Turner Prize

Five pieces of art about switching lights off and on

In this age of environmental anxiety, the act of switching a light bulb on or of becomes increasingly meaningful. In that spirit, here are five pieces of art about using light switches:

This simple idea from Tiffany Holmes at ecoviz.org was displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicaco last month under the title darkSky.  Viewers are encouraged to turn these salvaged lamps on or off as they please. The resulting electricity consumption is displayed on a screen nearby. I’m guessing the purists can’t resist turning all the lamps off, while the aesthetes can’t resist turning them back on again. Of course the really smart purist would turn the tv monitor off as well.

Tue Greenfort’s work has simple wit to it. Back in 2002 he created this untitled piece in Frankfurt [see right]. The switch gives people the ability to turn the street lamp off when it’s not needed. (Image courtesy of Johann Koenig, Berlin).

 

 

 


Martin Creed’s 2001 Turner Prize-winner  Work 227: The Lights Going On And Off. Obviously.

 

 

Robert Watt’s 1965 piece Lightswitch, played with the notion of a light switch as an instrument to turn on a light to illuminate a space. In this case, when the switch is flipped, a light turned on inside the switch box itself, illuminating the two screw holes of the lightswitch face plate.

In 2002 the Gorbet Art Collective, Professor of Electrical Engineering Rob Gorbet and and husband-and-wife Matt and Susan Gorbet created a piece of work called Power to the People or P2P to celebrate the 100th anniversary of a publicly-owned hydro electric company in Kitchener, Ontario. It consists of 125 light bulps and a panel with 125 switches on, each connected to one of the bulbs. The public can chose which light bulbs to illuminate.

Any other nominations?


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Artists digging for victory part 2

This is from an article I have in this morning’s Observer magazine:

Flicking through a history of community gardening in America, Amy Franceschini discovered that between 1941 and 1943, 20 million Americans took part in the Victory Gardens programme, an initiative created to feed the nation during wartime.

“I was thinking, when have 20 million Americans ever participated on that scale besides sports – or shopping?” says Amy, nursing a cup of green tea in her studio, an expansive floor of a former warehouse. “And San Francisco was the most successful place for Victory Gardens. They took it on massively here.”

In a local newspaper she found a photo dated 18 April 1943. There, in front of the august neo-classical pillars and dome of the San Francisco City Hall, were row upon row of vegetables. “And I thought, ‘We have to have a garden in front of city hall again.’”[…]

“What artists do is seed things. They plant ideas,” says Michaela Crimmin, head of the RSA Arts and Ecology Centre. Which maybe explains why these cheap, relatively small-scale projects like Franceschini’s can have such an influence.

Harvesting food as art is growing in the UK, too. Patrick Brill – otherwise known as the artist Bob and Roberta Smith – currently features as one of the new generation of “Altermodern” artists at Tate Britain. In 2007, he created a work called The Really Super Market in Middlesbrough. Encouraging local gardeners, schoolchildren and farmers to grow vegetables, they turned the town centre into a giant farmer’s market for a day, an event that culminated in a community cook-in.

The idea took root. This summer, in east London’s Gunpowder Park, artists Amy Plant and Ella Gibbs are running a ramshackle Energy Café, using only renewable resources to cook organic food foraged locally, or supplied from within a six-mile radius.

Turner prize-winner Jeremy Deller initiated a 10-year project in Munster, in Germany, in 2007, giving all the gardeners on a community plot a large leather-bound diary in which to record their notes – whatever they wanted to write. In exchange for their participation, Deller handed each an envelope containing seeds of the dove tree. When planted, the trees should flower for the first time at around the point the project comes to fruition, at which time Deller will collect the diaries and put them in a library. “The gardens are a vernacular art work in their own right,” says Deller. “They’re homemade and made up as they go along. The people that tend them are thinking about colour and form.”

Meanwhile, for the past nine years, the artists Heather and Ivan Morison have been working on a garden and woodland in Wales – originally a community garden plot developed as a conscious echo of Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness. (Jarman, of course, was another artist who helped change the way we think about gardens.)

The rest is here.

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