Blink: the viewer as blind man in installation art

Terence Koh produced a comparable theater of sunlight using similar means in 2007. His untitled work was installed in a small gallery just off the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The piece consists of a 4,000-watt HMI PAR light, used in filmmaking to simulate sunlight, mounted about five feet off the floor on a steel stand and pointed directly at the viewer. (13) The light is so intense that museum guards stationed near it wear sunglasses, and for the unprotected viewer it has a painfully blinding effect. This blinding makes it all the more difficult to see the other element of the work, a lead ball, one foot in diameter, which lies on the floor and contains what the artist describes as a secret. Though, like Diaz's piece, it employs a theatrical lighting instrument to achieve its effect, Koh's installation produces a more direct visual assault. The viewer blinks, squints, and turns her head to one side as she approaches the source of the intense light that blinds her. Because this lighting instrument is 4,000 watts, unlike the spotlight used in Diaz's piece, which is perhaps only 1,000 or 1,500 watts, it creates a great deal of inviting warmth, and simultaneously, because it is pointed directly at the viewer instead of at a wall, it produces an almost painful experience and a disorienting barrage of afterimages, what the Whitney curator Shamim Momin describes as "explosions in your retina." (14) No longer able to see the light to which I am subjected, I close my eyes and see an image, a memory, a representation of that light, which is ultimately a representation of my own seeing. It is as though, rather than stare at the sun, one were to turn to see the sun's reflection in water, except that in this instance the image of the sun is reflected in the watery chamber of the eye itself. Therefore, in an extremely clever way, Koh's conceptual installation, though it does not engage in traditional forms of depiction, returns us, just as Diaz's work did, to the image, to representation.

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In that regard, it also returns us to philosophy, to Plato's cave and the traditional philosophical belief that light represents the authentic, the good, and the true. But Koh's installation seems to view the light of the sun not only as beautiful, infinite, and cosmic, but as potentially threatening. "Using light as his primary material," Momin explains, "Koh transforms the gallery space into a seductive yet inaccessible diorama, creating a psychological interaction that evokes desire and loss, pain and hope.... As we enter the Museum lobby, we are immediately aware of the flood of light emanating from the gallery; it is so powerful that its presence in the space is almost physical. When we turn toward it, however, it is nearly impossible to look at directly. It is a harsh, painful, extremely white void closing onto a single center, like the exploded point of a star." (15) Momin's warning reminds us of Derrida's discussion of what he calls the "Platonic speleology." The inmates of Plato's cave, he remarks, "suffer from sight," both when they are imprisoned, transferred from light into darkness, and when they are freed, transferred from darkness into light. (16) On this point, Derrida quotes Socrates, who of course challenged Plato's disdain for the image that dances about in firelight, who entertained the possibility of the representation or the sign to enlighten when he said: "I decided that I must be careful not to suffer the misfortune that happens to people who look at the sun and watch it during an eclipse. For some of them ruin their eyes unless they look at its image in water or something of the sort. I thought of that danger, and I was afraid my soul would be blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with any of my senses. So I thought I must have recourse to logoi and examine in them the truth of things that are." (17)