Rockne Krebs: A pioneer of laser art and a master of contemporary environmental sculpture

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2023 ILDA Conference, International Laser Display Association
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Artistic Seminar

Presentation by Heather Krebs

Rockne Krebs was an ILDA member in the mid-1990s to 2000.

​Birthdays, Whales and Debts
"All his art, his light works and his animals,
his sculptures, and his drawings,
​pay homage to the cycles of the natural,
​to energy and time."
​
Paul Richard, The Washington Post, February 25, 1978, 
Birthdays, Whales and Debts

&

The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience
“Rockne Krebs shares with poets and playwrights the knowledge
that it is better to give heroes some human blemishes if they
are to be thoroughly believable."

Benjamin Forgey, The Washington Star, February 26, 1978, The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience

​“Rockne Krebs shares with poets and playwrights the knowledge that it is better to give heroes some human blemishes if they are to be thoroughly believable.
 
Krebs customarily strikes a heroic stance in his famous city-scale laser structures, whose presence, at least at first, is so spectacular, impersonal, formal, optimistic, rational. There is, however, another side to Krebs’s art, a side that is funny, vulgar, odd, irrational – fully anti-heroic.
 
The second side of Krebs’s artistic character is featured in a small but telling exhibition of his works currently on view at the Fraser’s Stable Gallery. The exhibit even is, in its way, a retrospective view of the work of the 39-year-old artist, rather like an autobiography composed almost entirely of footnotes.

Let it be said, however, that the footnotes are first-rate. The exhibition is extremely interesting to anyone with a prior knowledge of Krebs’ major works for the light that it sheds on them. It also stands quite well on its own. Anyone for whom this show serves as an introduction is sure to emerge wanting to see and know more about the artist and the art.

​THE FOOTNOTE here is a piece from 1943 -- Krebs again, is 39 years old – and it is a neat little thing, a hippopotamus that formed part of a zoo the four-year-old Krebs made for himself. To actually put it into a serious gallery exhibition would be sheer indulgence if the little hippo did not establish a mood of personal, and not altogether happy, reverie that Krebs apparently wanted for this off-beat little show.

​He follows it with a porcelain tiger he made in 1956, the year he graduated from high school; a 1973 sketch on an envelope containing ingenuous ruminations upon the unfortunate fate of whales, and, to bring things up to date in the animal department, an ape drawing he made on Dec. 25, 1977 – Christmas Day and the day after the artist’s birthday.

The ape is a beguiling, touching piece of art, a farcical plastic relief of the kind you can buy in souvenir-novelty shops, transformed by the artist into an expressive personal souvenir with brushstrokes of flecked day-glo paints, a rhinestone tear in the eye, and a tiny 3-D heart cut from Plexiglas.
 
Krebs obviously wasn’t feeling so well last Christmas, and with this piece exposes something of his personal life, touched with irony and humor. Yet the point is not simply anecdotal. 

Krebs the artist as well as Krebs the person identifies strongly with animals, they act for him, as for many artists, as surrogates for something strong and non-rational in his emotional life.

​TO PURSUE THE animal motif one big step farther, we can look at two of Krebs’s original sketches for his large-scale laser-and-prism environment inside the huge steel, concrete, and glass Omni International complex in Atlanta. This is the very type of super-formal, super-“rational” piece that earned Krebs his international reputation. And yet as these drawings show, Krebs’ idea was to make of a configuration of the Canis Major (the Great Dog) constellation upon the vast ceiling of the place.

These sorts of connections help to make clear Krebs’s belief that art and life are inseparable at heart, that art depends in no small measure upon harnessing and transforming the energies of personal experience. Indeed, the principal point of this show may be to enable us to see Krebs’s work whole, to unite in our minds the apparently contradictory poles of his art.
 
Krebs is, to be sure, no animal sculptor, and yet in his own unconventional way he is not far from it. His childhood interest in animals has been extended and given meaning as an important facet in his complex, multi-faceted body of work.
 
So, there are lots of other interesting connections to be made. As a certified visionary Krebs is not at all above tinkering with thoughts of the physically impossible, such as his “One Sun,” a structure to be “made” by cutting geometric holes in clouds so that the sun’s rays form a vast truncated pyramid across the landscape (the sun would then be “rayning,” he puns). Still, in his laser structures, which would have been impossible not much more than a decade ago, has he not found a way in which to make such vast and magical visions come true?

​PERHAPS THE STANDOUT piece in the show is a simple-seeming concoction where a conch shell, painted red-white-and-blue and pointed with 50 rhinestone stars, hangs at the end of a little flagpole that juts from the wall. Inside the conch is a tiny music box, when you wind the shell, it turns and tinkles the first eight bars of “Home on the Range.”​

The piece is very appealing. It manages to be simultaneously simple and complicated, ordinary, and unusual, factual and imaginative, serious and ironic, personal and universal. These are qualities that adhere, in very different ways, to his city-structures, which are commonly appreciated as sheer spectacle or as technological feats, but which actually are much more.
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​“Home on the Range” is the title Krebs has given to an entire series of these anti-heroic pieces over the past seven years, in the last two (at the New York Customs House last fall and in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1976) he has begun to incorporate them into the structure of his large-scale works. Bringing the two together has not been an easy process, intellectually or formally, but by doing it, by letting the human blemishes show, Krebs has enriched his art immeasurably. This show is a priceless-documentation of the ups and downs the artist has experienced along the way.”

Benjamin Forgey, The Art of Rockne Krebs: Harnessing the Energies of Personal Experience, The Washington Star, February 26, 1978

Rockne Krebs and John Dickson at the Fraser’s Stable Gallery, 1978

John Dickson’s 2019 comment under The Experiment Station, a blog from The Phillips Collection, November 4, 2011, Rockne Krebs, 1938-2011, obituary by Ianthe Gergel.

​Rockne Krebs and Sam Gilliam’s studio, 1970 
Sam Gilliam in the window of his studio, Rockne’s pickup truck,
​1737 Johnson Avenue, NW, Washington, DC.
Photo by Rockne Krebs, 1970 

“I had the great pleasure to be Rockne and Sam’s studio mate in the mid to late 70s. Furthermore, my studio was the middle floor between them. Rockne was on the large expansive space on the bottom floor, with all the windows covered so it was always setup for the immediacy of his light experiments with lenses, smoke, and lasers. I remember the striking glint of reflected/refracted light that came from the part of the studio where he stored the Pi-Flower series of plexi-resin works. Sam was on the top floor with brilliant light filled walls with hundreds of feet of sopping wet canvas strung through the light-filled space…in various states of drying and recombination. Being in the middle floor meant that I had access to both artists…through their brilliance and the vernacular of each day. It was a great 5-year immersion for me as a young artist, one that has stayed with me throughout my life.” 

​John Dickson, 2019

​Krebsiana: Witty, Offbeat, by Tobie Lanou, What’s Up in Art: The Washington Art Marketletter, February 1978

“Rockne Krebs was a multi-disciplinary artist known for his
monumental laser light installations. His transparent plexiglass
sculptures likewise court symbolic passage through projection
by imaginative means. In addition, notational works on paper
provide glimpses into other levels of expression hinted at in
larger pieces. The mystic vision that Krebs delineated was
spectacular and private, exalted and hermetic, dazzling and still.”

​Mike Zahn, The Technological Sublime, 2022 
Pazo Fine Art

​Birthdays, Whales and Debts
"No artist in this city has produced
work more amazing."
​
Paul Richard, The Washington Post, February 25, 1978, 
Birthdays, Whales and Debts

"Rockne Krebs’ exhibit, now at Fraser’s Stable, is quirky, moving, and unfamiliar. It includes neither lines of laser light, glowing planes of Plexiglas, nor slowly marching sunbeams. This exhibition is, instead, Rockne Krebs’ self-portrait.
 
No artist in this city has produced work more amazing. Rockne Krebs has drawn, in the night sky above Arlington, a perfect laser triangle whose closest point dissolved in glinting Oz-green light on the waves of the Potomac. He has sprinkled us with prism-produced rainbows and wrapped us round with fogs. But the Krebs that we know best is not the Krebs that we see here.

​These drawings only hint at his elegant geometries, his dazzling technologies. Confessional, autobiographical, they deal with whales, the debts Krebs owes to others, with his feelings and his politics, his birthdays and his zoo.

The oldest work on view, a hippo made of clay, was done when he
​was 5. He also shows an envelope on which he sketched, one evening, the suffering of whales, their wisdom, and the sea.

Krebs has been a minimalist, an advanced technologist, a conceptualist of sorts, but he is not that only. One melancholy birthday he collages a bleeding ape with sparkling diamond tears.

He did not have it easy. Even when most polished, his art is never slick. He is no pencil prodigy, he struggles when he draws. His work, though often troubled, is at all times honest.
 
In 1965, when a newcomer to Washington, a sculpture that he made was given the first prize at the Corcoran Area Show. A rather academic work, made of painted wood and metal in a constructivist-cubist style, it is here on view.
 ​
The references of this piece to others, to Kenneth Noland and Tony Caro, are no longer of much interest. What makes it intriguing is the way that it predicts what was to come. It hints at orbs and landscape, and its title is prophetic. 

It is called “One Sun.” Krebs had not yet worked with laser beams or sunshine [in 1965], but he was even then, perhaps without quite knowing it, reaching toward pure light.

​And not toward pure light only. His art, as this exhibit demonstrates, has always been inclusive. When he asks us to peer through his transparent planes of Plexiglas, or collages, rivers, streets and cities, to his laser works, he draws into his art as much as it can bear.

​All fine artists show us what they feel must be seen. Krebs is freer with his feelings now than he ever has been, but his motives have not changed. All his art, his light works and his animals, his sculptures, and his drawings, pay homage to the cycles of the natural, to energy and time.”

Paul Richard, Birthdays, Whales and Debts, The Washington Post, February 25, 1978

Rockne Krebs 
b. Kansas City, MO, December 24, 1938 -
​d. Washington, DC, October 10, 2011

-HK, October 10, 2023