Brian Eno is curating what looks to be a fascinating festival in Sydney, Australia called The Luminous Festival starting on 26 May.
Apart from concerts (and a laughter workshop!) the festival also includes two light installations by Eno: first the iconic Sydney Opera House will ‘glow with rich, continuously changing configurations of colour’ and secondly his 77 Million Paintings will be exhibited for the duration of the festival.
The idea of art dealing solely with light is not new by any means, but in my experience the true master of the medium is artist James Turrell. I suspect it is making an unfair comparison, but my response to Enos visual work is one of ‘hmmm thats kind of nice…’ whereas my response to experiencing James Turrells work is near-religious. I have experienced four of his works in person, all on Naoshima, an island in the Japanese inland sea and they were the most vivid art experiences of my entire life. Seriously. And his epic project Roden Crater will likely be the ultimate expressions of his lifes work: “Artist James Turrell purchased the 400,000 year old, 3km wide crater in 1979 and has been transforming it into a massive naked-eye observatory, designed specifically for the viewing of celestial phenomena. He stated that he plans to to open the crater for public viewing in 2011.” – I am so there!!!! This interview with Turrell is also very interesting to me as it mentions how he was brought up as a Quaker & the role silence plays in that religion.
But back to what Eno does best ie produce music; I am VERY interested to hear Mr Enos contribution to the score of Lovely Bones which was mixing in the theatre next door at Park Road Post while we were finishing UTM… The film gets released on December 9th…
