Robin Clark, Curator, formerly of the Saint Louis Art Museum, currently Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

in conversation with

Rainer Kehres & Sebastian Hungerer

This conversation took place via telephone on June 16, 2008.

Robin Clark

I wanted to ask you about your partnership as artists. I know that Rainer is a musician and Sebastian has a background in architecture, and I wondered if you wanted to talk about how you ended up collaborating and what your different backgrounds bring to the way that you work.

Rainer Kehres

We met some years ago at the ZKM I Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, in a group of artists who were working for the Center. As our interests always went far beyond music and architecture, we found out that working with light and lamps was a common passion. The light installations we make are a permanent fusion of our histories and interests where aspects of composition and construction come together by the medium of light. The upcoming work for the church is an especially wonderful example of our ambitions in public space.

Robin Clark

Could you tell me how you found each other and started working together?

Sebastian Hungerer

In the beginning it started with small collaborations like a light sculpture for a stage design, which ended up getting bigger and bigger because we were falling more and more in love with the lamp thing.

Robin Clark

I first became familiar with your work through the catalogue LIGHT ART FROM ARTIFICIAL LIGHT / Light as a Medium in 20th and 21st Century Art, produced by Peter Weibel for the ZKM Karlsruhe. The catalogue features great installation photography of your piece, Space Invaders. Do you want to talk a little about what that work was like when you installed it in Karlsruhe?

Sebastian Hungerer

For the ZKM's big light art exhibition we intended to do something in the atrium. We had that giant room and we wondered what we would do with it. Something small would look like a tiny stamp so we said, we might draw on our ability to work with big rooms, as architecture and music can change a whole place.

Robin Clark

Could you describe what it looked like?

Rainer Kehres

It looked like a huge curtain made of 192 lamps hanging in a grid, each occupying a space 85 centimeters square, all together 14 meters wide and 11 meters high. It was a hovering light construction, and the configuration reminded us of the early computer game Space Invaders. Although it has nothing to do with the game, we kept the title because it literally means an intervention in a space—and that's what it was. It developed its own magnetism, by day as a gleaming light sculpture, at night as a glowing bonfire multiplied in the reflecting glass walls and roof of the ZKM's old industrial architecture.

Sebastian Hungerer

We took care to hang them accurately, so that it would not look like a lamp shop. Each lamp regardless of size, origin, or value had the same space. We are interested in the history of the lamps, so we wanted to give each and every lamp the same space and the same value. We also carefully considered where to hang each lamp. The placement is not incidental; we change them around a lot before we find the perfect setting.

Robin Clark

How did you choose the lamps that you used in your installation at the ZKM?

Sebastian Hungerer

We have maybe four thousand lamps in our workshop and all of them have a particular history. In this case our interest was that the lamps would not spotlight the space but would glow in all directions. What we really liked about the space at the ZKM is that people enjoyed their time below the lamp curtain of Space Invaders by sharing memories. They would spot certain lamps and older people might say, "I had this lamp with my ex-husband in 1954," which added another layer to the lamps' histories.

Rainer Kehres

In the future we are thinking of adding a recording console on the ground where everybody can feed or retrieve memories.

Sebastian Hungerer

Yes, something that shows people sharing their stories, which are different for each and every lamp.

Rainer Kehres

We have already started to make our works interactive. For our development—and the development of guest artists from all over the world—the ZKM is a unique place: it is not only two museums, but also a venue of different institutes for research and production in the fields of visual media, music and acoustics. Director Peter Weibel and his staff have supported us a lot.

Sebastian Hungerer

We enjoyed watching the atrium at the ZKM become a communication focus, seeing people who didn't know each other start responding to the lamps. The place where the piece hung was perfect for us because you could see it from all floors and bridges of the atrium, and people felt invited to move all around and join all the different points of view.

Robin Clark

This would be a good point to start talking about the Pulitzer project, because while the lamps that you used at the ZKM were lamps that you collected anonymously, not necessarily knowing who owned them before, for the Pulitzer project you are actually asking for donations from the St. Louis community. Do you want to talk about the way you developed that idea?

Sebastian Hungerer

Actually we knew a lot of stories about the lamps used in the ZKM because you can ask people when you buy a lamp on eBay or at the flea market, "Just give me a short story about the lamp—do you know where it hung, why did you sell it?" But with the Pulitzer it is more special. In the beginning, we had the idea of bringing lamps to St. Louis from the former parliament building of East Germany, which has a very specific history dating back twenty years ago, when the wall came down. But then we developed the idea to get the lamps from the St. Louis area, to bring histories of this certain area together; and by good fortune the Pulitzer was able to get for us a story and picture of each lamp with the help of the local community. When we saw the Pulitzer's lamp collection Web site for the first time, we were freaking out. For example, there is a lady called Meredith with two lamps. With the orange lamp, if I remember right, it is actually quite a sad story. She tells that about ten years ago her brother died and she took the lamp from his apartment. So the lamp has a special history for her; for us it has something to say, definitely. I won't forget that story. Then, about her other lamp she said, "This lamp was a present from my ex-boyfriend's mother." And we love this! We have these contradictions. It's a simple lamp, one might say, but people have memories. We try to share the memories of these people and put them in one piece. This is why we are so lucky to have the possibility of collecting lamps at the Pulitzer.

Robin Clark

It would be interesting to hear how you responded to the site of the burnt church. This project is related to the ZKM project, but there is a big difference between making an installation in a museum atrium and making an installation in a church that has suffered a fire.

Rainer Kehres

Over the last ten years the ZKM has been converted from a factory to a lively center for art with an important influence on the whole city; in the church and the surrounding area there is still a lot of potential for a transformation. So the lamps are gathered not from elsewhere but from St. Louis, which gives the work a more concrete and local context. Also, there are different technical demands. We continue to use indoor lamps as our working material in a public space because every lamp carries its own history and the individual expectations and prospects of its owner. Normally light in public spaces as well as the history of development of artificial light in general is determined by business and security rules. The place of the burnt church is a wonder and a dream for our work: fire ended its usefulness to the community, and now we have the opportunity to give it a new life with light emitted through the lamps of the community.

Sebastian Hungerer

The church is, in a way, different because it is an open space. We have weathering and wind and other climate effects on the installation which we did not have at the ZKM. The nice thing about the Spring Avenue church is that you'll see the church from far away, yet the closer you get, you have a different perspective and angle. I am looking forward to that moment where you get closer and closer and go inside and just look up, and then you see through the whole missing roof and only the lamps are left.

Robin Clark

Can you talk about the way you'll make a roof out of the lamps?

Sebastian Hungerer

After the roof burned seven years ago, they stabilized only the gables and the walls, so this is the situation at the moment. We are planning to put up scaffolding and wire strings with 289 lamps connected along the whole thing.

Rainer Kehres

The scaffolding holds the tension of the seventeen wire strings. At night it will disappear so that the installation may be like a swinging light harp between earth and sky.

Robin Clark

And the lamps will each be donated by someone in St Louis?

Sebastian Hungerer

We think even our curator will bring a lamp. That's what she said...

Rainer Kehres

We hope that this factor will attract people to Grand Center, not only to see our installation, but all the other installations during that time, too. They will light the area from very different perspectives.

Sebastian Hungerer

Although safety regulations prevent us from admitting people into the church, we would also like for people to go inside the installation. That moment from outside to inside would change the aesthetic experience dramatically.

Robin Clark

Yes, I think from outside it will have a large sculptural presence, but from inside you would be enveloped in the light and it would be much more like an environment.

Sebastian Hungerer

That's right, you would get that light as a shelter and, on the other hand, you still have the church atmosphere. It will hopefully be a unique room.

Rainer Kehres

The roof will still be open. We prefer a lightweight and airy construction for the lamps, to make it transparent so that you have an enlightened room and also see the sky—and from above you can look down into the church.

Robin Clark

It does have that allusion to sunlight coming through stained glass, but in this case it will be something you see at night.

Sebastian Hungerer

Kind of reversing the normal theme of transparent windows.

Rainer Kehres

And as you walk around, the images in the windows will constantly change.

Robin Clark

Is there anything else you wanted to say about the project?

Rainer Kehres and Sebastian Hungerer

We'll call it CHORUS. The title indicates the engagement of the community as well as it deals with the building. As a term used in music and in architecture, the title also covers our former individual professions and history. To make CHORUS resonate, it will be an adventure until the last moment.
 

Actual Exhibition / Introduction

The artist duo Rainer Kehres & Sebastian Hungerer gained wide recognition with the Space Invaders installation, a luminous curtain of 192 lamps, that was introduced at the 2006 exhibit “Lichtkunst aus Kunstlicht” (light art from artificial light) in the atriums of the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Quickly becoming an audience favorite, Space Invaders accomplished an unprecedented design and structuring of the huge former industrial space of the ZKM. At the same time, the installation also created a space for personal association, which allowed visitors of all backgrounds and ages to invent or recall their own stories. Everyone’s own memories glistened in unison with the lights of the “curtain.” The lights also shed their shimmer far into the city, appearing like stained-glass church windows of the former industrial cathedral. Within the building, they turned the vast foyer of the ZKM into a living room that, as a universal fireplace, also produced social warmth—an innovative variation of social sculpture.

Following Space Invaders, the duo’s first gallery exhibit, entitled Head of the Bed, presented a new challenge: reducing the format of the original large-scale installation. The concept of thinking big that had governed Space Invaders was translated here into small nightstand lamps, which, sitting near the head of the bed, accompany people from everyday reality into the virtual world of dreams. This is where the German exhibition title Kopfende originates: it means “the head of the bed,” and, literally translated, also refers to “the end of the head,” suggesting the transition from conscious waking state to the unconscious world of dreams. In this smaller Head of the Bed exhibit, too, the ordinary and the curious are combined in roster-like shelves which fill the windows of the gallery, turning them into both show cases and light cases. Lights originating from the most private of living spaces become the membrane to public space. And just like in dreams, projections are flickering on the “pixel membrane.”

Almost inevitably, the further development of Space Invaders was geared into two directions. On one hand, the installation was extended to include interactive involvement, in which visitors could direct the lights by their own movement in the foyer. On the other hand, viewers of an imminent large-scale installation were asked to contribute their own lamps and stories to the work of art. Thus, they are empowered to transcend mere participation by directly producing art themselves.

Based on the success of Space Invaders, the two light artists were invited by the Pulitzer Museum for the Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, to conceptualize a large-scale outdoors design to accompany a light art exhibit focusing on Dan Flavin’s work. This move is a dual achievement: from Karlsruhe, Germany, to the United States, from museum space to public space.

In St. Louis, in close proximity to the elegant museum designed by Tadao Ando, they will execute a monumental installation at a church that was destroyed by fire a few years ago. Now, the completely burnt-out and roofless building is being revived as art space. With their installation of artificial lights, Rainer Kehres and Sebastian Hungerer conquer the church for art, giving it space and a gleaming, diaphanous roof that spans over the ruins like a starry night sky. Citizens of St. Louis were asked to donate lamps for the project, so that the entire city may participate in the building of this star bridge.

I am absolutely certain that their work in St. Louis will cause the same sensation it did in Karlsruhe. The general enthusiasm the works incited as well as their easy and joyful approachability, however, have been captured too lightly here. Much too easily, because they are composed of individual designer and kitsch lamps, the light installations themselves could be judged as just that: design and kitsch. However, such a view ignores the artistic multidimensionality of Kehres and Hungerer’s work.

Let me explain a little in the following. 19th-century art was dominated by the dream of color. One of the greatest painters, Vincent van Gogh, offered this prognosis at the time: “The painter of the future will be a painter of color.” And he was right (even though he primarily meant to talk about himself). The artist of the 19th century was indeed an artist of color. One could note that the development of painting in the 19th century was driven by color, by the emancipation of color. At first, this liberation took place through the change of local color (the color of the object) to absolute color. Color was increasingly liberated from its object and became abstract color, absolute color. This development led to paintings that did not feature anything else besides one single color, that is, to monochrome painting, such as the work of Yves Klein with the IKB (International Klein Blue). Thus, color itself was the motor of development in painting toward 20th-century abstraction.

During the 20th century, however, the color artist increasingly becomes a light artist. He thus follows a dream of painting to artistically represent light and to incorporate this most immaterial of all artistic media into art (water color = light transparency, oil painting = luminosity of color; light and shadow). Entire schools and movements emerged from different treatment of light in painting. However, light itself, the source of all color, could never be truly captured in images.

Today, though, we are able to utilize real artificial light, not just as a representation of natural sun light, but as real artificial light. The introduction of artificial light to both humankind and art was a hymnal celebration of a “victory over the sun” (opera by Matyushin, Malevich, and two other artists, 1913). Hence, one can join Moholy-Nagy, the famous Bauhaus artist, in proclaiming that “the 20th century belongs to the light.”

We can predict that just like color was a defining factor in the development of 19th and early 20th-century art, light is a defining factor in the 20th and 21st-centuries. And we are seeing works in which light and color, that is, light art and paint art, interact. The image develops into an image space, and this image space, a three-dimensional creation, becomes a sculpture.

This is the astonishing and touching aspect of Kehres and Hungerer’s artistic light works that we must grasp. Their responsibility is not only toward the abstract sources of modern art, that is, light and color, but also toward the concrete sources. Remember 1915: Malevich painted his first abstract paintings and Duchamp exhibited his first ready-made objects. For a long time, these two directions went separate ways. Painting became a differentiated system of abstract color fields, and sculpture became more and more the realm of concrete everyday objects.

At about the same time and with the help of electric light sources, the motion picture was transmitted into the world as light art. Kehres and Hungerer combined these tendencies: in the medium of light, everyday objects and abstraction are finding together.

Common lamp shades, ready-mades of the object world, form themselves into abstract color images, into luminous color mosaics, which, to top it all, are in motion. Lamps are lanterns, color is light. Kehres and Hungerer have consequently made unique images of light from lamps—and light images. They turn objects into abstract kinetic light creations, light games, op art.

Not by means of painting, but by means of sculpture (also in the architecture), color space and color image are forming, which nevertheless do not neglect the element of time. From controlled light processes—sometimes slower, sometimes quicker, sometimes static, sometimes dynamic—we somewhat see a kinetic work of light art, a kinetic light sculpture, and perhaps we also see a painting.

This paradoxical light sculpture, this light sculpture as screen, as image, as abstraction, as ambience, constructed from everyday objects, this palette of lamps the light of which are colors, this light sculpture has indeed many aspects.

The word “lampshade” gives clues to the possible function of light as color because shade also points to screen or canvas. Canvas is not only surface that carries color, but it can also be a screen onto which light is projected. No work makes this connection more obvious than Head of the Bed and the ball screen Panthella. The pixel walls of lamps are not only luminous in themselves, but they are also being projected on. The lampshades are also image screens. This interlude of everyday luminous objects and their concurrent function as image carrier is a perfect if not welcome paradisiacal solution, which finally reconciles the two most important art movements of abstraction and objectivism. Additionally, the technical light media of photography and film or video are brilliantly combined in the process.

In the ball screen Panthella, a screen was constructed from half-round lampshades, onto which photos, that is, light images, of lamps from Space Invaders are projected. This light source is also externalized in order to cast light images onto the lamp screen. This is a wonderful picture puzzle which separates the commodities, namely the lamps, into their individual elements to cleverly recombine them. These works have virtually transformed out of themselves. In the process, the projection reaches an unusual depth with 3D effect.

Photographs
The two artists are also astute observers of their own work. It was not the viewers of their installations alone who took countless photos and videos of the lamp curtain and thus catapulted the light artists to the top of Flickr and YouTube hit lists. The artists themselves have also photographed and artistically reflected on the many different views of the installation. The selective view of the camera revealed surprising details on the light image which had not been obvious in the overwhelming vastness of the ZKM light installation. Hence, the huge dimension of the overall work is being transformed into a size suitable for intimate living space, thus returning to the original location of its objects.

Christiane Riedel
ZKM I Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie
Karlsruhe, Germany