I can well understand why this has been so popular. It really has some stand-out works, provided you don't read the twaddle that comes with the pieces. You don't often wander around an exhibition and see kids faces spontaneously break into a smile when they see what's on show, but that's what happens here. Nothing stuffy about this, provided, as I say, you ignore the pretentious blurb.
Of course, light affects are very much part of what I enjoy at music gigs, and this follows in that tradition some of them relying on artificial mist (equivalent of dry ice at gigs) to get the effect of light playing on the suspended particles.
Difficult to know where to start on this stuff. Maybe with Leo Villareal's "Cylinder II" which is a stunning chandelier of a piece, hanging 19,000 LED lights on mirrored drops which go light and dark on a computerised timer. Frankly you could watch it transfixed for ages. Would make a great centrepiece for an office atrium. It made a good entrance piece to start the exhibition.
Anthony McCall's "You and I Horizontal" was wonderful too, with beams of light shining at you, but as you passed through the beams they seemed to bend and what was a straight line became curved. You have to see it really.
Similarly Carlos Cruz-Diez's "Chromosaturation" is best appreciated by being right in it. Its just a matter of colour, but you feel saturated by the depth of the various pure tints.
Rose also relies on colour and light beams to create a rich effect.
Maybe the one you most need to see, or perhaps feel, is "Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV". This is basically a cage with a light slowly moving within, in an arc. The important bit is the shadows this creates, the mesh of the cube's sides casting moving shadows on the walls and floor. It leaves one with an unsettling effect as you feel motion yourself, or at least your eyes are telling you that the room must be moving.
Another wonderfully clever effect is to be seen in Olafur Eliasson's "Model for a Timeless Garden" in which a series of fountains are arranged across one side of a darkened room. They are lit by flashing strobe lighting (not one for epileptics) but this has the effect of freezing the droplets of water, making the scene like a series of crystal blooms. Beautiful, but the flashing lights are hard to bear after a while.
The most ingenious piece was perhaps one of the least impressive works. Bill Cuthbert's "Bulb Box Reflection" is just one light bulb seemingly reflected in a mirror on the side of a box. But the curious bit is the the light-bulb is off, but its "reflection" is on!
Not all the works are this interesting. Some are just too simple and therefore dull, like Brigitte Kowanz's "Light steps". We are supposed to see a series of floating steps suspended in mid-air, but its all too obviously just a line of fluorescent tubes.
I think what makes this exhibition work while many modern are exhibitions don't to my eyes is the nature of the medium. Its new. The effects with lights wouldn't have been technically possible only a few years ago. So the artists don't have to go bizarre to be new, they just need to understand the technology and imagine the effects. Don't look at this stuff for the meaning of life, just be amused and slightly awestruck. Its also an exhibition that needs to be seen. No catalogue could do it justice. You need to move around in some of the exhibits - to take part as it were.
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