Light and Space, ‘Finish Fetish’ and the Endless Summer of the Frist’s LACMA Exhibition

Certain things will always be associated with summertime. The combination of salt water and Hawaiian Tropic, The Beach Boys, the glossy finish of a surfboard. Just as potent are the works in Light, Space, Surface, a Frist Art Museum exhibition of works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which highlights the surface-oriented movement of “finish fetish” and the Light and Space movement that developed in parallel. 

A massive Norman Zammitt painting, “Untitled” from 1984, is an ideal gateway to the exhibition — at once monumental and Zen, it calms and overwhelms at the same time. The gradient work includes 48 shades based on five colors, which you can try to decipher when you get up close. The darker shades toward the bottom almost read like stripes, but the hazy blues and greens at the top of the canvas wash seamlessly into the buttery-yellow middle. Zammitt organized the colors based on a computer-generated logarithm, which might explain why the execution is so unexpectedly minimal, like stained-glass windows featuring an airbrushed T-shirt design.

Immediately following the Zammitt painting is a gallery of works by various artists who experiment with the aesthetics and culture of cars. “Pastel Domes #1,” a mirrored pedestal with three pastel domes from Judy Chicago, is among the exhibition’s first highlights. Chicago is famous for her feminist masterpiece “The Dinner Party,” which has been on display in its own wing at The Brooklyn Museum since 2007. The magnitude of that piece cannot be overstated, but its tendency to overshadow the rest of Chicago’s work makes the inclusion of these pastel domes especially exciting. Immediately after finishing art school in the early 1960s, Chicago enrolled in auto-body school as a way to establish her presence as a serious artist in the male-dominated art world. She was the only woman in a class of 250 men. There she discovered the idea of merging color and surface — an important addition, as well as a bit of an undoing, of her art school education. The three domes are pearlescent seafoam and lavender, and they lie face-up on the table like anatomical specimens — like if Lisa Frank designed breast implants.

Additional works by Larry Bell and Billy Al Bengston underscore the car-culture aesthetics of the exhibit. Bengston’s “Tom,” from 1968, goes a step further and nods to the rich symbolism of biker culture as well. The warped aluminum surface is like a macho dismissal of perfection, even as its shining surface denotes polish. I’m reminded of tattooed chests, Easy Rider and the Altamont Free Concert. 

Larry Bell’s “Cube” from 1966 exemplifies the convergence of auto-body methods and fine art application. In 1962, Bell began experimenting with vacuum-coating glass, a process that deposits a thin metallic film onto the glass, which modifies how it absorbs and reflects light. In a 2006 interview, Bell described his process: “My media isn’t glass, it’s the light that hits that glass.” The idea of borrowing methods from industrial design was so counter to the prevalent ideas of New York-centric Abstract Expressionist ideals of the time that preference for shiny, pristine surfaces was considered an obsession rather than an organic movement. Around that time, the term “finish fetish” began to trickle into art criticism. Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson first published the term in 1966 to describe “California’s industrially oriented ‘finish fetish’ school of cool sculptors [who] work in geometrically reduced forms that are metaphorically expressive of contemporary emotional attitudes.” That assessment wasn’t universally well-received by the artists themselves — the emphasis on the surface material made it all too easy for the movement’s deeper substance to be overlooked. 

Robert Irwin’s “Untitled” from 1966-67 is the first hint that this exhibition is shifting its focus away from the artwork’s surfaces and into the viewer’s perceptions of them. That may sound more esoteric than it is — the Light and Space works are extraordinary in their ability to merge craft and populist appeal. Curator Melinda Wortz first used the term “Light and Space” in print in 1979 to refer to works that present “visual phenomena which cannot be recorded, measured, or experienced by touch.” And Irwin’s deceptively simple design — a convex disc painted a flat white and light from four different angles at once — is a powerful perceptual experience. Viewed straight on, it looks almost like an unfurling lotus flower. But as you move around the work, the play between light and shadow makes the work appear to float in midair.

An even deeper examination of perception is a room dedicated to Doug Wheeler’s “Untitled (Light Encasement)” from 1968, which is granted additional importance because no shoes are allowed inside it. Viewing the piece is a physical experience — the air feels heavy, the sound muffled. It’s like a sensory-deprivation chamber, with curved walls that have no discernable corners, and the box of light at its center is diffused so that no shadows are cast. The work is unnerving, and exiting it feels like you’ve just escaped from the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The artist most closely associated with the Light and Space movement is James Turrell, whose “Blue Pesher” at Cheekwood is one of Nashville’s contemporary art treasures. There are several walls dedicated to his works in the Frist exhibit, but his 1966 piece “Afrum (White)” distills Turrell’s aesthetic down to a small thing, which sounds as dull as it is extraordinary to experience — light is projected into a corner of a room.

A dark room filled with holographic works from Bruce Nauman announces itself as singular right away with walls that are painted pitch-black. The holographic works inside are examples of Nauman’s insistence that any type of play done in his studio must also be a form of art. The combination of playfulness and deep aesthetic curiosity is evident. Two holographic images on glass from 1968 show the artist’s face contorted to be purposely silly. It’s uncanny, with a hyperrealistically sharp focus and unnatural lime-green tint.

One of the most recently created elements of the exhibition stands on its own in the small gallery nestled in the back of the exhibition. Gisela Colon’s “Untitled (Monolith Silver)” from 2016 is made from an internal steel structure, engineered carbon fiber and prismatic surface particles. It uses reflection, surface elements and shifting perception, but incorporates organic concepts — as she says, “the energy of the earth, of the planet.” The monolith is equal parts Space Age rocket, surfboard and architectural column, and it functions like a sexually charged exclamation point — a marker for the Light and Space movement’s continued significance into the 21st century.