Artikkelit

What has Art education, international moveability, and lighting design in common.

And when does lightning design become art?

Ihminen, kone ja esitys This is a confusing question, since one can approach it from several angles. If I focus on lighting design considered as an artistic process, and avoid myriads of connotations about Sociology of Arts and historical hierarchies, trying to avoid judging the end product, I might get somewhere within these few pages.

It seems almost inconceivable that the very first international exhibition of theatre design was held in 1924 in Vienna, Austria. The exposition was curated by Frederick Kiesler, an young architect and set designer, known for being among the first theatre artists to utilize film projections on live performance. The comprehensive nature of that first exhibition of theatre design proved to be an important source of information for many international directors and designers drawing attention to new aesthetics in theatre including Bauhaus and Expressionism...

By the1960's Prague Quadrennial started to flourish, bringing together designers from all over the world. As we know now, it became and remains still the largest world exhibition of theatre design. The aims and perspective of the Quadrennial (PQ) have broadened considerably in more than half a century, now including the field of lighting design, among others, as a part of "new scenography," or I if I dare to use a new term: "spatial design."

Witnessed from a Northern European perspective, this inclusiveness is a very new phenomenon. When, as a student myself, visiting PQ for the first time in 1987 with my class from the Theatre Academy Helsinki, the first year lighting design students from the remote city felt a bit like aliens. As you may also recall, at the time, there was nothing presented concerning the "art of light" in the exhibition. Often we were asked what we were doing there…and why?! Such comments came as a shock to a young artist in many ways, as you might imagine. But also in a positive way. After being brainwashed in the Theatre Academy for a year about the importance of lighting design; about how it will change the aesthetics of the theatre in the future, I was confronted by the reality of the international situation: lighting design did not exist in the same celestial orbit inhabited by set and costume design. It was mere technology playing a supporting role, domesticated and tamed to serve the director's and set designer's visual dreams, or at a base level it was there to illuminate the actors and make the set look impressive.

But that smack-on-the-face did not bring us down, quite the opposite was true in fact. We came to understand that only by going beyond our own cultural safety net of traditional theatre practicalities, could we reach our own lofty orbit. Fueled with far reaching goals and the ambition of youth we began to see how much was possible internationally for the expansion of light as Art, as Design and as a profession. Now almost 25 years later, I can still see why it is so important and I can still see another orbit ahead of us.

Professor Arnold Aronson, an internationally prominent and distinguished scholar from Columbia University, has played many top executive roles in PQ since 1991, being most recently the Commissioner Generale in 2007. Soon after the 2003 PQ he wrote in the USITT Magazine, Theatre Design & Technology about how PQ had become less exciting, even insinuating, dare I say, boring. He emphasized how little difference there is between the various national exhibitions and how similar the set-ups and presentations appeared even at an inter-continental level. Of course, considering the crowd of thousands upon thousands of design professionals ploughing through the vast exhibition halls, carrying their own digital image capturing devices...it all seems understandable.

Now PQ is steering towards a new direction as a World Expo of "Performance Design and Space" thereby re-defining the word "scenography" as a contemporary variant of performance design disciplines and genres encompassing: costume, stage, lighting and sound design for dance, opera, drama, site specific multi-media performances and performance art, as well as theatre architecture. I look at this new direction as a lesson: is there anything else so international, so exhaustive? Where else can you see so much presented in one exhibition in one forum?

Now that lighting design is fully welcomed as member in the Oistat (Art-) world, can we also see and experience the change? How has it impacted the field internationally?

Well, to be clear, almost everything has changed in lighting design´s global village. Tools, practices, professions, productions, planning, visualizations, aesthetics. One thing, however, seems to remain constant: communication. It can be said that the lighting design process is 90% verbal communication, but the outcome is 100% visual. Is it not, indeed, a fact that light and lighting as a non-verbal proportion of the performing arts is helping us to see it naturally internationally, traversing both cultural and linguistic borders with ease? How much are we not seeing?

Of course international upward-mobility is an issue in many other ways. Almost everybody who claims to be a lighting designer is already working internationally. We, of course, face different situations that are always challenging, when e.g. touring with a production. Cultural differences too play an important role when taking a show abroad, extending well beyond the already inherent technical challenges. When designing a totally new unseen show/production in collaboration with an international artistic team, we are presented with other issues to ponder: language, sharing and disseminating the cultural background of images, dreams and visions. In such, do we wondrously discover the capacity and capability for taking artistic risks dramatically increased? Do we generate the mental fuel for a possibility of making that quantum leap across the artistic abyss to explore the visual; to bravely go where no-one has ever dared to go?

Technology international

Once again technology is exacting change on the world of lighting. We have all "gone" digital. In that new mileu we are facing new inventions almost quarterly it seems. The more technology is involved in lighting design and practice, the more the advancement becomes invisible. By that I mean the designed space given to technology is lost forever. Technology is ruthless and unforgiving as it takes and does not give back. To be able to accept more technology, older parts will become foundations for the next generation. And now all this, to be sure, is very international. We all can take comfort in knowing that we will be surrounded by our homey tools, wherever we land, in almost every corner in the (theatre-) world. Remembering that the 100% visual output we create, is utterly delivered by technology.

This may seem like a bit of an over-reach extended and posited from this spot in the Westhern Hemisphere. Considering the speed of the research in the development sector, marketing volumes and the built-in expanding pressure to up-grade the technology...will there be any saturation point? How do we see this new global industrialisation of the world of lighting? And what are we to do? Does it only benefit designers? Do we see a pursuant upgrading of artistic quality? (whatever that really means?) Most international lighting pre-design today is also done via technology (simulation, pre-planning, preplotting, automated macros.) Severely altering the extent to which we rely on the choices presented, and thereby also restricted, by technology.

I believe firmly that the Post-Modern did not die in 1993, as some important German philosophers so claimed. Instead, it became invisible, hiding behind the wall of digital technology. Now, when as it re-emerges and becomes more visible once again in the processes of international lighting design, are we able to see it for what it truly is? Through all that copy and paste design we all do almost unconsciously? Even while being so international?

Yes, the Copy-and-Paste-Digital-Post-Post Modern epoch has been ushered in. It is a global epoch in which we all, even the non-professionals, are "artists" and "designers. " From this expanded, hugely international playing field, those of us who adapt and evolve to form the new abilities to modulate and respond to the subtlest nuances presented by technology will, not coincidentally, also find the resolve to make the micro-est of quantum leaps necessary to remain artists ahead of the technology.

And finally to the point, a desperate attempt to answer the question:

When does lighting design become Art?

The answer to this frequently asked question is perhaps the true reason why seminars are organized around the subject. At the Theatre Academy Helsinki's annual Aesthetics of Light Seminar we have found that the answer can be: a.) short and simple: never; or b.) a trigger to a complicated and nuanced chain of discourse.

Currently in the world of the Performing Arts the lighting designer is considered an Artist and a member of the artistic collaboration team responsible for the deployment of a very powerful visual tool – be it in service to a painfully executed minimalism for its own sake or a maximalist operatic production. Not so long ago there was some semantic disagreement concerning the difference between a lighting designer and a merely clever technician, but now a contemporary lighting designer is by default smothered and pampered with accolades previously reserved for the artist.

Seen from the platform of the Visual Arts, the lighting designer, it would seem, does not warrant the status of an Artist – simply because the lighting designer always has a client. Additionally, there is always a myriad of demands which lighting must serve in the process of collaboration if a seamless "Gesamtkunstwerk" is to be a goal. Furthermore, lighting design itself, is not Art as Art must ultimately stand independently of the production as it is transformed by the viewer.

Since the 1960's however, Light Art, has evolved from curious hair-raising spectacles into a serious art form. Before that time, of course, certain established artists had already experimented with light.

Performance, Live Art, and Contemporary Dance then found a unique and individual collaborator in the light artist who does not just provide delightful visual effects, but is interested in creating a unique space for performance. What has been established, in effect, is a vague border- area. It is in this ambiguous boundary where we like to be involved.

As a university-level art education institution our task often verges on academic or scientific research wherein inventing something new becomes a primary goal. We are charged with creating an environment where art and research can flourish together in a real way. Maintaining skills and traditions is one of our core values. In order to evolve, however, we need to "shake the tree" on occasion.

Therefore trans-departmental, inter-disciplinary, curious, international collaboration is crucial. Light is made visible only by reflection, and finding unique "surfaces" on which to shine is critical to evolution of the medium and education of future practitioners. Results may not always be outstanding and success is never guaranteed, nor is our goal even to educate Light Artists per se. Following these experiments it is always refreshing to return to the "fields" again, with some new thinking, clear vision and a newly reflective surface. X

Professor of Lighting Design, Scenographer

This article is an edited combination of two previously published or presented papers.

The text starts with an outline for a round table discussion at the International Lighting Design Symposium in Hangzhou 2011. The latter part is from the Light Art Exhibition catalogue "Relativité de la lumière et des lieux / Dispositifs visuels", where Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD), Aalto University, and Theatre Academy Helsinki collaborated in three exhibitions in Paris in autumn 2009. This article has also previously been published in the magazine of the Finnish Pavillion in the Prague Quadrennial