Professional Documents
Culture Documents
American Art
The groups appeal was broad and extended across a variety of cultural strata. In addition
to its work at the Fillmore, JLS produced a light show for the premiere of the New York
Symphony at Carnegie Hall, provided light effects for a Lincoln Center production of
King Lear, collaborated with Yayoi Kusama in the staging of her political performance
piece Self-Obliteration of the Feast (1968), held a happening in Bryant Park, and designed
a party sequence for John Schlesingers 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. JLS member Thomas
Shoesmith also contributed light sequences to accompany pianist Hilde Somers recital of
music by Russian composer Aleksandr Scriabin at Alice Tully Hall.4
The Joshua Light Show employed a veritable arsenal of image-making apparatuses to
achieve diverse visual effects: three film projectors, two banks of four-carousel slide projectors, three overhead projectors, hundreds of color wheels, motorized reflectors made of
such materials as aluminum foil, Mylar, and broken mirrors, two hair dryers, watercolors,
oil colors, alcohol and glycerin, two crystal ashtrays, and dozens of clear glass clock faces.
Joshua White and his cohort designed a rear-projection system, situated roughly twenty
feet behind the Fillmore stage, where several tons of equipment were arrayed on two
elevated platforms.5
The conventional seated theater setup of the Fillmore meant the group focused its
efforts on a single screen, rather than attempting to establish a West Coast or discothequestyle overall light environment. Using eight 1,200-watt airplane landing-strip lights to
project imagery onto a 20-by-30-foot vinyl screen, the members of the JLS built their
shows from four elements. The first involved the projection of pure colored light through
various handmade and modified devices. The second element was concrete imagery, which
included film footage shot by the group, hand-etched film loops, segments from commercial cinema such as old black-and-white cartoons, King Kong (1933), and 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968), and, eventually, closed-circuit video, which was used to project enlarged
images of the musicians performing onstage in real time. The groups collection of concrete
imagery also included hand-painted slides, art-historical slides featuring paintings by
Francisco de Goya and op art designs, and slides consisting of text such as Andy Warhols
quote Art is anything you can get away with, or the more self-reflexive and audience-ingratiating The Joshua Light Show: A Product of Stoned Age Technology.6
The third element was what the group dubbed its wet show, or colored oil and water
dyes that were combined in the glass clock faces and displayed via overhead projectors
without any photographic mediation. Group members Cecily Hoyt and Bill Schwarzbach
produced wispy, smokelike trails of intertwining color or shape-shifting blobs (likely the
amoebas in colored water referenced by Bell) by pressing a smaller clock face against a
larger one, which sent the oil and water mixture to the edges of the container in a manner
that could be precisely matched to the rhythms being played on the Fillmores stage.
The fourth element was dubbed lumia and was a technique unique to the Joshua Light
Show. The name comes from Thomas Wilfreds color organ experiments of the 1920s. Lumia
was Shoesmiths domain. He occupied the top platform behind the Fillmore screen by
himself, where he manipulated reflected and refracted light via a series of mirrors, reflective
Mylar sheets, hand-built motorized wheels covered with mirror fragments, and projectors.
The Joshua Light Show techniques and elements were refined by hundreds of hours
of experimentation and rehearsal, and would be added to, subtracted from, updated,
and combined in an improvisatory fashion as light-show members communicated with
one another via headset microphones. The group was able to follow the action onstage
via closed-circuit television while White conducted the show, using a mixing board to
fade in Joshua Light soloists when they were ready to present their creations. As White
explains, Every week we had new ideas, which became part of the whole palette of ideas,
and it was my job to mix those ideas together.7
18
Summer 2008
Curator Christoph Grunenberg has written that the light shows emphasis on abstraction
and perceptual effects allowed viewers to enter a place where reality becomes the result of
the direct interaction with the perceptual apparatus of the perceiver. Often accompanied
and amplified by the use of psychedelic drugs, the perceptual circuit enacted by projection
performance thus closes the distance between viewer and the art object, so that the cinema
becomes, in the words of paracinema practitioner Bradley Eros, a flicker of a breathing
moment, a living, changing cinema. The result, argues Eros, is a cinema that recognizes the
transitory nature of human existence by expressing and experiencing joy in the time of its
performance.8
19
American Art
Taken in total, the Joshua Light Shows craftbased ephemeral cinema resulted in a staging
that detailed and commingled nearly the entire
history of the projected image. Its use of projected and reflected light is a practice, as Sheldon
Renan reminds us, that extends back to religious
ritual in ancient Egypt and Greece. The groups
magic lantern techniques date back to the midseventeenth century. The display of artisanal
film loops alongside examples culled from the
entire history of industrial cinema illustrates the
heterogeneity of moving-image conventions.
Taken together, the Joshua Light Show epitomizes what curator Kerry Brougher has cited as
the maximalist trajectory in 1960s filmmaking,
wherein artists saturated the information in the
frame, pushing the image to such a complex and
multi-level state that film was shoved up against
its boundary lines of possibility. The opening up of perceptual possibilities afforded by the
Joshua Light Shows ability to play a cinematically captured history against an improvised
present also brings to mind what Jorge Luis Borges, writing in The Garden of Forking
Paths, describes as
an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.
The fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for
centuries, contains all possibilities.9
And that is the Joshua Light Showa reservoir of cinemas memory, unmoored in an
ephemeral celebration of cinemas possibilities.
Notes
1
For the quote, see Barbara Bell, You Dont Have to Be High, New York Times, December 28, 1969.
Edwin Pouncy, Laboratories of Light: Psychedelic Light Shows, in Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social
Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2005), 156.
See Gene Youngblood, Part Six: Intermedia, in Expanded Cinema (Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company,
1970), 34598; Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E. P. Dutton
& Co., 1967), 24850; and Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 19591971
(New York: Macmillan Company, 1972), 242. Kerry Brougher, Visual-Music Culture, in Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1900 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 88177; Christoph Grunenberg,
The Politics of Ecstasy: Art for the Mind and Body, and Chrissie Illes, Liquid Dreams, in Summer of Love:
Art of the Psychedelic Era, ed. Christoph Grunenberg (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 1160 and 6784.
See, for example, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Lighta Medium of Plastic Expression, in Krisztina Passuth,
Moholy-Nagy (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 292. Jonathan Walley, An Interview with Anthony
McCall, Velvet Light Trap, no. 54 (Fall 2004): 66. JLS founder Joshua White, interview with the author,
February 9, 2007. William Moritz, Weekend in Los Angeles, Weekly Planet, January 24, 1969, 45.
A full performance history of the group is available in Amalie Rothschild with Ruth Ellen Gruber, Live at the
Fillmore East: A Photographic Memoir (New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1999). When Joshua White left
the group in 1970, it continued on as Joes Lights. Grunenberg, The Politics of Ecstasy, 26. Joshua White,
interview, February 9, 2007.
20
Summer 2008
Margaret Morse
The modern-day light show can be traced to the projection of liquid-filled slides at beat poetry recitals and
jazz concerts in the early 1950s in San Francisco. For a more complete history, see Brougher, Visual-Music
Culture. Rothschild, Live at the Fillmore East, 2333. Joshua White, interview, February 4, 2007.
Grunenberg, The Politics of Ecstasy, 21. For the distance between, see Illes, Liquid Dreams, 158.
Bradley Eros, There Will Be Projections in All Dimensions . . . Millennium Film Journal, nos. 4344
(Summer 2005): 98.
Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film, 24849. Kerry Brougher, Hall of Mirrors, in
Art and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors, ed. Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art,
1996), 88. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999), 182.
American Art