Albuquerque Museum show rewrites the Light and Space narrative

The Albuquerque Museum’s “Light, Space, and the Shape of Time,” takes an art movement associated with the clean lines and shiny surfaces of postwar Los Angeles architecture and turns it inside-out, showing how generations of Light and Space-inspired artists, including women and Indigenous artists, have used this seemingly cold, prefab language to communicate personal and historical truths.

Near the entrance of the exhibition, a green and orange photocollage by Michael Namingha (Tewa/Hopi) depicts the ruins of a Chaco Canyon great house, whose ancient builders positioned the structure to light up during astronomically significant events, such as solstices. In the context of this show, Namingha’s image serves as a reminder that the desire to make light visible in a prescribed geometric configuration predates the Light and Space movement by at least a thousand years.

Similarly, Neal Ambrose-Smith’s (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation of Montana) neon wall piece, “Abstract in Your Home,” turns an abstract triangle into a representational teepee with just a few extra lines of neon tubing. Teepees are elegant and efficient minimal dwellings whose central skylights reveal the changing patterns of clouds or stars, as in a James Turrell installation.

By placing these works in the front gallery, curator William Gassaway not only highlights contemporary local Indigenous artists but shows how ideas associated with the Light and Space movement were already present in Indigenous cultures long ago.

Sharing the front room with Namingha and Ambrose-Smith is a softly pulsating light sculpture by Leo Villareal, whose work I had seen at art fairs and museums on the East Coast for years without realizing until now that the artist was born in Albuquerque or that he produced his first major light installation for the 1997 Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. I’ll admit I had been quick to dismiss Villareal’s work in the past as something of a one-trick pony, but reconsidering it now as part of a distinctly Western landscape of neon signs and big, open skies made me appreciate it more.

What separates gimmicky art from great art, or even good art? It’s a fine line, particularly when we’re talking about Light and Space installations, which often hinge on simple optical phenomena, like making viewers aware of their own reflections in a piece of mirrored glass (as in Larry Bell’s 1981 masterpiece, “The Cat”), or showing them how identical colors of fluorescent lights look different when arranged in an alternate configuration (e.g., Dan Flavin’s pieces).

These works are more than hollow exercises in form or notable feats of electrical engineering. As Bell explained during a recent studio visit for a forthcoming episode of my “Work in Progress” Journal podcast, “My work is about feelings.”

Bell’s sincerity comes through, even when his specific feelings are hard to pin down. There is often a sense of wonder, but it may be mixed with something else — sadness, perhaps. Between these poles of feeling lies a whole world of inner experiences.

“Light, Space, and the Shape of Time” puts paid to the notion that Light and Space art is cold and unfeeling. It also pushes back against claims that Light and Space art is nonreferential. Bell’s “The Cat” may only be called that because it can be installed nine different ways (like a cat’s nine lives), but, by titling it so, Bell imbues the sculpture with a strong dose of feline mystery, as beguiling as the Cheshire Cat’s fabled disembodied grin.

Robert Irwin, who was always a more nuanced colorist than Flavin, named the specific colors of his fluorescent tubes after avocados, violets and other species of Southern California vegetation. So, Gassaway encourages visitors to interpret Irwin’s piece as an abstracted landscape, as opposed to the traditional interpretation that places the work in a realm beyond the visible.

Gassaway takes care to ground all the works in real-world references, showing how even the most ethereal and transcendental sculptures are not beamed down to us from outer space but are made by people with thoughts and feelings about the times in which they live.

Perhaps the exhibition’s most significant corrective to the standard art historical narrative of the Light and Space movement is its inclusion of women. Of the 16 artists in the show, six are women, nine are men and one — LaTurbo Avedon — is a nonbinary digital avatar. That’s still not gender parity, but it’s better than the all-male Light and Space shows that used to be the norm.

Helen Pashgian, a long-overlooked founding member of the movement, gets her own room, and it’s the most transfixing installation in the show. I could easily spend half a day staring at Pashgian’s illusion of a pink orb dissolving into a foggy pale nothingness without tiring of it.

Compared to the hard-edged steel sculptures of the Minimalists who preceded her, Pashgian’s use of soft, rounded forms and the color pink represent a triumph of “feminine” aesthetics whose power to hold the viewer surpasses that of most of her male peers.

Barbara Bock’s wall installation of curved strips of paper, which she created in the early 1970s, is another revelation. Dating from roughly the same era as Robert Morris’ hanging felt sculptures, Bock’s curved paper forms are even more elemental than his. Yet, like most of the other works in the show, they point to real-world referents. Bock, who had modeled professionally before becoming a full-time artist, was inspired by the curved white paper backdrops used in modeling studios, and used that same kind of paper for her wall hangings. Her work infuses the most pedestrian of materials — paper — with the glamor of fashion, while omitting her own body and the camera’s objectifying lens.

In the exhibition’s final gallery is a new installation by Korean American artist Soo Sunny Park. Park’s floating cloud forms are made from bent sections of chain-link fencing, fitted with fish scale-like pieces of treated Plexiglass that change color from purple to yellow to green as you walk under them. The artist does not attempt to conceal the cables and hanging mechanisms, nor the fact that her primary material is a chain-link fence. It’s unpretentious and anti-illusionist in that sense, just like a Flavin. But knowing what the materials are does not quite prepare you for what they do, nor the feelings they evoke.

“Light, Space, and the Shape of Time” may sound like a show about physics, but it’s really a show about feelings. Spanning generations, geographies and genders, the selected artists reveal clues to their own lived experiences. And despite the seemingly affectless industrial materials they employ, including Plexiglass, fluorescent lights, flat sheets of glass and chain-link fencing, all of the work feels remarkably personal.

Albuquerque Museum show rewrites the Light and Space narrative