The medium of light is at the center of the work of Brigitte Kowanz. Whereas artists like Bruce Nauman work in other media besides light − body performance, sculpture, and installations, light is the recurring motif that determines Kowanz’s work.
Kowanz is aware of all the possible sources of light art. With her art, she makes a considerable contribution to showing that light can also be used as a language; the language of light is her art. What is special about this is that she employs this language of light parataxically. Her parataxic method − or parataxic poetry − has given her use of light its specific structure from very early on in her career, which meant that she took on board historical sources of light art, but adapted them for her own purposes.
The sources that Kowanz’s light art draws upon are painting, music, film, architecture, and advertising. Her art addresses all of these media in varying degrees of significance. Initially, her most important source for light art was painting, synesthetic painting in particular, which attempted to identify correspondences between color and music and then present or materialize these through the medium of light.

Synesthesia and Color Light Painting

Color was the engine that led to the transition in painting from representation to abstraction; “Consequently, it was color that provided the impetus for the liberation of painting from representation.”1 First, the “local color” that was stuck to an object was abandoned. In the era of local colors, lemons were painted yellow, the sky blue, and the fields green. In post-impressionism, painters discovered the autonomy of color, and the idea of absolute color was born. “Pure color. You must sacrifice everything to it.” (Paul Gaugin). The sky became yellow, horses blue, and trees red. After absolute color had become independent of local object-based color, the next step was for color to free itself entirely from the object. It was sufficient to apply color in its pure form. Absolute color then led to a further step: The object itself was abandoned. Color surfaces, lines, and dots were now enough. Finally, it became sufficient to paint the canvas in one color alone, as Alexander Rodchenko did in his works Black on Black (1918) and Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color (1921). Monochrome painting was the ultimate triumph of color, dominating the surface entirely.
But color wished to expand beyond the surface of the canvas into the surrounding space. Artists began to paint walls and objects. But that too was not enough, as some painters wished color to pervade the whole space. The absolute dominance of color not only led to its taking control of the surface, but also of the room. In 1961, Dan Flavin created images he called Icons. At their margins he affixed light bulbs, so that the pictures lit up the whole room. The light bulbs in effect materialized the expansion of the image, of color − of light − into the room. For this reason, like many painters before him, Flavin saw light and color as one, and then the painting itself was no longer essential, as the light bulbs alone sufficed, or neon tubes, white or colored, whose color or light flooded the whole room.
In Diagonal of May 25 (fluorescent light in a Plexiglas tube, 1963), the color indeed illuminates the whole room. Color scored a victory over surface, was no longer restricted to the surface, but now pushed its way into the whole space. It was no longer the color of oil paints, but the color of light. Color painting entered real space.
Kowanz operates within this context, but not as a painter. Rather, she is like an architect or poet. She knows that painting is a source of light art and uses light as a spatial medium, but not colored light. Kowanz almost exclusively uses white light. Thus she stands in the tradition of monochrome painting.
The transformation from monochrome painting to monochrome light was achieved by the ZERO artists’ group around 1960. They succeeded in transforming the canvas into white light. But each ZERO artist used light within the framework of his or her own painterly or sculptural idiom. Ucker used pillars of light like nails. Piene’s light installations mixed his own painterly idiom with that of Fontana. Kowanz, in contrast, creates her own light idiom in white light. She uses mirrors, like Mack and Luther, but less in the sensual sense of painterly effects and more conceptually as linguistic effects. She does not dispute the idea of light as color, but her reduction to the color white shows that she does not see light as part of the painter’s palette and effects, but as an autonomous medium. She thereby severs light from its links to color.
The idea of using light beyond color as color was supported by a development from represented light to real light. For centuries, there had been painters of light who had succeeded in perfectly presenting light in all its facets on canvas. Painting was like a kingdom of the rainbow, as, for example, in Joseph Wright of Derby’s Landscape with a Rainbow (1794). With the development of color triangles and color theories (James Clerk Maxwell’s “color top” of 1855 or Charles Henry’s “cercle chromatique” of 1888) there began the development of color as light. In Des expressions de la lumière (1874), Charles Blanc already theoretically replaced oil paints with colored light. This new equation of absolute color and real light also became the basis of the painting of Robert Delaunay: “Color is form and object.” Color replaces the object. Color is the form. “The color, the fruit of light, is the basis of the painterly means of painting − and its language” (Delaunay).
Gauguin was interested in pure color and the primacy of color. For Delaunay, color became all there is, and a new equation was formed: Color is light, an approach that many subsequent painters would adapt, right up to Moholy-Nagy. Furthermore, color is the language of painting. If color is light, therefore, light is also the language of painting. Here we see the seeds of a definition of the medium of light as language. This is the historical lesson that Kowanz picks up from painting. Her own artistic achievement consists in how she defines and articulates this language of light, its syntax and semantics.

Synesthesia and Color Light Music

There is not only synesthetic painting, which equates color and light, but also synesthetic music, which brings together sound and light.
The affinities between color and sound and between painting and music have fascinated artists as well as scientists for centuries. Examinations of acoustic phenomena and the anatomy of hearing corresponded to examinations of visual phenomena and the anatomy of the eye. The experimental psychology of the nineteenth century − from Hermann von Helmholtz, who developed a resonance theory of hearing (On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, 1863) to Ernst Mach (The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, 1886) − researched synesthesia, the simultaneity of acoustic and visual sensations.
This desire to hear what you see, and to see what you hear, to enjoy acoustic alongside visual sensations and visual alongside acoustic, led to an important field not only of synesthetic painting but also synesthetic music. For example, light pianos and light organs were built by Alexander Scriabin, who used a clavier à lumières in his orchestral piece Prométhée. Le Poème du feu (1910), projecting colors of light instead of sounds into the room. Modern disco is ultimately another example.
The attempt to marry music and painting by means of light pianos and organs was particularly popular in the 1920s. Color was defined as light, and sounds were said to correspond to colors. Color pianos were used to create synesthetic sound colors. As synesthetic music tended to separate light from color and to grant it the status of an autonomous medium, it promoted the development of light art as an independent artistic discipline. Musicians wished to enter into the realm of painters and to challenge their monopoly on color. They saw themselves as color and light artists on an equal footing with painters. Light as an artistic medium was thus separated from color as a painterly medium.
Synesthetic experiments on color light music are typical of this new music-based connection between color and light. The 1920s saw the advent of the art of light. Thomas Wilfred, for example, the inventor of the "Clavilux" (light piano), also founded an Art Institute of Light. Alexander László worked from 1925 on color light music, according to the maxim “Color is light,” but he never painted. In 1926, Adrian Bernard Klein produced Colour-Music: The Art of Light. Color music enabled light as an independent form of art to play a more prominent role than had been possible in color painting. Avant-garde film also contributed to the increasing independence of light as an art form.
Kowanz transforms both color music and color painting as historical sources of light art, not negating them but varying them. Her links to film can be seen in her use of the historical means of op-art and kinetics, the arts of the moving observer and the moving object, so as to promote the transformation of the light image from a static to a moving image.

From Color Light Music and Color Light Painting to Film

Some painters extended their research on the color of light from the static image to the moving image, and they realized that they had to switch media, moving from the single image to a succession of many images, from the canvas to the film frame, from painting to film. The color that had become independent of the object became absolute color. By analogy, film that became independent of the world of represented objects was named absolute film. The first film matinée Der absolute Film took place on May 3 and 10, 1925.
These abstract or absolute films were largely responsible for the transformation of represented light in painting into real light in art, because film was the first medium to introduce pure white or colored light into art as reality and not as representation. Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer, a film consisting only of white light and black (1960) and Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973), a film which shows the growing trace of light of a circle and thereby forms a cone in the murky space of the cinema theatre are the ultimate climax in film as pure play of light, a high point that began with the further development of color light music in film. In his lectures on color light music between 1925 and 1940, Alexander László gave a good overview.2 Painters like Léopold Survage (Rythme coloré, 1913), Viking Eggeling (Diagonal Symphony, 1921), Hans Richter (Rhythmus 21, 1921), Walter Ruttmann (Lichtspiel Opus I, 1921), and Oskar Fischinger (Lichtkonzert Nr. 1, Komposition in Blau, 1934/35) painted and drew for film. This led to the first works of art with real light: “light shows.” Many painters saw color as the “fruit of light” (Delaunay), and therefore their journey to research color led them ultimately to light − real light. The Bauhaus artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack spoke of “color light shows” (1923). Alexander László called his demonstrations “color light music” (1925). In a 1941 publication aptly entitled Kinetism, the Czech artist Zdeněk Pešánek pointed the way from represented light via film to real light. He called his first light sculptures (1929/30) “kinetic light sculptures.” Real light was introduced into art via the represented light of painting and then film.
The light art of painting, music, and film led to the independence of light as a form of art, but it did not yet free light from the prison of the surface. Light art still remained projection art consisting of a ray of light and a light surface. Recognizing this historical restriction, Kowanz began to layer transparent surfaces such as glass or mirroring surfaces so as to provide spatiality and three-dimensionality for the medium of light. By referring to the experiences of architecture, she made a key contribution in turning projected light into flooding light, and in transforming reflecting light surfaces and reflecting light shows into self-generating sources of light and light objects.

Architecture and Light

For architecture, as the art of space, the treatment of light has always been of fundamental importance. A house with no light is a cave. Architecture thus begins with light − with a dwelling beyond the cave. Providing the façade with openings in the form of doors and windows and thus allowing light into all the rooms inside a building has always been a primary task of architecture. Because this mostly was not possible with natural light alone, architects searched for artificial sources of light. For centuries, fireplaces, torches, and candles were the sources of light they used. With the invention of the light bulb in 1879 and other gas sources of light later, it was finally possible to create light everywhere independently of the time of day, pretty much with the same freedom that light painters enjoyed. After 1900, architects like Peter Behrens and Josef Hoffmann began to design light sources that oriented themselves on modernist architecture and its “love of brightness.”
The development from the representation of light to the design of light and the design of rooms with light was primarily driven by architecture. This is the real source of Kowanz’s light art. She designs rooms with light. Her works do not only present light or project light; they emit light. Her light objects generate light and design rooms. Moholy-Nagy’s definitions in the Hungarian journal Telehor in 1936 are the historical preconditions for her art: “1. Light shows in the open air: a. Illuminated advertising today still mostly works with linear effects on a surface [. . .] shifting and transforming light surfaces [. . .] 2. Light shows in enclosed rooms: [. . .] d. The light fresco that designs large architectural units, buildings, parts of buildings, walls with artificial light based on a pre-devised light plan.”3 Colored light had long replaced oil paints, but what mattered was further developing the technology of light so that light art could become an independent genre and autonomous medium of art.
Electric light was the beginning of the dominance of “true” light, in architecture above all. Light façades for casinos, theaters, and hotels starting in the 1940s, and sophisticated tube lamps as ornamental façade designs starting in the 1920s, show that technical progress pushed the development of light art as spatial art forward. Modern light technology also entered theater, particularly from 1920 on. The ray of light that the electric floodlight projects onto the stage is theater’s equivalent to a brushstroke in an oil painting. The ray of light’s angle of incidence is particularly significant. Since the 1920s, light has determined stage sets, from Bel Geddes in 1924 to Robert Wilson today. The lines, surfaces, and colors in painting find their equivalent in Kowanz’s sum of light in space. Her works celebrate the architectural and theatrical use of light. Knowing that advertising plays a decisive role in urban life, she draws on the historical effects and matrixes of illuminated advertising and transfers them into artistic spaces. Light objects and light façades disseminate light in space in ways musicians might dream of when they wish to project sound into space. Kowanz creates an architecture of light. She thus makes a clear break with painting and its definitions of color and light.
A key experience in her light art is the use of language. Where does this come from? From the experience of urban spaces and a knowledge of conceptual art. Kowanz abandoned painting’s two-dimensional definitions of light in favor of architecture’s three-dimensionality. Then she renounced the static light image in favor of the moving image experienced in film, thus promoting the light dimensions of op-art and kinetics. Finally, she integrated into her light art the techniques of self-referentiality of conceptual art and a view of the world as a forest of signs that she knew from the world of urban advertising and conceptual art.4 The primacy of linguistic references and tautological definitions of the act of perception itself are also clearly denoted in the titles of her works.

Advertising and Light

Advertising floodlights were first used in 1900. In the 1920s, illuminated advertising using specially constructed floodlight cars that projected light onto the overcast sky was very popular. Starting in 1930, floodlight parades and light displays in the sky above towns became a prominent feature. At the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the exhibition area was so brightly lit hat people spoke of the “white city.” Cities became “cities of light.” The light islands and brilliant façades of skyscrapers from Manhattan to Shanghai create massive fields of light that have dominated the image of our metropolises since the 1930s.
From 1910, illuminated advertising made up of letters, numbers, signals, signs, and pictures has conquered the façades of buildings and transformed our cities at night into cities of light: Electropolis.
In 1909, the Frenchman Georges Claude invented the neon tube. This led to an enormous proliferation of illuminated advertising. Cities are advertising signs that can tower into the sky. They are architecture only in the second instance. The Bauhaus movement, in particular, did illuminated advertising a great service by adapting it to architecture and pointing the way forward for illuminated graphic art to create striking modern architecture. A form of illuminated architecture arose that led to a completely new kind of light architecture today now that LEDs (light emitting diodes) can facilitate the design of entire façades. Whether Times Square or Potsdamer Platz, Broadway or Kurfürstendamm, they are all strongholds of illuminated advertising. There buildings are no longer to be seen; instead there are just the images of illuminated advertising made of neon tubes and lamp bulbs.
This urban experience of two-dimensional light graphics in interplay with three-dimensional architecture largely determined the feel of the twentieth century. It meant seeing architecture and space from the perspective of light. This is also the central experience in Kowanz’s art. She has succeeded in liberating light art entirely from twodimensionality and transposing it into the threedimensionality of the space of architecture and object art or installation. The difference is decisive. Light artists like James Turrell create pictorial spaces that work with the illusion of the surface; they are still painters of light, creating paintings by means of light, even if these paintings spread out into the room, as in the case of Dan Flavin. Kowanz is a light artist of space and architecture. She designs light three-dimensionally. In this she has achieved much more than her predecessors.
Kowanz often refers to the fact that light is disseminated at the speed of light, as in one of her best-known works, Lichtgeschwindigkeit sek/10m (Speed of Light sec/10m, 1989/90), in which the speed of light is presented in numbers. Kowanz also very definitely uses light as a medium of time. The titles of her work again and again indicate the speed of light and the temporality of light.
She thus understands light as a medium of both space and time. We know that the world as a whole “moves” at the speed of light, that light is the only constant, the measure of all measures. For Kowanz, light, and thus also the speed of light, is the starting point for space and time. Light is the universal medium from which the experience of space and time, and of seeing and moving, is derived.
This singularity leads to the simultaneity of all sources. Kowanz adapts, ignores, or emphasizes painting, music, film, architecture, and advertising. She thus arrives at the autonomy of light art, light art as an autonomous medium. From advertising and conceptual art, she takes text and signals or symbols. Letters and sentences are written in light. The light of the stars before the black backdrop of the universe is a well-known early navigation system. Kowanz’s illuminated letters and words point to these sources. She uses letters and text as systems of navigation. By employing mirrors, she returns the endlessness of the stars to these textual navigation systems. She builds ladders of light or uses light as a metaphor for ladders, like Jacob’s ladder leading into the heavens. Her titles (see Lichttreppe [Light Steps], 1991, Ad infinitum, 2007) say it all. Kowanz uses texts conceptually, and − as is common in contemporary conceptual art − she also uses them tautologically and reflexively, as for example in Maßstab 1:1–1:6 (Scale 1:1–1:6, 1994–1996). Her work Light Is What We See in Basel (1995–1999) is also noteworthy in this context. The tautological character of this claim is self-fulfilling. Her Kalender (Calendar, 1996), on the other hand, is a typical conceptual work with numbers. Text and numbers from the world of illuminated advertising (which can also be translated into other systems of signs and languages, as for example in Morsealphabet (Morse Alphabet, 1998/2000) are thus one backdrop. The other is painting, and the result is abstract light images like See It Now (2000) and Exchange (2008), which form a kind of reflex to Dan Flavin’s light painting. And Kowanz refers to architecture. Her light images become light objects. These light objects may be sculptural, as for example Lichttreppe, Unendliche Falte (Endless Fold, 2007), and Ad infinitum. Or they may be a mixture between pictorial object, sculpture, and architecture, as are Kowanz’s neon works with mirrors, such as Vergessen (Forgetting, 2001), Just Make Sense (2002), and Now I See (2002). The references to architecture are very clear in works like Lux (1998). Their permanent installation in architectural spaces is a direct continuation of the work of the Bauhaus, whether in interiors as in Licht bleibt nie bei sich / kennt keinen Ort / ständig in Veränderung / mit seiner Umgebung (Light Never Stays / Knows No Place / Is Continually Changing / With its Environment, 2003–2005) or outside as in Outline (2006).
Kowanz develops the language of light. With the help of light, she formulates messages and images and also designs rooms. She uses mirrors to create virtual spaces of light. She uses light in optical illusions leading to insights. Processes of perception become processes of knowledge. This makes her a language artist of light. She reveals the light of language by developing the language of light. And she does this parataxically; this is a key feature of her aesthetics of light.
Hypotaxis (Greek hypo means below, taxis means order) stands for the subordination of subordinate clauses to main clauses. The link between a main clause and a subordinate clause is done via a conjunction, and artful and convoluted sentences are seen as “high” style. Examples would be Heinrich von Kleist and Thomas Mann.
Parataxis (Greek para means beside), on the other hand, denotes a linear arrangement of independent main clauses. There is no subordinate or superordinate clause, but only clauses of equal valence, mostly separated from one another by punctuation such as commas, periods, or semicolons. Paratactic style can be found in texts by Franz Kafka and in early expressionism. It more strongly adheres to logic and authenticity. In a lecture in 1963, which itself was highly hypotactic, Theodor W. Adorno in 1963 presented his thesis to the Hölderlin Society in Berlin that Hölderlin was a poet of parataxis.5

If we assume that there is a language of light, then we can note that Kowanz uses this language of light parataxically. This is the deeper reason why her light art so heavily refers to text and codes, to information and communication. She measures the universe as a poet of parataxis.

1 Warwara Stepanowa in Alexander Nikolaewitsch Lawrentjew, Warwara Stepanowa: Ein Leben für den Konstruktivismus (Warwara Stepanowa: A Life for Constructivism) (Weingarten: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1988), 170 and 175
2 Jörg Jewanski, Natalia Sidler, ed. Farbe – Licht – Musik (Color – Light – Music) (Berne: Peter Lang Verlag, 2006)
3 Lázló Moholy-Nagy, “Lichtspiele” (Light Show) (excerpt), in Telehor, vol. 1 (Brno, 1936): 116, cited from Europa, Europa: Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Europe, Europe: The Century of the Avant-garde in Central and Eastern Europe), exh. cat., Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 3 (Bonn, 1994), 110
4 Catherine Gudis, ed. A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989)
5 “Parataxis: Zur philosophischen Interpretation der späten Lyrik Hölderlins,” (Parataxis: A Philosophical Interpretation of the Late Poetry of Hölderlin) in Noten zur Literatur: Gesammelte Schriften Band II (Notes on Literature: Collected Writings Volume II) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 447–49

In: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Hg.), Brigitte Kowanz. Now I See (exh. cat.), Verlag für moderne Kunst Nuremberg, 2010, S. 100-105.