For the exhibit Light Lines: Jay Atherton and Cy Keener, the artists stationed nine mirrors in the landscape in order to direct sunlight into the largest gallery of the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts (Rubin Center). Inside they have suspended nearly 5,000 contiguous, hand-cut squares of plaster-impregnated fabric to create vertical surfaces for the light to permeate and bounce off of. Each mirror functions best at a certain time of day based on its location and angle. The results are difficult to determine but ideally every hour at around the half hour mark beginning at 11:30 a.m. and lasting until sunset a visitor can experience brilliant points of reflected light inside the gallery. Because the daily course of the sun is shifting during the fourteen-week run of the exhibition, Rubin Center staff adjusts the mirrors in their frames at the beginning of each week. The exhibit, like the sun, constantly changes. In 2004 when The University of Texas at El Paso’s (UTEP’s) Seamon Hall was renovated to be the Rubin Center, all of its windows were covered with sheetrock in order to create wall space for the exhibition of art. For Light Lines three windows are revealed for the first time, one each on the north, west and east sides of the building, so that light can enter from three directions.
Mirror gimbal assembly at 425’ distance from Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts with Ciudad Juárez in background.
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Top to bottom: 1. Early schematic drawing of Rubin Gallery interior and mirror positions. 2. CAD line rendering of Light Lines in Rubin Gallery interior.
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Atherton and Keener visited El Paso for the first time in September 2010 to discuss the possibility of reshaping one of the galleries in the Rubin Center to express one or many of the unique qualities of the site. Initially they considered the U.S.–Mexico border and how to respond to it. But within a few weeks they decided that approach was, in the words of Atherton, “too directly about construction; we were missing the big picture. Instead we wanted to ask questions about commerce and history and how light is a mixture of colors reflected from objects around us.” Keener adds, “We did not really want to address architectural space but rather that which is not knowable.” Light Lines acknowledges the borderlessness of air and light.
The plaster-impregnated fabric in Light Lines stiffens when moistened. The artists wet and crinkled the squares to create an uneven surface to create high points for reflected light and low points for shadows. Each piece looks something like a three-dimensional topographic map. Fragile but strong, the fabric permits the transmission of light while also mediating it. Its standard use is for casts to heal broken bones, alluding to repair, restoration and survival. Mirrors in the landscape can also be associated with survival tactics; they are used by the military to signal location and by land surveyors in their quest to place each of us in relationship to others. Light Lines has precedence in works by artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Robert Morris, Christo and JeanneClaude and Donald Judd, but also sets itself apart from them. In the 1960’s many artists including Kusama and Morris used mirrors as a method of situating the viewer within a broader interior environment. This was the time of the beginnings of postmodernism when writing about art and relating it to psychological and philosophical analyses, such as those of Jacques Lacan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, increased in importance. Kusama’s installations Infinity Mirror Room (1965) and Peep Show (1966) are rooms with mirror-lined walls. They are kaleidoscopic, infer boundless space and challenge the viewer to orient him/herself within a visually confusing environment. Kusama’s strategy turns on its head Jacques Lacan’s famous “mirror stage,” a psychoanalytic exploration of the moment when an infant, usually at about 18 months old, recognizes him/herself in a mirror and thus as distinct from other entities. It is an important juncture in the establishment of selfhood. But in Kusama’s work it is difficult to discern where self ends and other begins. Jay Atherton and Cy Keener finalizing the location of a mirror gimbal using sun tracking software.
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This page from top to bottom right: 1. Signaling with heliograph near Monument 92, AlaskaCanada border, International Boundary Commission, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Historic Coast and Geodetic Survey Collection, 1910. 2. Mirror gimbal pieces during fabrication. 3. Sunlight reflected from mirror into Rubin Gallery. Adjacent page: Images showcasing the installation process inside Rubin Gallery.
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This concept of continuum is also applicable to the work of Robert Morris who in 1965 exhibited a group of plywood cubes faced with mass-produced mirrors that visually incorporated the gallery space and the viewer. A year later Morris wrote an essay Notes on Sculpture that discussed how the literally reflective surface on these sculptures impacted the viewer’s understanding of both space and personhood. His essay was informed by the writings of Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist who used the mirror in a discussion of the relationship between vision and art.i Merleau-Ponty focused on uninterrupted experience and rejected dualisms, especially those that separated the mind into parts, such as Sigmund Freud’s distinction between conscious and unconscious, and those that separated subjects from objects. He was interested in sensation and the body, apropos for Light Lines which is, at the request of the artists, without wall text or exhibition signage of any sort so that it is, in the words of Keener, “a singular experience.” The viewer’s entire being becomes involved upon entering the art, which absorbs both body and mind. Light Lines’ use of the mirror takes the work of Kusama and Morris one step further because it connects environmental conditions with interior space, expanding the idea of cohesion by joining landscape to room to viewer. In addition, whereas Kusama and Morris used the mirror as a medium to reflect image, Atherton and Keener use the mirror as a tool to direct light. The mirror is not their medium. Light is. And there is precedent. James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson and Robert Irwin are some of the better-known artists to find meaning in the manipulation of light. Irwin has enjoyed a 30-yearplus friendship with his biographer Lawrence Weschler who credits his short note to Irwin asking “Have you ever read Merleau-Ponty’s The Primacy of Perception?” 6
as the initiator of their relationship.ii The message in part prompted Irwin to steep himself in the thinking of numerous philosophers. It also further supports the argument that light is a unifier and an example of Merleau-Ponty’s point that existence is an interlocking of differentiated but not isolated components. Ambient natural light connects us because it is all around us. We cannot help but share it. In physical form the interior component of Light Lines relates more closely to Running Fence by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude than it does to artworks that produce, emit and manipulate light. In 1976 Christo and Jeanne-Claude formed a billowing 24.5mile fence of heavy white nylon along the Northern California coast. Large scale and a literal connection to the land link Running Fence to Light Lines. Christo and Jeanne-Claude repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning than to create aesthetic impact, joy, beauty and new ways of seeing familiar landscapes. Light Lines has similar conceptual buoyancy because it encourages appreciation of the common resources of light and air. The seven-inch squares abut each other on all sides so the overall effect is that of a curtain swooping back and forth between the gallery’s pillars and walls to divide the space into multiple open areas of monochromatic visual quietness. Previous page: Early schematic drawing of mirror gimbal assembly and anchoring mechanism for Light Lines. This page: 1. Photograph showing synchronous light qualities occurring in Ciudad Juárez in background at left, with mirrored reflection of Rubin Center in foreground at right. 2. First experience of direct sunlight on plaster cloth during installation.
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Museums are sometimes referred to as sanctuaries, places to escape everyday concerns and to reflect upon larger subjects. Light Lines provides this reprieve. In addition, its intentional manipulation of light can be compared to that of Gothic cathedrals or that of more recent sacred spaces such as Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut de Ronchamp (1955) and Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light (1989). The Rubin Center usually does not take the approach of museum-as-escape; most of our exhibitions tackle pressing issues in society and politics. Light Lines is understated activism because it encourages us to pay attention. It demands time and concentration to experience the light as it shifts, and to appreciate its subtleties, such as the shadows on the floors and walls, the delicacy of the fabric, and the variance between one square and the next. In the successful union of the opposites of repetition and uniqueness, and in the intentional manipulation of natural desert light, Light Lines can be compared to the Chinati 8
Foundation’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum by Donald Judd, which still exist together exactly as they were installed between 1982 and 1986 in two former artillery sheds. Each of the 100 works has the same outer dimensions (41 x 51 x 72 inches), although the interior is unique in every piece: the same could be said of the squares in Light Lines. The size and scale of the buildings at Chinati determined the nature of Judd’s installation, just as the site and layout of the Rubin Center guided Light Lines. To visit the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas is to make a pilgrimage. El Paso has the closest airport; the three-hour drive south and east from here is marked by the subtleties and openness of sky and desert. Judd’s art speaks in a different way when it commands views of the high desert than it does crammed in a big-city museum. Marfa represents a quiet escape and is especially satisfying for those interested in the connection between landscape, architecture and art. For the time that Light Lines is on view, the Rubin Center offers a similar experience.
Previous page: 1/16� aircraft cable stretched taught to create armature for plaster-impregnated cloth.
This page: Reflected sunlight in Rubin Gallery interior.
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Clockwise from top left: 1. North exterior facade of Rubin Center showing reflected light from three active mirrors. 2. Detail of plaster-impregnated-fabric in Light Lines. 3. Light Lines in Rubin Gallery.
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Jay Atherton and Cy Keener are principals of the design firm Atherton Keener and are based in Phoenix, Arizona. Each earned a graduate degree in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.
Jay Atherton
Cy Keener
Essay by Kate Bonansinga, Director, Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. 11
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Doyle, Eileen, Art in the Mirror: Reflection in the Work of Rauschenberg, Richter, Graham and Smithson. PhD Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2004, 6.
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Weschler, Lawrence, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, 267.
Exhibition funded in part by UTEP Department of Art’s Patricia Hewitt Silence Memorial Fund and by Texas Commission on the Arts. Photography: Jay Atherton and Cy Keener Heriberto Ibarra Graphic Design: Karina Tovar
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THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO rubincenter.utep.edu facebook.com/rubincenter twitter.com/therubincenter Phone: 915. 747. 6151 Fax: 915. 747. 6067
RUBIN CENTER HOURS Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 10 a.m–5 p.m. Thursday: 10 a.m–7 p.m. Saturday: 12 p.m–5 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday
This brochure published in conjuction with the exhibition Light Lines: Jay Atherton and Cy Keener May 26–September 21, 2011 Text copyright by the author and The University of Texas at El Paso.