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http://www.cleveland.com/living/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/living/1098351511110130.xml
Works of light:
Inspired designs are turning everyday fixtures into functional art
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Jenny Staletovich
Special to The Plain Dealer
Since Thomas Edison first plugged us in, we have been playing with light suspending it from ceilings, stashing it behind stained glass and shooting it into the air.
We always desired its practical effect, but we have learned that, like architecture, it can create powerful art by manipulating space and altering our senses. And the best part: It doesn't have to be confined to a museum. It can sit at the end of a couch or hang over the kitchen table.
Indeed, a lamp can shed light on a room. Or it can light it up.
Light is, as artist Dan Flavin said in 1987 after spending a quarter century elevating the common fluorescent bulb from dingy office fixture to celebrated art, "as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find."
Even Flavin, whose work is just now having its first full-scale retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, would agree light has come full circle: You're more likely more than ever before to confuse the office light fixture with art.
"It's just exploded," said Marcia Sweet, owner of Sweet Modern Contemporary Furnishings in Woodmere. "It's a pretty clean look but not as stark and cold as people used to think of lighting."
Inside Sweet Modern, B & B Italia sofas and Philippe Starck Louis Ghost chairs are lit with Jasper Morrison's Glo-Balls, which, like they sound, are luminous orbs suspended on steel rods. What's striking is that for all the plastic and metal used by Morrison, Starck and other contemporary designers, the place is warm and even cozy.
Across town at Boom, you can find authentic midcentury lighting alongside an Eero Saarinen coffee table and see firsthand why designs like Walter von Nessen's sleek architectural lamp and Verner Panton's pendant light ignited such a craze in lighting. (Boom, owned by photographer Michael Edwards and his wife, Deborah, a graphic designer, will move from Lorain Avenue to the Rockefeller Building, 2499 Lee Blvd. in Cleveland Heights, on Monday, Nov. 1.)
No dim bulbs
in modern styles
Now that modern and particularly midcentury furniture is in such high demand, more and more customers are looking more closely at lighting.
"We have some customers who are just interested in lighting, that's what they're all about," Mike Edwards said.
They tend to have eclectic tastes and mix their styles.
"We get people from Shaker Heights who have a number of antiques and throw in the modern stuff," Sweet said. "Or they're selling their house for a condo and want a modern look, clean and neat."
Along with local stores, the Internet is a trove for hard-to-find lights. Highbrow Furniture in Nashville (www.highbrowfurniture.com) is one of the few places to sell Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin 2 light, a stack of plywood boxes that dramatically echoes his architecture. Unica Home in Las Vegas (www.unicahome.com) has a large array, including Panton's Ilumesa, a round plastic table that lights up. And Velocity Art and Design in Seattle (www.velocityartanddesign.com) sells nearly every version of the ubiquitous George Nelson bubble lights.
As with most things modern, the seeds of lighting can be traced to Chicago's World Fair exposition of 1893, when Edison, Westinghouse and others showed 27 million visitors for the first time how alternating current could light up the fair's 630 acres. But it would take decades before lamps became the kind of decorative objects we now consider.
"For me, it probably stems from the 1950s and '60s when designers wanted to make good design for the average person," said Ana Vejzovic, assistant curator at Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art. "It's this idea of being functional as well as why should something we depend on not look great as well."
Lighting a room
without glare
Contemporary lighting, at least by aesthetic standards, started with von Nessen, a German immigrant who established a studio in New York in 1927. Initially designing only architectural lighting, he gradually turned to lamps, ranging from elaborate German and American deco to functional designs that won a following among architects and designers.
"He experimented with glare and trying to reduce glare and came up with the idea of hiding the light source within concentric circles of metal," Edwards said.
Others followed. Isamu Noguchi created paper lamps inspired by Japanese fishing lanterns that look more like sculpture, while Arne Jacobsen, who gave us the hugely popular bent plywood Ant chair, created the Stelling pendant, using three-layered blown opal glass. Some played with light, some played with shape.
Some of the most innovative designers today are doing just that. In a tribute to Noguchi, Ingo Maurer, whose work is part of the design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, created a flowing paper light that looks as if it has been miraculously suspended midfall.
Prices for lights can be all over the map, particularly if one is an original. A reproduction of Wright's floor lamp or a new design, like the Globe Floor lamp a 3-foot round ball of light go for about $3,000. Noguchi's simple rice paper table lamp, then, might be a bargain at $150. Something called the Groovetube, a suction panel of translucent boxes that could turn a plasma TV into a Flavinlike work, is a steal at $30.
So if you're searching for art that will do more than just hang on the wall, you might start with the nearest light switch.
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