The cones that are central to Liliane Lijn's pieces in 'Stardust', her show at the Riflemaker Gallery on Beak Street, Soho, differ greatly. The two white cones in the street level space have brilliantly colored lights spinning behind the slim plexiglass strips that run around them. She made it in '69 when she had already been making art for ten years. In the upstairs space the cones are part of pieces that Lijn has been making in the last couple of years and they induce that rarest of art reactions: Wonder. One seems to be carved out of pure light, another is a phantom, and a third - depending on the moving light images projected upon it - seems like a hologram or not to be there at all. Which is almost true.
"This material is Aerogel. It's a man-made material. It was basically made for NASA to use in space experimentation," Lijn says. "It's a three-dimensional web of air. There's very very small amounts - 2 percent - of silicon. So it's glass and air. It isn't weightless. But if you lift it you hardly know you have it in our hand."
Lijn discovered Aerogel at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley, the college in Northern California, where she had a residency in 2005. The material was first used as insulation to protect instruments in space. It's now used to collect cometary particles and interstellar dust from beyond Mars.
Yes, stardust. An art idea was born. Does she use the stardust in her pieces?
"They have just begun to examine it," Lijn says. "They have a few particles. Which have gone to the scientists, the astronomers. But I've seen these particles. And they are just these little black spots. They are actually using people to spot the dust tracks in the Aerogel on the Internet. I've tried. And they are very difficult to spot."
So the translucent crumbs and fragments that surround Lijn's cones are not actually stardust but pieces of rosin, the tree gum that musicians use on the strings of their instruments. As to the cone shapes, Lijn's attention was drawn to them by Robert Graves's book, The Greek Myths.
"It was one of the early symbols of the White Goddess," Lijn says. "It was probably made out of white ash. It was about keeping fire alive. And the cone is ubiquitous. This is what I've found out after many years. There are cones all over the highways, all over the world. Which were like signals. But for me they were like signals to some great adventure. There's something called the Lost Cone. Which is a conical area around the earth's magnetic field where particles get lost. And it's very involved with creating the Aurora Borealis."
Certain of Lijn's sources, elements in Lijn's thinking may strike a chord with anybody familiar with the late 60s and 70s. Yes, hippy days. But Lijn and Mark Boyle, the late Scottish artist whose work is also resurgent, are amongst the few fine artists to have come out of that period looking more effective than ever. This is because of their great formal strengths. And Lijn's wllingness to embrace hard science is one of these.
"Steven Jones, a chemist at the Jet Propulsion Lab made these cones for me. I sent him an aluminium mould that he cast from," Lijn says of the Aerogel pieces. "It's made in an autoclave. I don't have that technology. It's made in a very sophisticated NASA way."
Above each piece is being projected onto the assemblage of Aerogel and rosin. Upon one some footage Lijn shot in a market in Southern India is playing. "Somebody was selling pigments on the ground. That's a whole display of pigments," she says. The source footage is quite unrecognizable. "What's so interesting to me is that you could never do a light show like this. Never. In a million years. Set out to do it with coloured gels or on a computer with LEDS and you couldn't do it. The complexity of reality is so much greater. By using real images but dissolving them you get this extremely complex abstraction."
Not up at Riflemaker is Lijn's current project which remains very much a work in progess. It is called Solar Hills and this too came out the residency at the Space Sciences Lab.
"I met this astrophysicist called John Vallerga. And we're developing this together. I'm projecting rainbows from fifteen miles away," she says. She uses multiple installation of six prisms to create these rainbows, which are invisible, but which culminate in highly visible globes of pure light. "They are like suns, that's what they look like," she says. "What you will see is a group of scintillating stars. During the day. Not at night. And they will be very bright. As bright as the sun. They are in colors. The colours are changing and they are moving.
"We've been working, trying to get the funding. We did one. Now we've done two. But even if you have only one, people think they are looking at the sun. And they don't know what's going on. Because it's in the wrong place, it's not where it should be. And it's a different colour. It's very cosmic, very real."
Anthony Haden-Guest
Liliane Lijn: Stardust
Until 5 July
Riflemaker
Beak Street
London W1
Anthony Haden-Guest is a writer, reporter and cartoonist. He writes for leading magazines in Britain and America, most recently in Esquire, GQ (UK) the Financial Times and Britain's Observer Magazine. You can email him directly with your comments at anthonyhaden.guest@yahoo.co.uk and/or post your views on the Saatchi Online public blog, making sure to put the title of this article as your header.
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