Neon is a medium well-explored by artists in the 20th century, with many drawn to its immediate, almost innate connotations of commercialism. Neon signs are almost universally associated with retail stores, where simple messages of business draw consumers eyes to pertinent information: OPEN, CLOSED, FOR SALE, LIVE SEX, etc. The messages are overt in and of themselves, but the communication of these messages in the medium of neon adds an equally overt layer of almost subliminal communication to the interaction between consumer and retailer. Because of this, it makes a certain amount of sense that artists would be drawn to subverting the medium by appropriating it for their own purposes, be they explicitly anti-commercial or not.
As neon as an almost impossible medium to work with after it has been fabricated by industrial means, neon in an artistic context must be conceived of and executed as a custom fabrication. Therefore the artist must be ready to justify their use of the medium by virtue of the fact that any message rendered in neon will be immediately scoured for meaning and interpretation by a viewer, maybe even more so than other media. And in many ways, the medium of neon is highly constricted by the fact that it is so closely associated with the elements of commerce, so every message becomes examined in this context.
A pioneer of the use of neon in art is Bruce Nauman, whose works often challenge the banality of the messages normally associated with neon. Sometimes Nauman’s pronouncements in neon are dramatic, possessing grandeur and profundity, as with his piece The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, displayed below. Other times, his works provide almost a comical vanity that is accentuated by the medium, as displayed by the second piece below.
For our first assignment for Video Sculture, building a light sculpture, Li Li and I (Ari Joseph) were interested in recycling a fully-functioning neon sign that I came across last year, to respond to the tradition of using neon in sculpture. The sign, brightly illuminating the words “BUY SELL TRADE”, seemed ripe for reinterpretation. Working with the sign brought the added challenge of transforming a piece of found neon, rather than having a custom message fabricated.
The resulting work, Transact, is a response to the explicit nature of the message portrayed sign. Ironically, the sign came into our possession through a transaction that seems outside the universe of possibility given the initial intentions for the sign. When we found the sign, there were three possibilities: buying, selling and trading. Li Li and I worked to obfuscate the original sign by frosting it over, and hiding its original message on the backside of the piece. When viewed from the front, the viewer is left with one transaction option they were not initially presented with, “FREE.”
