online: 2 december 2013
modified: 1, 2 december 2013
30 november 2013 the connectiveness of physical light
Camden Arts Centre, London
...having come out this afternoon for some restorative exercise and worldly contact... i turn attention to the complex scene before me: reflected indoor lights in window glass or curtain wall... and (through the glass) the sight of the roadsign of Arkwright Road still lit by fading daylight... as well as by electric streetlights...
...after looking at this for a few seconds my thoughts begin to re-inhabit the present moment... reminding me of the light sculptures of Lazslo Moholy-Nagy*...
..but no artwork seems to me to equal the un-selfconscious beauty of the many light sculptures to be seen in and through the windows of any car or bus or train or glass-walled building... and now that modernism has so well composed this largely artificial scenery... ever-changing and luminous... reflected and counter-reflected... in the vehicles and places wherein we live and move... often unconscious of this unfound art all around us... for it's no longer abstract art (derived from the Bauhaus and elsewhere)... it has become a universal reality... no longer exclusive to the avant-garde... but now the everyday life-light of all of us... softly beautiful... or dazzling... and of course useful... very useful... when it comes to walking, driving, or just sitting in a vehicle or room or office block... or inhabiting a street a station or an airport... which together comprise the steel and glass and concrete jungles... the horrors and delights of modern living...
...let's go to the cinema and forget everything!...
*Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was active both as a light-sculptor and as co-organiser of 'art-universities' and 'experiments in totality' at the Bauhaus in Germany (and briefly in the UK) in the 1920s and early 30s... and later in the USA at Illinois Tech and elsewhere...
...as i look at these experiments today i note the instant connectiveness of physical light (if there is such a thing)... and i feel that intellectual or religious light is entirely different...
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