THE TARGETTI LIGHT ART AWARD for young artists celebrates its tenth anniversary with a tribute to Futurism.
On with the sixth edition… Deadline: September 10th, 2009

A tribute to Futurism and its prophetic exaltation of technology intended for the first time ever as inspiration and primary content of an artwork: this is the theme of the sixth edition of the TARGETTI LIGHT ART AWARD that is being launched in occasion of the hundredth anniversary celebration of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto.

The TARGETTI LIGHT ART AWARD is an international competition for under-40 talents which is held every two years. It has been ideated by Targetti – the third European player on the field of architectural lighting – to promote the creativity of young artists and to stimulate increasingly profound thought on the bonds between technological innovation and artistic creativity.

The participants – more than 3,000 competed in the first five editions – are asked to create a work of art using artificial light as both medium and content. This year they will start from new reflections on the extraordinary vitality of the technical-expressive concepts developed by the Futurists concerning the role that light can play in creating a work of art. While respecting the formal criteria set out for the competition, the artists may use any material and technology and avail themselves of advice from Targetti’s experts to optimize the expressive power of light in their works. To participate in the competition entrants must submit a sketch on paper along with a description of the planned work of art no later than September 10th, 2009.

Entries will be judged by a panel comprising Amnon Barzel (artistic director of the Targetti Light Art Collection), Omar Calabrese (semeiologist), Alessandra Mammì (art critic for L’Espresso magazine), Peter Noever (Director of MAK, Wien), Franziska Nori (Project Director of CCCS, Florence), David Sarkysian (director of MUAR, Moscow) and Paolo Targetti (president of Targetti Poulsen Group).

The first prize winner will receive € 10,000; the second and third place contestants will each receive € 5,000.

The winners’ artworks will also become part of the TARGETTI LIGHT ART COLLECTION (the most important European collection dedicated to Light Art and which includes works by artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Gilberto Zorio and Brigitte Kowanz and enjoys the cooperation of prestigious names such as James Turrell). In addition, the pieces will be included in the itinerant exhibition which has been ongoing since 1998 in some of the world’s most prestigious museums such as MAK (Vienna), the Chelsea Art Museum (New York), the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujadowsky Castle (Warsaw) and MUAR (Moscow).

Download here the full announcement and competition rules. For further information please contact artlight@targetti.it.

The reasons for a tribute

THE PREMIO TARGETTI LIGHT ART AWARD is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a tribute to Futurism, the first artistic movement (just thirty years after Edison’s invention) to understand the revolutionary potential of electric light and that its extraordinary power was not limited merely to making it possible to see at night.

With his “Futurist Manifesto” of 1909 and subsequent writings, Marinetti was the first to sing of the new “electric moons”, polemically opposed to romantic moonlight, to praise the beauty of hydroelectric plants, and to become excited by the “lyrical initiative of electricity” and the “electric light that suffers, racked with pain and screams” predicting the use of artificial light as the expressive medium and primary content of a work of art.

Giacomo Balla accepted Marinetti’s “invitation” to celebrate the artificiality of this new light: in 1909 he had painted the famous “Street Light”, and broke up the light released by his “Speeding Automobile”. Soon he was joined by Umberto Boccioni who in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” stated that “Transparent planes of glass or celluloid, strips of metal, wire, interior or exterior electric lights can indicate the planes, the tendencies, the tones and half-tones of a new realty”; it is electric light that illuminates his “Modern Idol” from the background and agitates the atmosphere of the café in which “The Laugh” bursts out.

Light has always played an important role not only in the perception, but also in the interpretation and re-proposition of reality. Mankind’s earliest creations that were not tied to immediate, practical needs are related to light, and an almost uninterrupted study of the chromatic values of light has been part of art history – from its birth to the most recent developments - through the important experiments of Caravaggio and La Tour, the Impressionists and the Macchiaioli. But it is to Futurism that we owe the explicit prophecy of the advent of an art (Light Art) that would only come into its full in the early 1950s with the experiments of Lucio Fontana and the great season of American Minimalism when artificial light developed from a suggestion evoked by chiaroscuros to active material, medium and content of artistic creations. It is for these reasons that Targetti is dedicating the sixth edition of its international competition for young artists to Futurism, with an invitation to “rethink” Marinetti’s prophecy and reflect on the extraordinary vitality of the technical-expressive theories it contains.