Refracted Histories

In Robin Clark’s essay “Phenomenal: An Introduction,” Clark argues that phenomenal is a term that links art dealing with light, space, environment, and ambience for the purpose of applying “mechanical and psychological effects of visual and haptic perception to aesthetic experiments happening in the Light and Space Movement during the 1960s and 1970s in and around Los Angeles, which emerged as a byproduct of the 1971 exhibition at UCLA titled Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space: Four Artists.”⁴ Curiously, American light art practice developed alongside sound art in almost parallel courses on opposite sides of the United States, with the Light and Space Movement (LSM) in California and Fluxus in New York, which discursively grew out of composer John Cage’s Experimental Music course at the New School, and shortly thereafter with the emergence of the Sonic Arts Union.⁵ Just as some artists expressed ambivalence around their affiliation with Fluxus, many artists associated with LSM resist that categorization and deny membership in the group, and even dispute the origins of the name and its credibility as a distinct art movement.

The 1971 UCLA show exhibited works by four artists, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and Craig Kauffman, yet many more artists working with light share historical roots with LSM, either as members or collaborators. These include but are not limited to James Turrell, Mary Corse, Doug Wheeler, and Ron Cooper, as well as artists inspired by the group such as Yayoi Kusama, Olafur Eliasson, and Bruce Munro. A younger cadre of artists continuing to work with immersive light and environmental installation notably includes Soo Sunny Park, Yoko Seyama, Gunda Förster, Jenny Holzer, and Ben Ruben.