Bill Culbert Making Light Work
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Bill Culbert
Making Light Work
Ian Wedde
Auckland University Press
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First published 2009
Auckland University Press
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland 1142
New Zealand
www.auckland.ac.nz/aup
Text © Ian Wedde, 2009
All images © Bill Culbert, except as otherwise noted.
isbn 978 1 86940 439 0
Publication is kindly assisted by Creative New Zealand,
The Henry Moore Foundation and Jenny Gibbs
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Wedde, Ian.
Bill Culbert : making light work / Ian Wedde.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-86940-439-0
1. Culbert, Bill, 1935- --Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
709.2—dc 22
This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research,
criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by
any process without prior permission of the publisher.
Previous page: Wine Glass With Reflection of Bulb (Lit) on Top Surface whilst Projecting Shadow is a
Light Bulb/6 Jan 82 (1982). Ink drawing in notebook (December 1981–April 1983), 200 x 165 mm.
Opposite page: Windscreen. 30 Aug (n.d.). Ink drawing in notebook (1982–84), 145 x 95 mm.
Printed by Kyodo Nation Printing Services, Thailand
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Contents
Preface
Introduction: Lunch at Malaucène culberttexttoprint.indd 5
vii
1
1. Getting a Life
12
Painting, 1956–1968
32
2. Encountering the Modern
49
Electric works and suitcases, 1968–2008
70
3. First Light
86
Photo works, 1975–1992
107
4. Looking with Affection
121
Bottle combinations, 1982–2007
139
5. À Charge de Décharges
154
Installations, 1984–2008
168
6. An Explanation of Light: The Installations, 1984–2001
185
Public works, 1991–2006
211
7. Blue Sky: The Commissions, 1991–2007
225
Notes
239
Exhibition history
246
Bibliography 252
Index
261
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Total (Driving), 1990. Plastic oil containers, fluorescent tube, electrical cable, 250 x 620 x 70 mm.
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Preface
Untitled drawing (3 August 1987). Ink drawing in notebook
(July 1986–August 1987), 200 x 165 mm.
This book is an affectionate and admiring, but I hope thorough,
account of Bill Culbert’s art. Much of the work involved was done
­during conversations at the dining table in Bill and Pip Culbert’s
home in London. Often there were guests present. Always the table
was lit by a version of one of Culbert’s best known works, three Total
oil containers pierced by a fluorescent tube. It was in this kind of
situation that the approaches and concepts that would shape our
book were formed.
Congeniality illuminates every aspect of what Culbert calls ‘the
circumstances at a moment in time’ through which he makes art
and the reciprocal circumstances through which people look at it.
Congeniality links his relationships with cultural agencies, with
colleagues, with viewers and with what he calls the ‘conditions,
­conditions, conditions’ of the conceptual and material world in
which he works. One enchanting sign of this is wall-mounted light
sculptures made of cool white fluorescent tubes and coloured plastic
containers. These objects complicate the distinction between what is
lit and what lights. They make a connection (or refuse a disjunction)
between something that is different from everyday life and something
that is part of it, something made up and something made out of.
If congeniality is the overarching theme that holds this book
together, then its sub-theme of conviviality is as important. At its
simplest, conviviality suggests the pleasures of eating and drinking, of conversations, and these characterise much that has been
important in Culbert’s life. The well-known signs of this in his art
VII
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are his many variations on the glass of wine as an image and an
element of installations. In this book, the word ‘conviviality’ has
to do substantial work, which may seem trivialised by its cheerful
expression. Conviviality is about living together and therefore about
politics: it links sociability and sociality. It requires participation in
culture. Even at its simplest, Culbert’s art has a deceptively jaunty
air that conveys an ethical challenge: to be alert, to participate, to
converse. Sometimes the work’s political meaning is almost overt, as
in the sculpture Stand Still (1987) with its echo of a military command.
Culbert’s many disavowals of commodity — his re-use of discarded
materials, his liking for series and multiples — also have a firm
though never overbearing political base.
These concepts derive from an overview of Culbert’s art and the
social and institutional conditions in which it was made; they provide
a simple theoretical framework within which to look at the work in
detail. This looking is the book’s principal task. Other terms have
emerged in the course of writing, among them ‘affection’, which, like
‘conviviality’, should be read both for its emotional warmth and for
its ability to do hard theoretical work. Man Ray called his versions of
Duchampian readymades ‘objects of my affection’, thus describing
a transitional and affective space in which his liking for something,
and that thing’s existence, produced a work of art. The French artist
and critic Yves Abrioux has used the word ‘affections’ to describe
the results of Culbert’s liking and choosing. The word ‘fiction’ is
another useful and hard-working tool: as if housed within ‘affection’,
it emerges to wrangle the complex moment when something in the
world also becomes something other in a work of art. These terms
describe a space where knowledge of the world is grounded in an attitude to its inter-related conditions or ‘circumstances at a moment in
time’. A different theoretical or art historical lexicon could have been
deployed to do this work — Félix Guattari’s concept in Chaosmosis1 of
an ‘ethicoaesthetic’, for example. But, in the end, I liked ‘congeniality’, ‘conviviality’, ‘affection’ and ‘fiction’. These concepts, when kept
honest, can always match Culbert’s conceptual rigour, and they have
the added advantage of empathy with the manner — even the manners
— of his art.
As well as looking at the art works themselves wherever possible, I looked at the comprehensive records of them in Culbert’s
photographic archives. In doing this, I was often looking at what
they have become as photo works — photographs that have moved
beyond documentation. Culbert’s paintings, sculptures, photo
works and photographs are characterised not just by their profusion
but by the critical energy of his productiveness. He moves concepts
restlessly forward and he enjoins us to participate. He demanded
VIII
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through the 1950s and 1960s that his paintings should move on and
test themselves anew until they became ‘light fields’, then the great
site-specific installations of fluorescent tubes and junk. He demanded
that photographs move beyond keeping record and become sculpture.
With ‘paradoxical literalism’,2 as his friend Yves Abrioux called it, he
gently exhorted unremarkable objects to get new lives. The art you
see at any time is likely to represent where he has just been, not where
he is. This book has had to follow and understand Culbert’s kind of
forward momentum.
At the same time, the book has been shaped by the ways in which
his critical energy circles around: he is constantly trying another way,
another variation. Ideas and projects loop back to past opportunities;
the past reaches forward to ideas that, when we encounter them,
we recognise as simultaneously new and familiar. The sumptuously
elegant collaboration with Ralph Hotere Blackwater (1999) is not just
a reprise of the rough improvisation of Blackwater (1978) — yet time
and circumstance encircle them, not least because they are linked by
Culbert’s first meeting with Hotere and their subsequent friendship.
The viewer or researcher experiences moving along the chronology of
Culbert’s work and life as more like a succession of whirlpools than a
smooth linear development. The impact of his return journey to New
Zealand in 1978 after an absence of twenty years, the ways his thought
kept circling around the time and motion of barges on rivers, cars
driving through avenues of trees, the shuttering of light in a camera,
the reverse perspectives of shadows, the materiality of light — these
and other preoccupations are like eddies.
Culbert and I worked hard to choose a representative selection
of images that would also do justice to hitherto marginalised bodies
such as his paintings, but the works reproduced in this book are
only a small sample of what he has made. As well as being a record
of looking, they ask a number of questions. At what point does a
photograph of a deliberate installation become a work in its own
right? What kind of representation or autonomy is provided by
Culbert’s photographs of his temporary installations? What kind of
work has the illustrative photograph become in this book?
Many locations have been important in Culbert’s working life,
but none more so than his and his wife Pip’s home in Croagnes, a
small hamlet on a hill in the Vaucluse region of Provence. This was
a rugged, almost depopulated backwater when they first went to live
there fresh out of art school in 1961. Its resources at the communal
dumps or décharges not only propped up the roof of their house, they
became the raw material of Culbert’s art. These days the region is
ubiquitous in lifestyle television programmes, and writing about
it invites accusations of pretension. Yet there was only one place to
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ground this book’s introduction, and that was at lunch in the small
town of Malaucène where Michel Barjol, one of Culbert’s friends
and colleagues, runs a gallery. Culbert has been eating, drinking,
conversing and making art in places like this for more than forty
years. These are the familiar conditions of his work and life.
This book could not have been written without such conviviality
and its wider congenial frameworks. It is a record of what the social
conditions and attitudes implied by the words ‘congeniality’ and
‘conviviality’ have enabled Culbert to do, and of his long commitment
to them. They have been the principal and most demanding tools in
my kit, as well as constant reminders of why this book has always been
a pleasure to write.
*
I am grateful to Bill and Pip Culbert for their warm hospitality while
I ransacked Culbert’s archives in London and France, and for the
trust he placed in me as I took many hundreds of photographs, slides
and project documents out of their safe places. I am grateful, too,
for his patience during many days of interviews and conversations
at Croagnes and London, and back here in New Zealand; and for the
many faxes and postcards that supplemented this talking. Unless
specifically credited, all quotations from Bill Culbert in this book
derive from these interviews and conversations. I am grateful for the
wine he always opened when it was time for that. We worked hard but
we had a lot of fun as well; they were great times. We both owe a lot to
Pip Culbert, who endured us never stopping. I owe her much gratitude
for her disenchanted advice, faultless memory and impeccable sense
of humour.
I have quoted at length from several writers and briefly from
many more who have written about or reviewed Culbert’s many
exhibitions. I am grateful for what they have had to say about his
work and for the light they have often thrown on the circumstances
of its production. Yves Abrioux, Gladys Fabre, Olivier Blanckart,
Stuart Brisley, Simon Cutts, Christina Barton and Justin Paton have
been especially valuable in this regard. Where original texts were in
French, quotations have been translated into the body of this book,
with the original French retained in footnotes. Unless otherwise
indicated, these translations are mine and so are their mistakes.
Though this account has been informed by what others have said
and written, and above all by Culbert’s own commentary, the views
expressed here are my own. Culbert has always been generous with
Untitled drawing: Winework (19 December 2003). Ink drawing in
notebook (2003–04), 220 x 165 mm.
PREFACE
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IX
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his attention to facts, but even more generous in believing I should be
free to write what I thought and in encouraging me to do that.
I had the privilege and enjoyment of meeting and talking to
Culbert’s friends and colleagues. Among these, I am especially grateful to Dick and Phyllis Ross on occasions in both France and London,
to Yves Abrioux in Paris, and to Simon Cutts and Stuart Brisley in
London. I would like to thank Christina Barton for reading an early
draft of the book and for her encouragement. Yves Abrioux and Simon
Cutts also read overweight drafts and must take credit for a leaner text.
My thanks to many librarians, gallery directors, curators and archivists
in several museums and art galleries in New Zealand, France,
Germany and Australia; assembling a record as large as Culbert’s
would have been impossible without their help.
The research for this book was assisted by The Henry Moore
Foundation and I am especially grateful to Greville Worthington for
his support and advocacy. Additional support was provided by the
Chartwell Trust through the unfailing generosity of Rob and Sue
Gardiner. The timely and even miraculous windfall of a Laureate award
from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand in 2006 allowed the project
to get under way. Several photographers gave their blessing to the
use of their images – they are credited in captions. Mary Trewby was a
scrupulous copy-editor. I thank the team at Auckland University Press,
in particular the press’s designer, Katrina Duncan, who sustained
lucid relationships between text and images; and my editor Anna
Hodge who, when asked to be merciless, was. My final thanks go to
Elizabeth Caffin, the press’s former director, for taking the project on;
and to Sam Elworthy, the current director, for his continued support.
Poster for Bill Culbert: Lichtobjekte, Forum Kunst, Rottweil,
17 January–15 February 1976.
Note: All works and photographs, including photographs of art works, are by
Bill Culbert unless otherwise indicated in the captions. All works are from the
collection of the artist unless otherwise indicated. Every effort has been made to
trace copyright owners; the author and publisher apologise for any omissions.
The dimensions of works illustrated are given by height, width and depth; floor
areas of installations are approximate; dimensions of artist’s black-and-white
photographs are those of prints held in his archive, unless indicated in the cases
of unique or limited editions.
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Introduction Lunch at Malaucène
Social mobility
Though Bill Culbert’s art attracts a specialised audience,
it pays close attention to issues of social mobility. It
might even be described as gregarious. One sign of the
work’s gregariousness is the glass of red wine that has
appeared frequently in both installations and photo
works — all of them deriving in some measure from the
original Small Glass Pouring Light of 1979 (see plate 34).
On the first occasion of this crucial image, the artist
and some close friends were at his home in Croagnes in
the Vaucluse region of Provence one evening, drinking
eau-de-vie out of shot glasses. Culbert noticed that a
certain angle of light on the glass produced the shadow
profile of a light bulb on the same scale as the vessel.
The following day he took a bistro glass outside and
placed it, filled with red wine, on a rough stone slab.
Now it was sunlight that cast a shadow of the liquid and
it was the sun’s brilliant light that was refracted within
the wine’s shadow in the shape of an electric light bulb
and its filament. The complete shadow resembled a
paradoxically dark bulb with a glowing centre. Culbert
took two photographs of this event, a black-and-white
Rolleicord square-format image and a 35-millimetre
colour one. Later in 1979, he took a second 35-millimetre colour photograph of the event staged on a slate slab
in the backyard of his home in London — this was the
image that appeared on the cover of Wine Spirit magazine
in December 1979. He took second Rolleicord and
colour 35-millimetre photographs of the ‘small glass
pouring light’ on a metal table at Croagnes in 1997.
His initial aperçu coincided with the hundredth
anniversary of the invention of the light bulb — a bonus
that would pay off when it was brought to the attention
of Frank Popper, organiser of the immense exhibition
Electra (Electricity and Electronics in the Art of the XXth Century)
at the Museé d’Art Moderne in Paris, in 1983–84.1 The
work’s mobility, however, was much greater than this
startling but fundamentally static opportunity. The
large-format Rolleicord photo work seen by Popper at
the insistence of the French art writer and curator Gladys
Fabre had already moved from a found situation indoors
to a staged one outside and from a three-dimensional
staging to a 35-millimetre colour slide and from there to
the square black-and-white photograph.
The simple photographic image of the small glass
pouring light subsequently moved on to become the
table-mounted installation Small Glass Pouring Light
of 1983 (see plate 35), the one installed by Popper at
the Museé d’Art Moderne’s Electra exhibition. In this
manifestation of the idea, a 3660-by-1220-millimetre
Cover of Wine Spirit magazine, December
1979, with second colour version of Small
Glass Pouring Light 1979, 35-millimetre colour
transparency.
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Small Glass Pouring Light (1983), Serpentine Gallery, London, 1983. 25 verres bistrot, wine, Formica
table and lampshades, 660 x 1220 mm (surface dimensions). Collection of FNAC, Château d’Oiron.
table covered in white Formica is installed beneath three
white hanging lamps. Twenty-five bistro glasses of red
vin du table (the pun is both deft and ordinary) are placed
on it so that twenty-five dark shadows resembling light
bulbs appear. At the Museé d’Art Moderne between
10 December 1983 and 5 February 1984, according
to Culbert, the wine was frequently drunk on the
assumption that such conviviality was no more than the
work invited. Culbert had made arrangements for the
glasses to be replenished when such salutes occurred.
When shown earlier in London between 13 August and
9 October 1983 in The Sculpture Show: Fifty Sculptors at the
Serpentine and the South Bank,2 many visitors assumed that
the wine was associated with the exhibition’s opening:
it was their prerogative to drink it as patrons of the
occasion. In the Coracle Press Gallery’s 1983 Assemble
Here! 3 exhibition at the Puck Building on Lafayette Street,
New York, the glasses of wine were, Culbert insists,
regarded with fear: it was suspected they might be
poisoned to stop people drinking them. Purchased by
the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain for the national
art ­collection of France, the table version of Small Glass
Pouring Light has been permanently installed in the Salle
des Ampoules, Château d’Oiron, in the Deux-Sèvres
department of western France. The wine is still occasionally drunk; it is, in any case, replenished with more
vin du table and not with poison or coloured water.
This ubiquitous, gregarious and mobile work has
appeared in other forms. As well as the 1997 version
of the Rolleicord square-format photograph, round
balloon glasses of wine have been installed so their
shadows fall through glass shelves supported within
wooden posts at Château Sainte Roseline in 20014 and at
Saint-Fons in 2002.5 A wall installation was included at
the Millennium Gallery in Blenheim in 2003;6 there are
many more. In Vin, Perspective I and II 1995, the glasses
pouring light – or shadow – join the ranks of Culbert’s
subversive anti-perspectives.
The shuttered effects of motion through or across
light in Culbert’s paintings; the dynamic pours, pierc­
ings, falls and spills of light time-stopped in his instal­
lations; the mobilisation in serial photo works of wheels,
bidons and lampshades — these conflate time and
movement or transform spatial movement into temporal
sequence. Such movements resemble the movements of
ideas: brain movements, as Culbert has described them.
They give the work its conceptual as well as physical
vitality. And the restless intellectual vitality of the work,
as it goes on moving through variations, locations and
times, resembles its social mobility. This intellectual and
social vitality returns us to the idea of conviviality — and
to a radical, politicised congeniality. The image of the
glass of wine — perhaps the best known of all Culbert’s
works — is convivial and hospitable. First and foremost,
it invites us to be sociable, to drink each other’s health,
to make room for our differences. It also, as Roland
Barthes reminded us, has a hereditary link with alchemy:
wine has ‘the philosophical power of transmutation, of
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creating things ex nihilo’.7 If you want to drink this glass
of wine — for example, the one on the white table with
twenty-four others, all casting shadows of light bulbs
— you need to be ready to look the art in the eye as you
salute it, and to welcome a transmutation you may not be
prepared for.
Vin, Perspective I and II, 1995, edition of 25. Colour photographs,
each 400 x 275 mm. Also in Blanc ou rouge/Red or White, a boxed set of
fifteen postcards (each 104 x 147 mm) of photographs by Bill Culbert,
with a note by Simon Cutts, Annecy: La Petite École, 1997.
The social space of art
On a blazing hot thundery day in July 2006, Bill Culbert
was having lunch with family and friends in the town
of Malaucène in the Vaucluse region of Provence. The
New Zealand-born artist had lived in the region since
1961, when he and his wife Pip bought their home and
studios at Croagnes. They were at home in the place
where they had brought up their children; they were also
at home in the cultural environment that had sustained
them as artists. One of the guests was the gallerist
Michel Barjol of the small, tenacious Galerie Martagon
in Malaucène, which was showing work by Culbert,
including Black and Light (2005) with its reference to Man
Ray’s photograph Le Dernier Oeuvre de Duchamp (Cheminée
Anaglyphe) (1968).8 At the opening a couple of weeks
previously, a local Côtes du Ventoux wine was served to
the guests, who included the winemaker, the Culberts’
friends and colleagues, the regional art community,
people from the town and others such as the Monde
Diplomatique journalist Guy Scarpetta (also at lunch)
who divide their time between Paris and regional towns
such as Malaucène. The lunch was a snapshot of an
environment Bill Culbert has found congenial for his
entire life as an artist.
The incorporation of contemporary art within the
social and commercial life of a small provincial French
town owes much to the legacy of Jack Lang, who from
1981 to 2002 held ministerial warrants for culture and
education in successive socialist governments. You
can read Lang’s legacy of devolving significant cultural
resources in the numerous public service acronyms
associated with contemporary art — for example,
FRAC (regional funds for contemporary art) and FNAC
(national funds for contemporary art). These, and other
agencies, are frequently acknowledged in Culbert’s
French catalogues.
Michel Barjol, Bill Culbert and Clay Culbert,
Galerie Martagon, Malaucène, with Black and
Light (2005). Photograph Ian Wedde
lunch at malaucène
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Top Installation view, Bill Culbert, Musée des Beaux-Arts André Malraux, Le Havre, 1990.
bottom Anchois et moutarde (1990), Tournus, 1990. Anchovy and mustard glasses, glass sheets,
6000 x 2800 mm.
Lang’s legacy built on the vision of André Malraux. It was in the
radical spirit of Malraux’s devolution of cultural resources to the
provinces during the 1960s that France’s regional centres of culture
— centres d’action culturelle — were established. These were intended
to encourage community participation in building relationships
between the traditional and the contemporary; the innovative outburst
of contemporary culture was seen to be vital within the social space
of nationally distributed public institutions. It would be easy, on the
strength of examples such as Galerie Martagon in Malaucène or the
artist Olivier Blanckart’s Galerie 1,618 Rue Blanche-Gaillard in SaintSaturnin-lès-Apt near the Culberts’ home, to sentimentalise the effects
of Malrauxian idealism and socialist devolution on contemporary
culture in regional France after World War II. In reality, according
to Yves Abrioux,9 ­models such as Galerie Martagon or 1,618 Rue
Blanche-Gaillard are exemplary rather than typical. The interventions
of state bureaucracy and commune politics are not always as benign,
nor are local audiences as interested or as accepting as Malaucène’s,
or as enthusiastic as the local crowd who were assembled for the
opening of Culbert’s exhibition ‘Very Close’ at his neighbouring village
of Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt and captured on a video of the event.10
Nonetheless, during the heyday of socialist cultural administration
in the 1980s and 1990s, Culbert was obviously at home in the
network of public galleries and small ‘associations’ that constituted
the official art infrastructure of France. His engagement within
that community continues to be sustained in 2009. His exhibition
history and bibliography are punctuated by the interventions of key
gallery directors, curators and writers within that network, including
Françoise Cohen, the director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts André
Malraux in Le Havre in 1990.
Culbert’s first major solo exhibition in France took place at this
museum (26 April–24 June 1990), the Réfectoire et cellier de l’Abbaye
Saint Philibert in Tournus (13 October–30 November 1990) and at La
Criée, Halle d’Art Contemporain in Rennes (January 1991). This suite
of exhibitions, in part site-specific and in part composed of existing
works, followed his inclusion in Britannica: 30 Ans de Sculpture simultaneously at Le Havre, Rouen and Évreux, and subsequently at Antwerp,
Labège and Toulouse, in 1988–89.11
Culbert was the second artist (Bill Woodrow was the first, in
1989) to be selected from this major survey for a solo exhibition at
Le Havre. By his own account, he was given an astonishingly free
rein by Françoise Cohen, who had made a point of including him in
1988.12 The museum’s combination of trust, institutional support and
hospitality was remarkable but also typical of the socialist ethos of the
Malrauxian, public-sector centres d’action culturelle.
MAKING LIGHT WORK
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The processes involved in the acquisition of contemporary art
for French regional and national collections may be politicised and
bureaucratic, but they sustain a congenial environment in which the
guests at lunch in the little town of Malaucène could still flourish
in 2006. The conviviality they enjoy has deep roots in left politics; it
represents the combined yield of cultural devolution and respect for
regional ways of life. As professional art environments go, it adds
values of transitivity and ‘relational aesthetics’13 to the art market
with which it intersects — a market in which the state participates at
national and regional levels.
Gladys Fabre, who wrote an important catalogue essay for
Culbert’s exhibition at Le Havre in 1990, invoked the term ‘innocence’
as used by Vladimir Jankélévitch to describe the effect of transparency
in his work: ‘What is innocent is a good conductor, and the light of
day passes clean through it: for innocence is quite literally a “state of
grace”, it involves receptiveness.’14 ‘Innocence’ in Bill Culbert’s case is
not naivety. Though his art plays with simple and sometimes cast-off
materials, it is not an unsophisticated art brut.
Fabre suggests that Culbert’s work deploys the minimum of effect
‘in order to get only an idea to appear. Once this point is reached, he
considers his work to be “charged” like a battery. . . . Art is a transfer
of energy.’15 Talking about this in his London studio in January 2007,
Culbert used the expression ‘equality of sensibility’. The works are not
esoteric in the sense of endorsing privileged knowledge or taste. Their
mystery lies in their appeals to paradox, their receptiveness to surprising experience: a sunlit glass of wine that appears to cast the shadow
of a lit light bulb. ‘To live is to participate, and art participates in life,’
Culbert said to Fabre on the occasion of the Le Havre exhibition.16 To
which we must add: and life is full of surprises. Usually, the experience of paradox provided by Culbert’s work subverts and intensifies
our sense of being in a world that is curious and unpredictable. The
experience suggests an epistemology of delight: we are surprised by
knowledge whose pleasures are increased when shared. Culbert’s
phrase ‘equality of sensibility’ describes the reception he hopes his
work will achieve; it also describes the radical aspiration of the centres
d’action culturelle within which his work was at home.
Installation detail from Incident in Marlowe’s Office, Avignon, 1997.
Fluorescent tubes, wooden door, desk, domestic objects, dimensions variable.
lunch at malaucène
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top Flat White Light (2000), Auckland, 2007. Also known as 100m Spiral Light 60 Watt. 2 x 100 metres of
electrical cable, light bulbs, each 2850 mm diameter. Courtesy of Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland.
bottom Bulb Reflection I (1971), edition of ten. Light bulb, mirror glass and wood, 330 x 330 x 300 mm.
‘How long is a piece of string?’
‘How long is a piece of string?’ Culbert asks in the context of his work
Flat White Light (2000). The question is meant — in paradoxical spirit
— to have no answer; or to generate successions of apparent answers,
rather like the infinity of bulbs produced in Bulb Reflection I (1971).
A piece of string, suggests Flat White Light with a pragmatically
deadpan expression, is as long as the radius of a spiral. The work
consists of a wall-mounted light bulb surrounded by an exactly spaced
expanding spiral of its own flex. It enshrines a practical solution: to
draw the spiral shape of the work on a wall, a piece of string is tethered
to a nail driven through a cork with a pencil loosely attached at the
string’s free end. The string is wound around the cork and the nail
hammered into the wall. The pencil draws an expanding spiral as it
unwinds the string around the cork on its journey to the spiral’s limit.
The spacing of the spiral’s revolutions is, of course, equivalent to the
cork’s circumference. Once the nail, cork, string and pencil have been
removed, a light bulb is installed at the centre of the spiral and its
electrical flex is pinned to the wall along the track of the pencil line’s
expanding spiral, ending at a power point. ‘Presto!’ the work seems
to say, its bulb lit up like the sign of a bright idea, its flex documenting
the useful journey of electricity to the lighting device at the centre of its
universe.
And yet the work deflects any transcendental implication: this flash
of inspiration does not need to be the sign of anything more than its
perception of a simply wonderful phenomenon. It might also enshrine
a tradesman’s ancient piece-of-string applied wisdom whose forgotten rationale an Archimedes had to rediscover while lying in his bath.
In Flat White Light, the lying-in-bath theorist Bill Culbert proposes
other answers to the question, ‘How long is a piece of string?’ A piece
of string measures the extent of a spiral. The distance it measures
— the distance described by the spiral — lies flat on the wall: the
picture plane of this spiral is not pierced by illusory distance; its extent
is an anti-perspective. It has coiled up the illusion of perspective and
made it flat; its distance goes around, not away.
Culbert has often distinguished between art as commodity and art
as encounter or situation. His preference for the latter has a political
dimension. He has to live by the sale of his art, but his best work has
been made in and for conditions such as those that sustained him
while making Incident in Marlowe’s Office at Avignon in 1997,17 the work
with which this book concludes. This was a very large and almost
entirely temporary suite of installations that had to be encountered
in situ, and from which a few potentially commodifiable elements
emerged as residuals of the process, rather than as its prime objects.
In distinguishing between commodity and encounter, Culbert
MAKING LIGHT WORK
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left Light Line (1990), Le Havre, 1990.
Fluorescent tubes, electrical cable, 7000 mm.
Same work viewed laterally and face-on.
below ‘Very Close’: Une installation de Bill Culbert,
Galerie 1,618 Rue Blanche-Gaillard, SaintSaturnin-lès-Apt, 1989.
describes perspective as the trick moment in art history
when it became possible for art to be a representational
illusion materialised as a transportable, tradable
window. The development of perspective in the late
Gothic attempts of Italian painters to create illusions
of architectural depth, or in the early Renaissance
ceiling paintings of Correggio, coincided with the rise
of commodity capitalism and banking. The link that
Culbert establishes between capitalism and perspective
is characteristically succinct. Having taken it on
board, we may read much of his work as deliberately
anti-perspectival and therefore as implicitly critical
of capitalism’s commodification of art. Bulb Reflection
I, for example, is blatantly a perspective-mocking
trick-with-mirrors.
At Le Havre, Gateways (1990, see plates 64/65) simply
reversed perspective’s scale (small foreground diminishing to large background) to negate the proportions
that would have produced an architectural sensation of
perspective. So did a set of four fluorescent lines, Light
Line (1990), whose industrial dimensions were organised
to produce a diminishing perspective viewed one way
and a negation of it the other. Many other works, both
photo works and installations, similarly make mischief
with the ‘laws of ’ perspective. They refuse to comply;
they mock the authority of a connection between
representation and commodity; they withdraw art from
that history.
These subversions of perspective are also found in
Culbert’s many plays on framing, especially windows
— including the window of the camera’s aperture or
the tiny perforation of the camera obscura, as in Cubic
Projections (1968, see plate 17). The windows of exhibition spaces have often been the occasions of site-specific
installations: falls of light, reflections, piercings of
transparencies, inversions of inside and outside, switchings of identity between shadows and light sources and
between daylight and nightlight. The largest window
Culbert worked with framed the Arc de Triomphe on the
Champs Elysées in Paris: a flight of green bottles pierced
with fluorescent tubes flew across it in Vol au vent (1993,
see plate 78).
Many installations have been trialled on the floor
of Culbert’s studio at Croagnes; the studio’s windows,
Perspective is False, 18 July 94 (1994). Ink
drawing in undated notebook, 185 x 135 mm.
lunch at malaucène
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Light, Croagnes (1980). 35-millimetre colour slide of light reflected from glass sheet.
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far left Jug With Flowers (1980), Croagnes, 1980. Wooden table, enamel jug,
light bulb, dimensions variable. left An Explanation of Light (1984), St Paulinus,
Richmond, 1995. Fluorescent tubes, glazed ‘French’ doors, electrical cable,
2400 x 2000 mm (tubes 610 and 2400 mm). above An Explanation of Light at
Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 1986.
often framing and admitting the hot summer light of
Provence, appear frequently in his photographs of work
and become familiar players in it.
An Explanation of Light (1984, see plate 59) pierced
a replica of the double French doors of London’s
Serpentine Gallery with twenty-one fluorescent tubes.18
Subsequently installed at the Victoria Miro Gallery
in 1986 and 1991, the ‘explanation’ was reframed by
the gallery’s plate glass windows;19 at St Paulinus in
Richmond, North Yorkshire, in 1995 the ‘explanation’
was again rearticulated in relation to the church’s
stained glass windows.20
Window Lamp 1982 posed a window supporting an
unlit lamp in hot sunlight: the window frame blocked
the lamp from casting its own shadow; the unlit bulb
appeared to be (to ‘explain’) the light source for the
window’s shadow.
Window Mobile (1985) combined a white window
frame with a black reading lamp: the dark shadow of the
pale window frame was projected on the wall.
Each of these works was singular: an explanation;
an answer to a trick question such as, ‘How long is a
piece of string?’ Collectively, they constitute a sustained
critique of conventional ‘explanations’ involving perspective, the frame, light sources, points-of-view. And
they enlist an extended definition of the photograph,
that effect of windowed light, in their critique.
Culbert suggests another answer to the question,
‘How long is a piece of string?’ when he asserts that
‘Light is a reversal of perspective’:21 shadows projected
by light get bigger as they extend into distance.
Light, then — framed by windows, deployed through
cameras, powered by electricity — is the simplest, most
available, most succinct and unsensational saboteur
of perspective and of perspective’s commodifications
of marvellous encounter, of the ‘good conductor’,
innocence; of art as a ‘transfer of energy’; of art as a way
of participating in life.
Extent and distance — the length of a piece of
string — can also involve movement through space.
Movement multiplies the effects of light, shuttering
it through avenues of trees seen from the windows
of a car (for example, a 2CV Citroën — see Movement
Through Trees II [1962], plate 7) or making shadows
top Window Lamp 1982. Glass, wooden
window and exterior lamp fitting painted
cream, 400 x 500 x 600 mm. above Window
Mobile (1985), London, 1985. Wooden
window frame painted white, bamboo,
metal chain, reading lamp, light bulb,
570 x 380 mm (window), 2000 mm (bamboo).
lunch at malaucène
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left Tug and Barges on Thames (1961). Oil on plywood, 533 x 737 mm.
above Car through Trees V (1962). Oil on plywood, 610 x 760 mm. Photographs Oliver Read.
on the wall of a ­building tell the time by showing the progress
of the sun’s day. Sometimes, in Culbert’s work, the ‘speed of
light’, the fastest speed there is, is very slow: so slow its contexts
dematerialise.
Before light got the job of breaking the laws of perspective, it was
movement that worked for Culbert. This began very early, with his
art teacher James Coe at Hutt Valley High School between 1948 and
1952, in drawings that captured the motion of birds (see p. 25) or
models walking rapidly across the art room. In the later 1950s at the
Royal College of Art in London, Culbert observed the spatialisation
of movement in paintings of tug boats on the River Thames and of
hurtling steam trains. In the early 1960s, he painted the movement
of the corrugated iron bonnet of his 2CV through avenues of plane
trees in Provence.
Culbert learned about movement early, thanks to the teaching of
his mentor James Coe. He also learned about ergonomics and how
bodies move, fit and reposition themselves within the world — about
bodily self-knowledge. Through this, he understood how to establish
a salient in the world where his brain could do the moving and where
his perceptions could be mobilised in well-lit social space. What he
was getting into perspective was ‘equality of sensibility’, not commodified representations.
Cypress Tree: Morning, Midday, Evening (1975).
Three black-and-white photographs, each
190 x 190 mm.
10
MAKING LIGHT WORK
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‘Very Close’: Une installation de Bill Culbert, Galerie 1,618 Rue Blanche-Gaillard, Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt, 1989. Black-and-white photograph, 165 x 200 mm.
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