Techniques: Luminal Music

Some day all art must come to light. —Matisse

Along with everything else, art has gone electric. It was bound to come in an age when light bulbs turn winter into spring in the greenhouses, when man's best-hidden viscera are laid bare and shining beneath the surgeon's spotlights, when murders have been witnessed on the television screen, and when the newest mind-expanding drug, in the words of one user, "makes your body feel like a conductor for tens of thousands of volts."

From coast to coast, no major exhibit of contemporary art these days is complete without the zap of neon, the wink of a wiggle bulb, the spiral shadows of alumia or the ghostly glare of minimal fluorescence. M.I.T.'s Hayden Gallery was jumping last week with the flickering lights of Venice Biennale Prizewinner Julio Le Fare's black-and-white Pulsating Lights and other works of artists exploring light as an artistic medium. For the Los Angeles County Museum's forthcoming "American Sculpture of the Sixties" show, electricians were readying Stephen Antonakos' Orange Vertical Floor Neon, Chryssa's Fragments for the Gates to Times Square II and an untitled work by Dan Flavin. At the heart of the U.S. pavilion at Montreal's Expo 67, technicians were putting into place Robert Rauschenberg's brand-new illuminated watt-chamacallit.

Moths to a Candle. The new luminal art has suddenly emerged as both international and popular. Some 80 artists from 20 countries were represented at the mammoth and highly successful "Art-Light-Art" show staged at Eindhoven last September by Philips' Lamp of The Netherlands. A record 42,000 visitors showed up when Kansas City's Nelson Gallery staged a month-long "Sound Light Silence" show last November. The minuscule Howard Wise Gallery on Manhattan's 57th Street was jammed to its sockets with 20,000 visitors when it displayed 36 artists from nine countries in its "Lights in Orbit" show this February. The same show, with 20 exhibits added, is currently breaking all attendance records at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Critics may rail at the technological supercharge of the "light brigade." Artists wail at the fragility of their new medium (fuses blow, bulbs burn out). But almost any exhibit that lights up in a gallery draws people like moths to a candle, or like children gazing into a burning hearth. In the following color pages, TIME reproduces the work of twelve luminal artists (and one luminal committee), photographed in galleries and studios in the U.S., France, West Germany and Britain.

Lutes to Lumia. For all its science-fiction appeal, the use of light in art is not exactly new; all art depends on light in one way or another. Light rays mold the light and shadows on the surfaces of sculpture, reflect from pigments to give the eye its impression of form and color. But in traditional art, color is constant, not kinetic. And even the purest oil or watercolor pigments inevitably reflect not pure color, but a mixture of colors. The present-day luminist's dream of both movement and purity has had to await the 20th century, with the full development of the incandescent bulb, the fluorescent tube and the movie projector, which has made the sustained use of artificial light possible.