Illuminating The Carnegies’ Mansion
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The spaces where German lighting designer Ingo Maurer exhibits his work are often more contemporary than the august mansion, built by Andrew and Louise Carnegie, where the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is housed. When the museum’s former curatorial director, Barbara Bloemink, first approached him several years ago about doing an exhibition, “I was really hesitating,” he said, “because the building itself is extremely difficult.” Finally, he gave in, and how his complex lighting installations have been made to work within the antique interior of the Carnegie mansion is a testament to the ingenuity of the museum’s exhibitions team and the group of Mr. Maurer’s own employees that he brought over from Germany. Mr. Maurer’s work encompasses both product design and what might more appropriately be called installation art. He manufactures his own designs at his studio and factory in Munich, where he employs over 70 people. His pieces range from the technically ingenious, like the YaYaHo — a low-voltage halogen lighting system, which took three years to develop and is now widely imitated — to the poetic, like Lucellino, a light bulb with wings that seems to be flying away. In New York, he designed the UNICEF Crystal Snowflake that hangs over Fifth Avenue at 57th Street every holiday season; he also designed the hanging lamps in the Camper shoe store in Soho. In Europe, he has designed lighting for subway stations, and is currently designing lighting to illuminate at night a defunct steel mill in Luxembourg, now a monument to the region’s industrial past.
He has been extremely inventive with LEDs (light emitting diodes), designing LED wallpaper, whose colors can be adjusted depending on one’s mood, an LED table — a clear, glass table that seems to have a swarm of fireflies trapped inside it — and even an LED wedding gown. His installations include “Wo bist du, Edison…?” (“Where are you, Edison…?”) — a blue-lit room that the inventor seems to have just vacated, with tools and a broken bulb on the table and, above it, a hanging hologram showing the red image of a perfect light bulb — and “Tableaux Chinois,” in which carp swimming in a mirror-bottomed tank cast shadows on the wall.
Mr. Maurer’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, and other institutions around the world. The Cooper-Hewitt, however, offered unique challenges. To begin with, nothing can puncture or be hung directly from the historic ceilings, posing a problem for installing Mr. Maurer’s many hanging pieces, including the substantial “Golden Ribbon,” which now hangs from an I-beam resting on a temporary wall in the Carnegies’ billiard room.
The museum’s ornate interiors also offer relatively few possibilities for hiding wires or the many transformers that were needed. Since Mr. Maurer works in Europe, his products are designed to receive 230 volts, instead of the American 110 volts. And because most of his works run on very low voltage, most pieces in fact required two transformers, the electrical contractor hired by the museum for the show, Nick St. John, explained: one to step the current up to 230 volts, then another to turn it down to 8 to 12 volts.
As a result, there are transformers secreted in every possible nook and cranny, as a member of the exhibitions team, Mathew Weaver, pointed out on a tour late last week of the installation-in-progress. There is one hidden inside the chandelier over the main staircase, which Mr. Maurer has wrapped, Christo-style, in red fabric and covered with Lucellinos. There’s one hidden in Andrew Carnegie’s closet. And there are many more, underneath air vents and along the top of walls built for the exhibition. The installation “Rose, Rose on the Wall,” which combines an LED wall of roses with a television-screen fireplace and a photograph of Che Guevara, is backed up against a small passageway, where the LED circuit boards are hidden.
A different technical challenge is posed by the carp, which a museum spokeswoman, Jennifer Northrop, said may be the first live animals to be included in one of the museum’s exhibitions. Fortunately, one of the members of the exhibitions team used to work in a pet store, so he has been assigned to be fish caretaker. In an interview, Mr. Maurer noted that in the 10 months “Tableaux Chinois” was on exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, only one fish out of some 25 died.
In terms of the mansion, Mr. Maurer said that he has been as “tender and gentle” with it as possible. He also has a sense of humor about the odd juxtaposition of his work with the otherwise stately decor. In the windows at the landing of the central staircase, he is installing two blownup photographic portraits of Andrew and Louise Carnegie, whose mouths and eyes move as they utter expressions of surprise and, ultimately, pleasure, at their house’s new look. (The voices of Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie were recorded by a longtime volunteer and a museum trustee.)
In part, it was Mr. Maurer’s love of New York that made him agree to the exhibition, he said. He has a store in Soho and comes here several times a year. This city, where Gilded Age industrialists like Carnegie settled, continues to have a galvanizing effect on both artists and entrepreneurs, he suggested. “New York has one big wonderful effect on people, and that is that it says, ‘Yes, do it!'” he said. He arrives “pregnant with an idea,” he said, which New York then liberates. “It clarifies a lot of things in my mind, and then I can start working.”