Shadow People

Tim Noble and Sue Webster are a pair of glam punks from England who have parlayed a literal trash aesthetic into a favored position with the heavyweight Saatchi collection and its colonial prefect, Larry Gagosian, in whose Western outpost their latest work may now be viewed. Their widely reproduced sculptures Miss Understood and Mr. Meanor (1997) and Dirty White Trash (With Gulls) (1999) were two of the few indications that refreshing new work truly emerged from the overhyped ‘90s U.K. art scene (if David Bowie says it’s authentic, it must be true: I‘m so sure!). Both consisted of piles of rubbish -- empty food containers, mostly -- which, lit with carefully focused lights, cast shadows that magically resolved into silhouettes of the artists in archly romantic “poses,” their severed heads skewered on spikes (if you can call that a pose) and reclining, occiput to occiput, with champagne and cigarettes. Either of these works, with their combination of optical gimmickry and populist sensationalism -- and with the complex, if undeclared, philosophical inversion whereby the shadow becomes more true to reality than the object that casts it -- would have been a brilliant addition to “Devices of Wonder.”

The artists’ first show in L.A. feels like something of a homecoming: Noble and Webster have long shared Los Angeles‘ obsession with all things Vegas. The title piece, Instant Gratification (all works 2001), retains the trompe l’oeil shadow effect of the rubbish heaps, but uses U.S. greenbacks instead. Housed in a “Perspex” arcade-style case, the gray-green blob resolves into a profile of the couple kissing; when a plastic token is dropped into the front of the sculpture, fans blow loose bills around the inside of the case, a vision that recalls both a “keep what you can grab” sideshow apparatus and that scene in Alex Cox‘s Sid and Nancy where the prototypical punk newlyweds swallow tongue as the trash rains down slo-mo around them. The other two works are dazzling Vegas-style signs made with strange, foreign-type light bulbs that cast their own intricate, seizure-inducing shadows -- two dollar signs and a giant word: Forever.

How much of the complex meaning borne by shadows in contemporary art can be read back into the shadows of the magic lanterns and other precursors to contemporary filmmaking, television and the digital domain? We probably can’t accuse the collective social artists who developed Javanese Wayang shadow-puppet shows of referencing anything, but the psychological, spiritual and aesthetic potency of shadow and light seems to be a human universal. “Devices of Wonder” does a superlative job of connecting the dots across 500 years of technological innovation, but the real payoff remains in our hard-wired fascination with this constantly renegotiated binary balance. And the best contemporary art, including many of the works in the Getty exhibit, as well as the Noble-Webster and Wickman shows, demonstrates that 21st-century fine art can produce as meaningful -- if not as bombastically all-engulfing -- sensory experiences as the dominant contemporary visual media of television and cinema.