Vittoria Bonifati

The play of light. Thinking through the prism of the exhibition.

My MA dissertation considers the exhibition as a structure composed by time and space, and questions in particular the role of light within it. There are three chapters (rays), treating light, respectively, in relation to space, time, and its symbolic value. How is the perception of space influenced by the use of light and how are the artworks within it altered in turn? How is the perception of time influenced by the use of light? What meanings can light evoke, beyond space and time?

I examine the ways in which light affects the viewer’s perception, thus comprehension, of an exhibition, from the practical to the symbolic and the poetic. I use the metaphor of the stage (or set) for the exhibition, with the choreographer as curator. Since light has always been such a principal concern for artists, it seems right that it should be more fully questioned within the contemporary curatorial discourse. But light – in art as much as in reality – is hard to pin down; perhaps that is why aesthetic arguments have tended to work their ways around it – it is difficult, maybe impossible, to offer concrete rules for an element that is, by nature and by quality, fleeting and insubstantial. Therefore, I choose to restrict my conclusions to experience, and bind them to particular examples of regular practices or specific artworks in film, exhibition making and artist’s practices. From Dwoskin’s Shadows of Light to Ragghianti’s Urne Etrusche di Volterra. From the 1993 exhibition Affective Light to Banner’s Stamp Out Photographie. From Barry Flanagan’s Light Pieces to Maria Nordman’s Saddleback Mountain. From Thomas Hutton’s Flat, Block,Flat to Christopher Page’s Exterior. (Morning.). Each conjures its own associated moods; each has its own intrinsic significance.

In the early twentieth century, many were the attempts - especially by artists and exhibitions designers - to subvert the conventional form of art exhibitions. Their critique was directed at the “bourgeois institution of art”, and to the passive experience of art in its exhibition spaces. Could the critique, today, be directed elsewhere, by a different approach to light?