AUTUMN LIGHTS LA: GO WITH THE GLOW
Cities run on many fuels, but none is more singularly associated with the urban experience than that most impalpable of media, light. Berlin has its Festival of Lights, St. Petersburg its White Nights, the Scandinavian cities their celebrations of the midnight sun, New York its Great White Way, and Paris, of course, is known as the City of Light. The most famous views of Los Angeles show it as a vast, unending sea of lights, a blinking grid extending to, even past the horizon in the soft, enveloping embrace of the peculiar night born of the marriage between desert and sea. Los Angeles, then, is also a city of light, a pool of stars overflowing Hollywood.
Thus, it should come as no surprise to find Los Angeles artists celebrating light and using light as a medium at once natural and spectacular, remarkable and mundane. It should come as no surprise that gallery openings are often heralded with klieg lights, like movie premieres. It should come as no surprise that the most popular new work of public art in LA is Chris Burden’s brilliant, bristling amalgamation of superannuated streetlights planted like a Parthenon ablaze in front of LACMA. And it should come as no surprise that “Autumn Lights LA” has become an annual fixture in a newly revitalized, re-aestheticized downtown.
The challenge for artists participating in “Autumn Lights” is to make their works more than simply beautiful or spectacular. We have fireworks for that. Artists here have to come up with the unusual, the provocative, the cryptic, the curious, the magical – in other words, with spectacles that get beyond themselves, that add the “hmm” to the oohing and aahing. “Autumn Lights LA” may not be a competitive show, but it invites comparison, evaluation, and investigation as well as admiration and celebration. Light is too precious to waste on the lightweight. Indeed, light is too precious to waste altogether, and some of the works on display, at least, show us how to use energy, and how to cast light, more efficiently.
Finally, though, “Autumn Lights LA” is a celebration, of the urban experience in the early 21st century and of the possibilities that, for all our tribulations, still course through art and life like veins of gold.
Peter Frank
Peter Frank is Editor of THE magazine Los Angeles and Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum.
