A Reflective Study on Silver and Light: Timothy Ingold’s Lecture

What is the relation between silver as a metal and as a quality of luminosity? What makes the metal silver white? Is light an essential ingredient of what silver is, or merely incidental?

These were among the questions — in relation to both physics and art — that were addressed by Timothy Ingold, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His latest book, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now, was just published in January.

Ingold spoke on April 3 at Yale University’s Loria Center for the History of Art Department in a talk entitled “How the World Shines Silver in the Moonlight.”

In reflecting on the relationship between light and materials such as gold, silver and chrome, Ingold posited whether light is an essential ingredient of these materials, “or merely incidental?”

“By distinguishing the beam of light that shines in our eyes from the ray of light as it is defined by physics,” he argued,  “we can show how luminosity enters constitutively into our apperception of the material world.”

“Pared down to its radiant, energetic essence as waves or photons in a physical universe,” he said, “light is the one thing we never see. It would seem that we see objects disclosed by rays of light, not light ‘as such’.”

However, the light that shines and shimmers is not light as it is defined by physics. For physicists, shining and shimmering are but effects of light, defined as an energetic impulse. “But for us, earthly beings,” he continued, “light is the experience itself, of a luminous world, for which radiant energy is but a condition.”

Taking an approach radically different from the conventional anthropologies and archaeologies of art and of architecture, which treat artworks and buildings as though they were merely objects of analysis, Ingold looks at ways of bringing the fields and disciplines together to enhance ways of engaging between human beings and the environments they inhabit.

Ingold, who received his BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1970, and his PhD in 1976, described color as a property of beams rather than rays. “Silver is to gold as white to black, arrayed respectively on the chrome spectrum and the spectrum of life and death.”

But there’s more to light than meets the eye, he contended.

“So long as we think of light as energetic rays, interceding between an objectively given world and the eye of the beholder, then we would have to conclude that the landscape itself is independent of the conditions of its illumination,” said Ingold.

“But if, to the contrary, we think of light as the very experience of illumination, then we could only conclude that the stars are their lights, not sources of light, and likewise that the aurora is its light; the moon its light; the flame of the wood-fire its light; and the landscape, glowing in its many shades of gray and white, its light as well. As light changes, so does the landscape. And since the light is always changing, no landscape can be the same from one moment to the next.

“Painters, of course, have always known this. Seeking to capture not things in themselves but the very experience of opening one’s eyes to them, as if for the first time, they know that light is among the materials of their craft, and color too. For them, colors are not variations along a spectrum but material substances, once concocted from motley ingredients but nowadays squeezed from a tube, which can be mixed and blended to form the distinctive luster of a composition. That luster is the light of the painting.”

“It is in the shining of their lights, I contend, and not in their inert and objective forms, that the sun and the moon exist for us, both in our own eyes and in the cosmos. Yet the moon shines differently, for its light, unlike the sun’s golden fireball, is not its own. And that’s what makes it silver.”

— FRANK RIZZO

Ingold’s latest book, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now, is now available from Polity: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509556601