A group show, entitled ‘Burning, Bright: A Short History of the Light Bulb’, takes place at the Pace Gallery, New York. It brings together works by 32 artists who embrace the incandescent light bulb and treat it as ‘a real beautiful sort of found object’.
A nighttime studio aid, the bulb hit the commercial market sometime around in the late 19th century, points out curator of the exhibition, Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst. The works on view try to put its relevance in perspective. For example, ‘Cat Lamp’ (1928) by sculptor Alexander Calder inserts a shaded bulb into a fascinating feline's wiry form. ‘Untitled Rayograph (Light Bulb with Nails – 1930), another early work done by avant-garde photographer Man Ray, portrays it as a mystical, almost divine object that radiates energy and hovers in space.
In a 1984 ‘Still Life—Broken Statue & Shadow’, done by British painter Francis Bacon, a bulb suspended from the ceiling apparently illuminates a nebulous form whereas Robert Rauschenberg in his ‘Soaring Dribble Glut’ (1992), done as part of a series about greed, affixed a line of light bulbs to a rusted metal arrow. The incandescent bulb had become such a commonplace object by the mid-20th century that you almost tended to ignore it, Oakland-based Mills College Art Museum director Stephanie Hanor notes.
Hanor was the organizer of ‘Jasper Johns: Light Bulb’, the traveling 2008-'09 exhibit. In the 1960s, Jasper Johns was working on metal casts of bulbs. One of them forms part of the show. According to the art expert, the artist wanted to get us all to see the bulb, but it's about the object’s beauty as well - the shape is sort of feminine and it gives a kind of lounging feel, deftly depicted on its side. There's something sensual and anthropomorphic about it. Artists were obviously playing with that idea too.
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