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This paper examines the modernist phenomenon of seeking subject material outside the realm of the purely physical.
Starting with the Impressionist project to paint light or at least its effects, the paper traces a trajectory of related
experimentation through Man Ray's "rayographs" or solarization images of the 20s and 30s, to the work of conceptual
artists of the sixties and seventies who focused their attention on ephemeral media. For example, Michael Asher's sitespecific
pressured air works, or Robert Barry's pioneering use of unorthodox materials such as inert gases or carrier
waves. More recently Dan Flavin and James Turrell have focused their artistic endeavors on light and its color
components, and the Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens has used light, color and fog to create interactive sculptures.
Today what remains invisible to the human eye has taken on a more sinister, and often political, connotation of deeper
forces at work as evinced most clearly by Trevor Paglen's The Other Night Sky (2008) series for which he tracked and
photographed the movements of classified aircraft and geostationary satellites in the California night skies. All these
works take the subject of art to be aesthetic perception, and consequently favor the means in which the experience of
viewing is directed by the artist, rather than the traditional art object.
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