder? And can you get red dye instead of red powder? Rust red dye?' So we did that with another plane. I watched again with the binoculars ... 

I did try. I made a valiant effort. I explained to Michelangelo, and I had a couple of photographs to prove it. I don't think he expected that the mountains would ever change. Just wanted to see somebody step up, wanted to see somebody try. That was the important thing. That's what a master is. Life isn't about winning, it's about trying"'.  

Extract from Murray Pomerance, 'Zabriskie Point', in Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011, 163-4

________________________________

Images from the making of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970); at the bottom, a still from the end sequence

For artist Juli Kearns' detailed three-part descriptive synopsis of Zabriskie Point, with numerous stills and assorted clips, see her Idyllopus Press site here

For an earlier post about Los Angeles, 'Let it shine', see here. For an earlier post about light and the colour blue ('Light'), originally written for Forced Entertainment's Marathon Lexicon, see here

shuttle 14: crystallize

'To get back to that metaphor of Oz ... through the force of the twister, you're propelled to this central image ... The people go there, the child and the scarecrow, to the Emerald City of Oz which is a palace - but essentially a crystalline buildup ... to me, on a kind of fairy-tale level that's indicative of something ... I don't exactly know what the actual building of Oz looks like. Oz, like Atlantis, is this difficult place ... a vanishing point, you know' (Robert Smithson, 1970) 
_________________________

The Crystal Land

"I turned on the car radio: '... countdown survey ... chew your little troubles away ... high ho hey hey ...'. My eyes glanced over the dashboard, it became a complex of chrome fixed into an embankment of steel. A glass disk covered the clock. The speedometer was broken. Cigarette butts were packed into the ashtray. Faint reflections slid over the windshield ... Under the radio dial (55-7-9-11-14-16) was a row of five plastic buttons in the shape of cantilevered cubes. The rear view mirror dislocated the road behind us. While listening to the radio, some of us read the Sunday newspapers. The pages made slight noises as they turned; each sheet folded over their laps forming temporary geographies of paper. A valley of print or a ridge of photographs would come and go in an instant. [...]

The quarry resembled the moon. A grey factory in the midst of it all looked like architecture designed by Robert Morris. A big sign on one building said THIS IS A HARD HAT AREA. We started climbing over the piles and ran into a 'rock hound', who came on, I thought, like Mr Wizard, and gave us all kinds of rock-hound-type information in an authoritative manner.We got a rundown on all the quarries that were closed to the public, as well as those that were open.

The wall of the quarry did look dangerous. Cracked, broken, shattered: the walls threatened to come crashing down. Fragmentation, corrosion, decomposition, disintegration,rock creep, debris slides, mud flow, avalanche were everywhere in evidence. The grey sky seemed to swallow up the heaps around us. Fractures and faults spilled forth sediment, crushed conglomerates, eroded debris and sandstone. It was an arid region, bleached and dry. An infinity of surfaces spread in every direction. A chaos of cracks surrounded us. [...]

As we drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, we talked about going on another trip, to Franklin Furnace; there one might find minerals that glow under ultraviolet light or 'black light'. The countless cream colored square tiles on the wall of the tunnel sped by, until a sign announcing New York broke the tiles' order ..."

Extract from Robert Smithson, 'The Crystal Land' (1966), reprinted in Jack Flam (ed.), The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996
_________________________

"Entirely lifeless, based on nothing but the dynamics of inorganic chemistry, the crystal nevertheless is said to 'grow'. It invades and coats a surface with absolute indifference, like mould or rust. And yet, unlike either of these - organic or inorganic processes - it is not necessarily an entropic process. While a mould might exploit the decay of a dead tree that it grows on, or while rust signifies the alteration of iron as it is exposed to air and water in a process of oxidisation, the process of crystallisation is one of resolution; it is what happens when the internal chemical instability of the copper sulphate solution resolves itself through the formation of the crystal.

Perhaps it is also significant that in the process of crystallisation, transformation is achieved through an internal process rather than external application. In a biological process such as the growth of a mould, the transformation of one sort of matter into another requires some external input of energy or outside substance. Similarly, with an inorganic process such as rusting, the process occurs only through a combination of external elements - the presence of oxygen and water. By contrast, crystallisation is an ordering of molecules within the crystal solution itself.

Crystallisation, then, is the purest expression of a self-contained, self-producing process of matter which goes from internal instability to stability, indifferent to materials and energies outside of it. In the iconography of Roger Hiorns' work, it is the clearest expression of the auto-generative theme that runs throughout. In the context of Harper Road, and of the crystallisation which has overcome an entire space of habitation, it is also the most absolute contrast to the processes of life and of living that this space bears witness to. [...]

The dense, dark cobalt blue of Seizure, its implacable and complete smothering of the straight lines of the original flat, seems to express a blank indifference to the troubles that afflict human building and human dwelling. If Seizure had continued its growth, one might imagine how the angles of the space would progressively disappear, as the crystals continued to grow inwards, towards each other. Ingrowing, like a crystal geode, this former space of human habitation - with its worn lino and peeling paint, with all the marks left by a living person - would be filled up, would disappear, transformed into pure crystal growth, with all signs of former human habitation obliterated. And with its cave-like floor, undulating with compacted crystals, Seizure suggests a return of the geological and inorganic world of prehistory. Rather than the complex and unstable relationship between human beings and their own built world, Seizure offers a lifeless form which, with its poisonous and lacerating surfaces, cannot even offer the primitive human shelter of a cave.

Auto-generative, inward-looking and ingrowing, independent of human intervention and human touch, Seizure contains Hiorns' fascination with the metaphorical potential of the inorganic, and of the strange life of inhuman processes. 'Seizure' might indicate the recovery of something that is rightfully owned, or a moment of paralysis or sudden arrest in the processes of a living organism. Here, in this flat that has become not a cave but a crystal geode, it is as if the living space of modern humanity is being reclaimed by the inorganic. While a more conventionally Romantic ecological narrative might imagine the reclamation of human space by organic nature - ruins overgrown by plants and trees - Seizure expels even organic nature in favour of the inorganic, choosing simple molecular growth over that more complex and curious molecule, DNA.

Seizure's perversely inhuman spectacle doesn't present us with the scene of a modern world, derelict or abandoned, or a futuristic fantasy of the ruins of a bygone civilisation. Instead it negates this human world and its human-scaled architecture, filling interior space with hard, inert matter, reclaiming it from those who have given it up. Seizure's paradoxical existence lies in the fact that, like any crystal geode, it has to be cut open to reveal its internal order and complexity, its hidden opulence and dazzling colour. In other words, the very act of seeing its internal form assumes a human presence; yet in this scenario, it is the human witness to the crystallised space which has become alien. No longer a derelict space of modern human habitation, Seizure positions the human spectator itself as trespasser. Seizure's internal order is a physical phenomenon before it is a visual one - by entering it one brings to it one's own human sense of visual, aesthetic value as if it were an intruder. However much we think of it as an artistic spectacle, Seizure remains indifferent. All it does is grow, in darkness. [...]

In this poisonously downbeat cultural atmosphere, it is not hard to grasp how Seizure resonates, even as it remains indifferent. Seizure's entropic, mineral and inhospitable formation, independent of human will, echoes all of our worst moments of doubt about what a world without humans would mean. The machine for living in has stopped. There are no signs of life. Art enters in".

Extract from JJ Charlesworth, 'Signs of life', in Roger Hiorns: Seizure, London: Artangel, 2008
_________________________

Images: (top) 'Iberian quarry no. 3', photograph by Edward Burtynsky. For Burtynsky's website, see here. (Bottom): Robert Smithson's drawing, 'Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis)', 1969

For further details of the conception and making of Roger Hiorns' Seizure, a 2008 Artangel commission in South London, see here and here