Inertia inverts the prejudicial equation between shadow and light that Westerners have inherited from Plato and his followers, which asserts that shadows conceal while light reveals.9 We experience a form of night blindness, wherein the more we try to focus on the light, the more pressing and palpable the surrounding darkness becomes. Temporary (as opposed to congenital) night blindness is an especially modern condition. Though “blinding lanterns” were used in the seventeenth century for effective poaching and in warfare,10 it was the invention of the automobile headlamp that established night blindness as an everyday occurrence. Increasingly, the image seems to get in the way of our ability to see, our eyes, guided by the light, follow an almost palpable darkness — first down the road, then into the woods. The title — Inertia — gives the game away: despite a perceived sense of movement, we are incapable of extending the experience into the unlit space beyond. We are in thrall to the visible. Though Plato claimed this as a universal human failing, it is a particular strength and weakness of the post-Enlightenment West that we feel the need to shed light in order to see, moreover to understand.11
NOTES 1. Though they have been presented individually, my own introduction to the work by Irijalba is in terms of their conjunction. Seen in concert, they comprise a different type of aesthetic investigation than when viewed in isolation. 2. A term coined by the American light and space artist James Turrell. In conversation with Consuelo de Gara in Light Art, Amnon Barzel, ed. (Milan: Skira, 2005). 3. As Foucault writes, as “Aufklärer,” products of the Enlightenment ourselves, we are subject to a cultural prejudice towards the rational at the expense of the irrational. But, as Foucault warns, rationalizations are dangerous; they make subject but can also be subjugating. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry, v. 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1982): 779. 4. Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle , transl. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), n.p. Originally published in French as La société du spectacle (Paris: BuchetChastel, 1967). 5. Debord. Society of the Spectacle, n.p. 6. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 7. Pamela Lee, Chronophobia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p. xvi. 8. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Revealing Technologies/ Magical Domains,” Devices of Wonder (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 65. 9. This famously articulated in the Allegory of the Cave, contrasting the ignorant masses deceived by the flickering shadows of artifice to the philosophers who have ascended to the — immaterial — light of knowledge. Plato, The Republic, 514a-b. 10. Friedrich Kittler, “A Short History of the Spotlight,” in Light Art from Artificial Light, P. Weibel and G. Jansen, eds. (Karlsruhe: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 2006). 11. In Eastern traditions, this is not necessarily - Tanizaki notes, it is the case. As Jun’ichiro shadows that prevent a space from becoming “mere void”; however, when Tanizaki was writing in 1933 he was defending a fading cultural preference for shadows, one superseded by an increased demand for the clarity and convenience of artificial light- Tanazaki, In Praise of Shadows, ing. Jun’ichiro trans. Harper and Seindensticker (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 34. 12. Bernard J. Baars, Thomas Z. Ramsøy, Steven Laureys, “Brain, Consciousness and the Observing Self,” Trends in Neuroscience, v. 26, no. 12 (December 2003): 671-675. 13. Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal v. 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 12.
Throughout the life of this body of work we are confronted at various points along the way with the strange realization of our own complicity in the dematerialization of light. Limited by our attentional faculties — wherein we are only able to attend to one object at a time — we afford light its material presence only when looking at it directly. Light’s materiality thus becomes the “property of the subject,” constituted by the attention she directs toward it.12 Even then, its status as physical matter is felt more readily through devices or “carriers” of light — the spotlights, but also motes of dust, the trunks of trees, leaves of grass, or the wings of an insect. What remains to be seen of Irijalba’s Twilight and Inertia? In permitting the work its afterlife as documentary image, the artist runs the risk of having it understood only as a dematerialized entity — nothing but image. But its existence as photography (both still and video) also opens up a new intersubjective space, one predicated on shared concerns of what it means to position ourselves as spectators in thrall to the visible or, alternatively, as enactive agents of light’s phenomena. I echo Amelia Jones’ assertion that the temporal or performative work of art involves multiple subjectivities, that, after all, “there is no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product.” 13 So understood, the uneasy spaces encountered in Twilight and Inertia — at once artificial and natural, cinematic and real, imaginary and material — gainsay the factual realm of physics and photons.
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