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Installation view of RafaelLozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Spiral(2008) at Haunch of Venison,New York

Rafael Lozano-HemmerPulse Spiral2008Haunch of Venison

Installation view of Make Out,Plasma Version (2009) at Haunchof Venison, New York

LIGHT TOUCHby Ben Davis

A wizard at merging slick technology withhigh-brow art, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is one ofthe faces of the future of art. He was the firstartist ever to represent Mexico at the VeniceBiennale, in 2007. He has become the go-to guyfor a certain type of contemporarymonumentality. And he has just been officiallybaptized a rising art star with a show at Christie’sHaunch of Venison gallery in New York.

Peruse "Transition States," as the Haunch ofVenison show is called, and you will see whyLozano-Hemmer’s work generates such a buzz.To me at least, this seems less to do with anyone dazzling work -- though dazzling works thereare -- and more to do with the fact that he hasfound a formula that wrestles with some of thecompeting pressures on contemporary art.

Greeting you as you enter is Pulse Spiral (2008),a large, hanging chandelier made of light bulbs.Grip two handles stationed just below it, and thelowest bulb will begin to flicker on and off to therhythm of your pulse. When you release yourgrip, the entire chandelier will light up, each bulbshimmering with the heartbeat of one of the last300 people to try it (each new user crowds outsomebody).

In a back gallery, you find Make Out, PlasmaVersion (2009), consisting of three room-fillingplasma TVs, each covered with a mosaic ofdifferent images of couples staring at each other-- 2,400, to be exact. When someone enters theroom, and stands in front of the screen, theybegin to kiss. A remote control thoughtfullyallows you to select whether you want to seeman-man kisses, or man-woman kisses, orwoman-woman kisses. When you leave, thekissers go back to just staring at one another.

As artworks, both of these pieces have agee-whiz quality to them, stealing the seductiveappeal of technology, unashamedly indulging inits pleasure. The danger of this, of course, is thatthe genre of "arty technology" easily descendsinto SkyMall-esque knick-nackery. Lozano-Hemmer, however, is adept at spiking his techno-wizardry with the kind of political, philosophicaland poetic referents that the art world takes asits métier. Both Pulse Spiral and Make Out,Plasma Version appeal to the kind of utopiannotion of "interactivity" that has become sopervasive in the art world -- he just gives it alibidinal, high-design twist.

Very much the same can be said about otherworks here, for instance, Seismoscope 1:Francisco Sanches. Portugese (1550-1632),author of "That Nothing is Known" (2009), adrawing machine which scratches out an image ofthe face of the titular Portuguese philosopher,

artist or keywords (modern prints, chair, etc.)

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s "Transition States" and Levels of N... http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/davis/rafael-lozan...

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Rafael Lozano-HemmerMake Out, Plasma Version(detail)2009Haunch of Venison

Rafael Lozano-HemmerSeismoscope 1: FranciscoSanches. Portugese (1550-1632),author of “That Nothing isKnown”2009Haunch of Venison

Rafael Lozano-HemmerCompany of Colors, Shadow Box92009Haunch of Venison

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s AmodalSuspension in Yamaguchi, Japan

Still from video about RafaelLozano-Hemmer’s AmodalSuspension

powered by the vibrations made by the footstepsof passersby. Or Company of Colors, Shadow Box9 (2009), a screen that projects back multipleimages of whatever happens to be in front of it,broken down into various tiled mosaic patterns,each one using the colors palettes associatedwith various greatest hits from computer history,like the original Gameboy, or the Comodore 64.

Lozano-Hemmer’s flashy/brainy esthetic lendsitself well to grandiose displays, and "TransitionStates" features documentation of a few of thesethat he has realized. Among them is 2003’sAmodal Suspension, for which he created a workthat translated text messages into flickeringflights above the sky of Yamaguchi, Japan, atribute to that city’s association with fireflies. Themore recent Voz Alta, similarly, wascommissioned by Mexico City as a memorialmarking the anniversary of the 1968 slaughter ofstudents. It consists of a megaphone that userscan speak into, with the volume of their voicebeing translated into the intensity of light from anassociated spotlight. A functional prototype ofVoz Alta is set up at Haunch of Venison, alongwith videos of folks giving it a whirl in MexicoCity.

Both these latter two projects came to mindwhen viewing Levels of Nothingness, aperformance that Lozano-Hemmer realized lastmonth for the Guggenheim as part of themuseum’s "Works and Process" series, in happycoincidence with his Haunch of Venison show.Levels of Nothingness also translated userinteraction into flashing lights. Its set-up involveda bank of state-of-the-art robotic stage lights, apassel of philosophy texts selected byphilosopher Brian Massumi, and the participationof actress Isabel Rossellini (again, you see thetechnology-philosophy-spectacle axis Lozano-Hemmer mines). In my mind, it is Levels ofNothingness that tells the true tale of what is atstake with the direction that Lozano-Hemmer islaying out for art.

Before pronouncing on that, let’s describe theexperience. The genial Lozano-Hemmer beganthe performance by introducing the high-endstage lights that he was working with -- they arethe type used for stadium rock shows and, hesaid, a dream-come-true to get to play with --before ceding the floor to Rossellini, who sat atone side of the stage, the better to let viewerssee the real star, which was the technology. Theactress then recited a series of texts -- she readfrom cards, but the words also appeared on anenormous screen above the stage. Responding tothe sound of her voice, the stage lightsperformed various operations, flickering,swooping around, flicking between differentcolors, bathing the room in colored mist.

Following each quote, Rossellini would pause.Lozano-Hemmer and his collaborator, Massumi,had divided their reading selections into variouscategories, with cryptic names like "Vague,""Everything," "Singular" and "Transformations."She would begin each new reading by stating thename of the category it belonged to, and theequipment had been trained to recognize thislabel, so that hearing it would cause the lights toreset before starting up in a new configuration.Each had a distinct light effect associated with it-- texts from the "Nothing" category wereaccompanied by well-defined white beams cutting


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Installation view of prototype forRafael Lozano-Hemmer’s VozAlta, at Haunch of Venison, NewYork

Installation view of prototype forRafael Lozano-Hemmer’s VozAlta, at Haunch of Venison, NewYork

Still from video about RafaelLozano-Hemmer’s Voz Alta

The artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmerintroducing Levels of Nothingnessat the Guggenheim, Sept. 21,2009

through the darkness; "Levels of Nothingness"corresponded to a sort of nebulous vortex thatwas thrown upon the ceiling.

Following Rossellini’s performance, a mic waspassed around the audience so that viewers couldthemselves read philosophical snippets of theirchoice from the screen, and see how their ownvoice affected the various set-ups. To be honest,the effects -- though often lovely -- seemed tome to offer negligible variation. Perhaps youwould just need to play around with the devicefor a while to get a sense for how you mightreally manipulate it with your voice.

What was most telling about the issuespercolating beneath all this, however, was thechoice of texts. Massumi, the philosopher (who,incidentally, reviewed Lozano-Hemmer’s AmodalSuspension for Artforum back in ‘03), has madehis career popularizing the work of French thinkerGilles Deleuze. Unsurprisingly, then, the textsincluded copious amounts of Deleuze and otherpeople broadly associated with the French guru,along with a few artists like Robert Irwin, as wellas quotes from Frances Bacon, the painter aboutwhom Deleuze penned a famous book (Just a fewmonths ago, I wrote that Deleuze’s writings werebest considered the "philosophical equivalent ofprog rock" [see "Bacon, Half-Baked," July 28,2009], and then there I was, at an event thatliterally translated Deleuze’s writings intosomething akin to "Laser Floyd!")

The rationale behind Massumi’s selection of texts,Lozano-Hemmer explained to the crowd, was thathe wanted to pick writings that rejected the"Newtonian" idea of color, in favor of a"phenomenological" approach. By this, he meantthat the texts embraced the idea of color as anexperience associated with the subject'sembedded experience in the world, rather thanas an objective, external matter of wavelengths,spectrums and so on.

What’s notable about this formulation is that it isa false opposition -- or at least a very dated one.Contemporary cognitive philosophy has gallopedalong past such notions; brain scientists studythe "qualia" associated with color-experience inrelationship to mental processes, whichpresumably both relate to one’s personal bodilystates and are the function of objective,knowable -- though very complex -- conditions.(Incidentally, such a mangled attempt to makeDeleuzian color philosophy relevant is notunusual for Massumi. Not so long ago, he wasarguing that George W. Bush’s "Terror ThreatLevel" chart’s use of color was a sinister newattempt to colonize the citizenry’s pre-subjectiveaffects, wiring "government functioning directlyinto each individual’s nervous system." Of all thethings to hate about the Bush administration, itsuse of color is pretty low on the list -- currentHomeland Security secretary Janet Napolitanowas just on the Daily Show saying that there wasthin evidence that the Threat Level actuallyaffects the public at all.)

Consequently, I take it that the reference to"Newton," and the recourse of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin, et al, has less to do with anyreal philosophical problem, and more to do withthe practical dilemma that underlies art of thetype Rafael Lozano-Hemmer makes. "Newton"here is actually a stand-in for rationalistic,


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Actress Isabella Rosselliniperforming in Levels ofNothingness at the Guggenheim

The crowd during Levels ofNothingness

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Levelsof Nothingness at theGuggenheim



technocratic thought. Lozano-Hemmer needs hisart, which is technologically based, to somehowdistinguish itself from "mere" technology in orderto be worthy for an art crowd. Otherwise, Levelsof Nothingness would just be a kind-of-cool (OK,very cool) karaoke light show. Massumi’sphilosophical snippits’ function here has little todo with any real enlightenment they bring to theexperience. What is important about them is theirrhetoric, which associates the artwork with theinsider cachet of esoteric philosophy, therebylending it a sense of poetry and purpose it mightnot otherwise have.

But consider this: While the "anti-Newtonian"approach to experience professed by the texts inLevels of Nothingness seems intended to defendsome kind of irreducible, rooted experience, thevision of the subject Lozano-Hemmer’s workimplies actually corresponds to the mostdispiriting notions from cognitive philosophy,which paints the brain as just a big computer tobe manipulated: The set-up in Levels ofNothingness reduces the personal input ofdistinct subjects to a collection of flickeringelectrical variations, their differences from oneanother set by a predetermined matrix ofvariables. In fact, Levels of Nothingness mademe think that if you really followed this idea ofart to its conclusion, what you’d get was amachine that just plugged directly into yourhead, producing esthetic "qualia" without anyexternal, social relay -- the ultimate in"dematerialization" of the art object, I suppose.Something to think about.

Lozano-Hemmer, a pleasant presence with a trulyinfectious excitement about what he does, seemsto be a little more aware of these stakes than hisphilosophical cohort. "Massumi calls hisphilosophy ‘radical empiricism,’" Lozano-Hemmertold the crowd at the Guggenheim. "If that istrue, I am in the moderate wing of the radicalempiricists." In that statement, you have his artin a nutshell -- enthusiastic about exploring thefrontier of technological razzle-dazzle, whichmakes possible a level of collective experiencebeyond the traditional mode of art-making, andas a result also makes individual creative visionthe appendage of a much larger apparatus. Butthen drawing back just a little, lest thisenthusiasm carry us too far from what makes artrecognizably human.

BEN DAVIS is associate editor of ArtnetMagazine. He can be reached at

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light touch by ben davis - lozano-hemmer.com · rhythm of your pulse. when you release your ......

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