“More Light”
On JoJo Tillmann’s light-objects
By Gerhard Charles Rump
Let light come on stage – or aren’t all the figurative arts
concerned with light, anyway? Especially in painting?
Wolfgang Schöne published his authoritative book “Über das
Licht in der Malerei” (On light in painting) many years
ago, and one can, indeed, come to such a conclusion from
what he wrote. But painters have to take a detour. Colours
are matter, which is also perceived as light. But it isn’t
light, it only depicts light. And colour isn’t a property
of objects (like form is), but only the reflection of light
of certain wavelengths, depending upon the texture of the
surface.
Glass painting is the exception. The stained glass painters
have, since mediaeval times, used light for the diaphanous
character of their church windows, also to theological
ends, but of course to magnificent effect. In the 1960s,
after a foreplay by, among others, Moholy-Nagy
(“Light-Space-Modulator”) in the Twenties the “indirect”,
the detouring work with light had an end: Artists worked
directly with light – Julio Le Parc, Heinz Mack, Günter
Ücker, Dan Flavin, to name just a few. “Physical” light has
since become an undisputed means of art, be it a sole
subject, be it as an agent embedded in a pictorial
superstructure, like in the backlit Cibachromes by Jeff
Wall.
JoJo Tillmann works with light in similar contexts. His
light-objects, however, are not built like backlit
advertising posters; rather they are made from different
layers from C-prints, foils and perspex, held together by
aluminium frames. Their box-like character, the step into
the third dimension becoming subject-matter here, gives it
the special quality of an object. So the light active in
the work of art – which, in the newer works, usually comes
from several fluorescent tubes, which may vary in length –
is specifically taken out of the everyday context of the
surrounding light. In this way light becomes free to work
for the “pictorial function”, the two intersecting “spaces”
forming a broken symmetry, to accentuate different zones,
so to say.
The fluorescent tubes produce a light akin to daylight
(“cold” artificial light of 6500° K), like the ones used in
your friendly neighbourhood supermarket. It stands for
clarity of appearance, as the “warm” artificial light
(3200° K) is, according to JoJo Tillmann, “too dirty”, too
yellow. It has to be fluorescent tubes, because, given the
wanted compactness of the construction and the equally
wanted visual compactness reducing heat is of prime
importance.
So we stand in front of a highly differentiated object of
perception. The viewer, willing to begin a dialogue, will
delve into the light-space and will go through an
experience of de-focalization, which will suddenly let him
find himself in the middle of the imagined space. As there
isn’t any fixed vanishing point, or point of rest, like in
a painting executed applying the rules of central
perspective, he will understand that it is he himself, or
the “spirit”, his mind, is this point of rest.
Here we find a reflection of relativity and quantum
mechanics, which have succeeded our old, fixed Newtonian
view of the world, without having been able to be as
graphic, as concrete. And so the light-objects by JoJo
Tillmann, too, make the viewer existentially insecure as to
understanding directions and dimensions in or of space – a
constant source of fascination. “More light!”, one is
tempted to say. Please – it’s within art itself.
Translated by the author