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Light Art in Italy 2009
Gisella Gellini, Francesco Murano - Maggioli Editore, Rimini
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PREAMBLE - Gisella Gellini
This is the second edition of 'Light Art in Italy', requested by the publisher after the success of the first one in 2007. We still aim to valorize and to convey the expressive and artistic values of lighting, one of the excellences of Italian Design. In the words of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, one of the most important collectors and experts of Light Art: 'We are not aware that, if we are what we are today, it is thanks to the Past; it is the Past that allows us to live our lives and improve our future. If memory was lost, we would go back to being wild animals, as we were some millions years ago.[…]Knowing the context in which an 'artwork' is born is also very important. Art is the expression of the ideas, of the political, social, cultural and philosophical conditions of a certain society.'
The first edition was written in Italian, but this year we decided to publish the volume in English, to allow its wider circulation abroad. Francesca Della Morte unraveled the very entangled skein of the texts, written by the different artists that are hardly as good with words as they are with brushes, or, as in our case, with light sources. The graphics remained simple, effective and recognizable, which are all needed qualities when illustrating artworks that should be, and often are, 'self-explicitating'. In the meanwhile, public and private, local and urban exhibitions dedicated to Light Art have multiplied; to the now historical shows in Turin and Salerno, the Light Exhibition Design (L.E.D.) festival added, promoted by the Municipality of Milan. Several educational institutions that offer classes and courses of Lighting Design participated to the L.E.D. contest, proving the high degree of pervasion that Light Art has today in Light Design, formerly more reluctant to welcome what was once considered a degenerated use of light sources. To the theme of the passage from provocation to norm Francesco Murano dedicates his introduction to show how, from the disruption of the classical scene carried out by the Russian Constructivists and by the Italian Futurists, an experimental art was born. It evaded from the laboratories, from the artistic circles and the galleries, and today it differs in innumerable ways and perfectly integrates itself in the indoors and outdoors of our daily living.
INTRODUCTION - Francesco Murano
In the first edition of 'Light Art in Italy' we tracked down the remote origins of the spectacular
use of light in ancient Greek theatre. But to understand the passage from the already sophisticated and tonic use of luminous sources on stage to their conscious employment in an autonomous form of art, it is not less fundamental to know the contribution given to this evolution by the Russian artists and theoreticians in the 'creative' and relatively free period following the October Revolution. As a matter of fact, many were the Russian constructivist artists that investigated new expressive characteristics of theatre lighting; already in 1913, even Kasimir Malevic directed the comedy 'The Victory of the Sun' by Kruc'nych Matjusin using light to cut clearly the actors' bodies in a cubist decomposition.
Great importance was given by a director like Tairov to the luministic effects obtained through spurts of 'chromatic energy'; in certain cases, such as in 'Kšnig Harlekin' by Lothar (1917), in 'Die Prinzessin Brambilla' by Hoffmann (1920), and in 'Romeo and Juliet' (1921), he used light to emphasize the theatricality of his shows, with phantasmagoric effects. Anyway, the most representative conception in the complex and intense activity of those years, and certainly the most substantial, was proposed by Mejerchol'd, the inventor of Biomechanics; he intended to make the actors' body an autonomous instrument of signification, with a conventional semantics of its own, freed from the traps of naturalistic imitation and from the reigning limits of representation and realistic scenography. The tight relationship with Majakovskij and the Russian futurists on the dramaturgical side, and that with the constructivists and the most advanced, aware and new waves in the Russian Figurative Art, like Tatlin and others, gave to the director a wide range of possibilities, texts and images of absolute originality and great significance. Its stage, stripped of all the traditional articulations and reduced to the perimeter walls, became filled of proper structures, conceived for every performance, like the costumes and every other tool of the show, carefully evaluated according to the dramaturgical and scenic requirements. Therefore, even lighting was reprocessed and laid bare, reduced to an element of the complex scenic 'score', in which every element was connected to the others without losing its autonomy, but, on the contrary, finding new stimuli and possibilities. The light sources, the projectors and the lamps were, at last, installed and
sometimes handled 'on sight', to isolate, to highlight or, instead, to unify and to include the single moments of the show and its components (actors, objects, places and spaces).
In Italy, after Duilio Cambelotti's attempts to undertake a reform of scenography inspired,by the plasticity of Appia's theatre, the theatre lighting and the raw light received their stimuli from the futurist theatre posters. The main commandments of the futurist theatre were to put on stage 'all the discoveries (however improbable, bizarre or antiliteral) that our genious is making in the subconscious, in the never defined forces, in pure abstraction,in record and psycho-madness[…][and]to tune the public's sensitivity exploring, rousing,by every means, the laziest branches; eliminating the preconception of coming to the fore, throwing nets of sensations between
stage and public; the scenic action will overrun stalls and audience'.
It will be Giacomo Balla to realize luminous theatre shows according to the futurist dictates. From the scenic synthesis on Hell, he will recover the promethean tradition of liturgical drama, as it
appears in the plot directions in his sketches of 'The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe' (1914, reported by Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco). In 1915, Enrico Prampolini writes the manifesto 'Futurist Scenography and Coreography', in which he states that 'the stage will not be a colored background anymore, but a colored electromechanical architecture mightily vivified by chromatic emanations of luminous source, generated by electric floodlights with multicolored glasses, analogously coordinated to the psyche that every scenic action requires. The luminous irradiation of these colored beams and surfaces of light, the dynamic combinations of these chromatic vanishing points will give wonderful results of pervasion, of intersection of lights and shadows, creating voids of abandon or luminous bodies of exultation. Let's invert the parts of the illuminated stage, let's create the illuminating stage.' This is a first clear definition of luminous figures, namely elements that have a defined formal character, in order to stand alone as protagonists of a luminous event, regardless of their power to make the environment, in which they are or in which they are projected, visible. The intrinsic spectacularity of light is 'traceable and we tried to follow it in the flames of pyres, in the simulations of flames in theatre, in the frenetic exploding of fireworks'. This spectacularity of the pre-ordered repetition of what Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti defines the 'visible forms in their making and invariably renewable, as in cinema and in automatic shows' joins the development of lighting; as Sedlemayr very clearly notices, 'from lighting, in different moments of history, arises an art that compose its lights using luminescent sources, or encompassing them as composing element'. One of these moments is represented by the show 'Feu d'artifice' by Stravinsky, staged on 12th April 1917 at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome. As Elena Povoledo reminds us, the scene consisted in a composition of abstract forms, namely volumes built with wooden frameworks covered with strongly and clashing colored cloths. Every shape was surmounted by another very colorful, but transparent one, shining with lamps on the inside. The human person was excluded from stage and replaced by effects of colored lights, rapidly changing according to
the rhythm of the music (in 15 minutes there were over 60 changes of lights) and determining the movement. It was the 'color on the move' of Futurism. The light changes were obtained using a control panel with switches that was connected to the electrical system of the stage and settled in the stage whisper's pit. There were Balla and Dagilev directing.
The experiment aimed at solving both a painting and a scenographic problem by breaking the unity and the traditional equilibrium of the scene (a need already felt in a different way by Appia and Craig), but it didn't continue in those years, yet it marked the beginning of the modern Light Art. As a matter of fact, Light Art can be considered as a work of synthesis between scenography and art, a true staging of light in which the spectator feels to be part of the space for which and in which light lives, as it appears in the pages of this book. |
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SOCI NAZIONALI:
SOCI SOSTENITORI E BENEMERITI:
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