The sources, uses and significance of light have been exploited by artists ever since we started scratching into cave walls by the glow of licking flames. So it is somewhat ironic that so-called light art or light works came into being in the latter half of the 20th century - and indeed that light came to be acknowledged as one of that century's most revolutionary art materials.
So let's be clear: light works or light art are the terms the art world uses to point to works of art in which light itself is a substance and subject. In the 20th century, it was the use of artificial light, namely electricity, that made this new art possible. Here, for the first time, was a light source that could easily be moulded by both the hand and the mind of the artist. The use of light as a medium for artists dates back to the early 1920s. It was through experiments carried out by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack in 1922 at the Bauhaus, and by the American Thomas Wilfred, who invented the colour organ, that artists became aware of the light bulb's possibilities. Yet, despite these early advancements, it wasn't until 30 years later that electric light and art became inextricably linked when a new movement - the aptly titled light art - was created.
The movement's modest history begins in California in the late 1960s. There, artists like Robert Irwin and James Turrell began using all kinds of radical new materials to create mysterious light environments and installations that focused on sensory perception. Light art is often confused with minimalism because a number of minimalists made art with lights, most notably Dan Flavin with his inventive sculptural arrangements of coloured neon. But plenty of major artists toyed with the mode, including George Segal and Bruce Nauman; some, like Turrell and Stephen Antonakos, continued to specialise in it.
From the start, light art has been associated with modernity and mundane uses of the same materials. For example, neon was used in advertising long before art. One of the first artists to use it was Chryssa, a Greek-born sculptor who came to the United States in the 1950s and, like many immigrants, was struck by the profusion of signs and symbols in American life. Her first works were metal reliefs of letters and directional signs.
Despite the associations we might make with neon, fluorescent lights or LED signage, the first proponents of light art insisted that their work had no meaning outside of itself. Flavin, the American minimal artist, is perhaps the most well-known light artist. He experimented with the ready-made fluorescent lamp for more than 40 years. His work drew on the fluorescent tube almost exclusively, finding its unique identity in the object's uniformity, anonymity, and ubiquity. The exploration occupied him until his death in 1996.
"It is as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find," Flavin said about light. He presented his work as simplicity itself: industrial materials, a carefully limited palette, radical reduction of form and line. No more, no less. Flavin's insistence on the lack of meaning or message in his work was similar to that of his contemporaries, all of whom reacted against abstract expressionists and colour-field painters like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who tended to encourage extravagant testimonials as to the mythic profundity of their work.
Flavin and his minimalist compatriots, Ad Reinhardt, Donald Judd, Carl Andre and the early Frank Stella, rejected the functions of art as social commentary, narrative and even self-expression. What you see is what you get. However, while many of these early light artists used light solely for its abstract powers of transformation, others had already started to appropriate light as a means of communication in much the same way as advertising or billboards did. The American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, for example, used glowing neon letters to explore language, thought and vision. And it is perhaps this legacy that has proved the most enduring for today's artists.
In a society bombarded by advertising - whether on television, billboards or the internet - many contemporary artists seem to feel that the only way to get a message across is by imitating or satirising these forms of mass communication. So light art has in many ways come full circle. Whereas the early light artists insisted on a lack of meaning, now, in this art, meaning is everything. Technology also has challenged artistic inquiry of the medium. Today, in place of neon, LED (light-emitting diode) inspires much of what passes for light art. Its attributes, such as its nearly infinite colour and hi-tech controllability, appeal to artists who want to make bold individual statements.
One of the most famous artists working in this medium today is the American Jenny Holzer. She first gained recognition in the 1970s for her Truism series: provocative messages that appeared on street posters, telephone booths and, in 1982, one of Times Square's gigantic billboards. They included: "lack of charisma can be fatal"; "any surplus is immoral"; "romantic love was invented to manipulate women", and "abuse of power comes as no surprise". Her work set out to challenge assumptions about the world and language to convey the many contradictory voices, opinions and attitudes that form the basis of society.
Holzer went on to create more intimate pieces for museums and galleries that range from painting-like work to large architectural sculptures that employ LED technology. Her most recent exhibition, Protect Protect at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, was the most comprehensive look at her work in the United States in more than 15 years. It demonstrated the power of her medium and the way LED signage can be used to combine political bravura with formal beauty.
The show's curator, Elizabeth Smith, said: "She challenges our assumptions about language, presents conflicting voices and differences of opinion that are shocking, surprising, poignant and funny." Holzer has said about her work: "The content is the message, and the presentation is important, but hardly dominant." LED signs are the most appropriate medium for her work, she says, because "these signs literally work to hold people's attention. And if I want my message to reach a number of people, you have to use a way that speaks to people and holds their attention". This is the power of Holzer's art: its insistence on reaching all people whether they want to listen or not. Holzer's trick is to use media we unthinkingly consume in our daily lives.
Of course not all of today's light art, or more specifically LED art, is about the message. The American artist James Clar uses LED to create interactive pieces such as his 3D Display Cube. The hand-built, free-standing matrix of 1,000 individually controllable LEDs can create a low-resolution, three-dimensional television. It can connect to a camera or soundboard for live video and audio, and allow designers to create 3-D animations instantly without writing a computer programme. His Habitat Hotel is a working scale model of a hotel by the architect Enric Ruiz-Geli of Cloud 9 Architecture that consists of a building with an "energy mesh" wrapped around it. The mesh has nodes that collect solar energy during the day. At night, the model gives off a colour that correlates with the amount of energy collected.
If Clar's pieces blur the boundaries between science and art, the British artist Jeremy Lord brings visual art closer to music. His colour fields are panels of hundreds of LEDs that he programmes with a sequence that plays constantly, like a piece of music. The light speaker, which radiates coloured light, can be used to build colour walls or to accent existing interiors. It can be set to respond to music with a display of pulsating colours or programmed to show an orchestrated colour sequence.
When an artist does have a message, it seems there is still little more effective than LED to get it across. On Jan 1, London became the site of a new work by the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. Death Counter is a giant LED sign that documents the annual number of human deaths worldwide from any cause. It was unveiled on the façade of Hiscox Insurers' London Headquarters. The compelling public artwork is a reminder of the transient nature of human life and capital, situated in the heart of London's financial district. But there is more to the piece than meets the eye. It is on loan to Hiscox for one year in exchange for a ?150,000 (Dh746,000) insurance policy, payable in the event of the artist's death and valid for the duration of the exhibition. Thus, it exists not simply as an artwork but also as a legally binding contract between Hiscox and the artist.
Exploring the concept of value in relation to human life and art, the collaboration accentuates elements of risk and value speculation to raise a number of questions about how value is determined; how this value corresponds to concepts of labour and commodification; how an artist's death affects the value of his work, and how we consider the relationship between life and work. The death count on the display is based upon a demographic projection from the US census, currently estimated at 55 million deaths per year, at a rate of nearly two per second. The value of the life insurance has been set in relation to the value of the artwork.
As with his previous projects, Sierra has dramatised the relationship between work and worth by placing precise economical transactions in a visual context. At a time when the economy is the hottest topic in the news, Sierra's brightly lit message could hardly be more appropriate.
