Art Burn

LEIF NORMAN Enlarge Image

Germaine Koh’s DIY Field

It seems fitting — generous, even — that Vancouver-based artist Germaine Koh’s DIY Field, a permanent, interactive light installation commissioned by the Winnipeg Arts Council for Central Park, should go live at a time of year when day length dwindles from "diminished" to "soul-crushing." Across cultures, we mark the year’s longest nights with observances celebrating light and illumination, and now, with the solstice next week, Koh’s piece (which officially opened last month) remains on the scene, looking for all the world like a fleet of those coloured lamps that people stare at to stave off seasonal depression.
   
If you haven’t yet seen and interacted with the work in person, DIY Field comprises an innocuously municipal-looking grid of 36 metal posts topped with coloured lights. Passers-by can change the hue of individual lights using buttons located on the side of every post that activate red, green and blue diodes, respectively. I’ll spare you the lesson in additive colour theory but the arrangement yields eight possible settings: red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, white and "no light." The overlapping pools of colour and luridly tinted cast shadows have an otherworldly beauty to them (especially on fresh snow) and the open-ended, participatory nature of the work means that the patterns created vary considerably from one day to the next. 
   
I pass the work on foot at least once most days and find myself drawn increasingly to the lights that people have switched off — "no light." It was, of all things, an inflammatory online comment about the work (anonymous, naturally) that brought them to my attention.
   
Responding to Tania Kohut’s Nov. 15 preview of the work, Winnipegfreepress.com reader "i8toomuch" helpfully opines, "Nice idea, however unfortunate area to put it in as I expect the core area scum will trash this in no time." While successful in provoking earnest denouncements from several of my fellow "scum," I would offer that, if we move past the barely suppressed racism and class bigotry, our random Internet troll seems to have inadvertently wandered into a salient point: the work is vulnerable, and that vulnerability is important. Granted, I’m less concerned with some fever-dream downtown bugaboo with a tire iron than I am with the implications of turning off a light versus turning one on.
   
That "off" is even an option comes as a surprise. When one light is dark, we assume that it’s burned out, that the piece is broken. For all the dozens of times I’ve walked by, though, I’ve rarely seen more than one or two lamps shut off. It would seem that the "core area scum," far from "trashing" the piece, have so far been tending to it, keeping the lamps lit in countless, tiny acts of unheralded collaboration.
   
The best public art is both a gift and a challenge to its community, and "participation" means little without allowing for undesired consequences. So far, it seems that the challenge inherent in DIY Field’s vulnerability is being met. As gifts go, proving that our bleakest assumptions about one another can be unfounded is even nicer than a reassuring light when it’s cold and dark.
   
Steven Leyden Cochrane is an emerging artist, writer and educator originally from Tampa, Fla.

Germaine Koh: DIY Field
Permanent installation, Central Park (near the corner of Ellice and Edmonton)