Techniques: Luminal Music

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Distant Music. The 64,000-volt question about the use of light as a medium is, of course, whether it can produce great works of art or will remain merely intriguing decoration. Certainly luminal art is dazzling, far more mysterious than the jeeringly antisocial comment of pop, far more alive and sprightly than two dimensional op. Yet, like op, it often seems to be all surface and no content. In part, the problem lies in the novelty of the art and the difficulty its practitioners find in rising above the welter of technological gimmickry. But, unless some way is found to build luminal constructions far more durable than the present variety, museums in the year 2500 are going to be even more strapped for examples of 20th century light art than museums today are for genuine Leonardos.

"The only limitation that I see in it." says Thomas Wilfred, now 78, "is that those who try it just don't have the vision to use it." As far as M.I.T.'s Gyorgy Kepes is concerned, the problem is largely one of newness: "Renaissance artists like Uccello and even Leonardo were as much interested in discovery as in the poetry of the discovery. There was a joy in the discovery and a joy in that joy."

Yet the luminal artists are keenly aware that if their art is to succeed, they must develop it a good deal further. "The power that will make it last," observes McClanahan, "is the power of the individual artist to transmit his humanity to it." Says Thomas Tadlock: "We are at a stage now in light that is comparable to music when the first man took a stick and banged on a hollow log." Under the circumstances, even the hint of distant music is to be heralded.