Neon Neon | The Light That Never Goes Out

© Jamie Woodley Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

What is it that we love about neon? When I say we, I refer to me. What is it that I love about neon?

In considering the chemical element Ne, or neon, the colourless, odourless gas that emits an orange glow when it is captured in a glass tube and ionised by electrodes at each end, I reflect on two distinct memories.

The first is a crazy, rollercoaster weekend trip to Venice. My then-partner lost a bag in transit. We arrived at our hotel to find the adjacent Teatro La Fenice – where we were booked to see a concert – swathed in scaffolding and undergoing serious renovation. No concert that evening. At dinner we accidentally ordered a €30 bottle of red wine to go with pizza. No big deal, but as I pointed at something on the menu I tipped the bottle of wine into his lap and over his only pair of trousers. The final faux pas, on our exit from the city we missed our scheduled transfer and instead ended up careering along the Grand Canal aboard a private (and considerably pricier) water taxi to get to the airport.

Image © Peggy Guggenheim Collection

A welcome oasis amid the farce, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection with its canal-side sculpture garden cradles Peggy’s ashes amid peace and seclusion alongside those of her dogs. There is also an aphorism by Mario Merz: Se la forma scompare la sua radice è eterna (If the Form Vanishes Its Root Is Eternal), 1982-89.

© Lee Broom

The swooping blue (neon + mercury) imitation of Merz’s calligraphy nestles against foliage on a wall. For Merz, neon represented, ‘The light of human intelligence, the power of thought, and the inspirational force of ideas.’

A second standout recollection is of Martin Creed’s Work No.1086, Everything Is Going To Be Alright, 2011. Emblazoned across the front of 18th-century Durslade Farmhouse at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, it made my throat ache. It still does every time I see or think about it. Variations of the work have been installed at locations as far and wide as Peru, Canada, Milan, Edinburgh and East London’s Lower Clapton Road. This original London-based version (Work No. 203) was on the front of the façade of what was once part of the London Orphan Asylum. Creed has said that it was meant optimistically, though has confessed he was depressed at the time of making it. For him his art is, “50% about what I make and 50% about what other people make of it”, and his works express his desire to interact and stir emotion. Quite possibly explaining why on that wintery, dusky afternoon I felt strangely comforted, yet paradoxically anxious.

The Luminaries

Modern captors of the gases are many and their works take different forms. Contemporaries of Martin Creed love neon and work with it regularly – think Gavin Turk’s The Observing Eye, Port and PHI, all of which playfully reference art history and were key in his 2013 We Are One exhibition. Of course Tracey Emin, who describes neon as, “Emotional for everybody”. For her, Margate’s ‘Golden mile’ of the past was like, “A mini Las Vegas”. In her shows she says, “The neon and argon gases make us feel positive…(it) electronically pulsates around the glass”.

Chris Bracey, known as the Neon Man or sometimes, Master of Glow, took over his London-based family’s firm Electro Signs in the 1970s following an art foundation course, and seeing a decline in trade from fairgrounds and circuses started making signs for Soho sex shops and clubs. From the iconic Girls, Girls, Girls shout-out of the Raymond Revuebar to collaborations with David LaChapelle, in-store displays for Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen and fabrications for Martin Creed, his film work included Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Bladerunner. Bracey, who died in 2014, was given his own 2012 solo exhibitions in LA and Miami by contemporary art dealer, Guy Hepner. The Walthamstow workshop lives on as the museum God’s Own Junkyard serving as Europe’s biggest collection of neon – or a living graveyard of light.

© Secret London @secret.london

Award-winning British product and interior designer Lee Broom, launched his first furniture collection Neo Neon to critical acclaim at the London Design Festival in 2007. In a 10-year anniversary show, Time Machine, a ten-piece collection revealed at Salone del Mobile in Milan, he includes his modernist approach to the Thonet Bentwood chair (Broom’s design dream-piece), its sinuous curves adorned with lithe neon spines.

San Francisco-based artist Terry Thompson recently spent more than a decade driving across the US to seek out old neon signs (some dating back to the 1930s) and preserving them as oil paintings. “I see these signs as historically and emotionally charged metaphors for unrelenting time. In these paintings I strive to reveal the hidden beauty of these banal, rusty relics, by rendering them in oil paint.” Thanks to Thompson, Pinkys Pizza, (2015), the Tropicana Motor Hotel, (2016), and Canyon City Liquors, (2010) stay ever immortalised.

© Terry Thompson

Unwittingly, the late Jason Rhoades may have hinted at the future political agenda in the neon works he created from the late nineties right up until his death in 2006. A recent major retrospective at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel has been described as ‘taking Los Angeles (the city where he lived, worked and died*) by storm’ by highlighting a ‘capitalist chaos’ (Wallpaper* Magazine), which nevertheless emits ‘a comfort’, an ‘irresistible warmth and light’. Dana Goodyear at The New Yorker goes even further, crediting Rhoades with anticipating our ‘Trumpian moment’. Rhoades’ maximalist, sprawling installations recurrently use tumbled, neon webs of words, including ‘Tijuanatanjierchandelier’ (2006), part of a series of searches for ‘the ultimate pussy word’. Whatever Rhoades’ motivation for such an endeavour, little might he have known the term would become a defining one for the incoming POTUS in the run-up to the 2016 US election.

Everything Is Going To Be Alright

Neon is what is known as a noble gas. It is chemically unreactive, inert, recorded as posing no threat to the environment and causing no known ecological damage. So while it means no harm, as Tracey Emin points out, neon resonates with everyone. For Merz it was an essence, a force, but somehow innately human. It can be nostalgic or futuristic. It can call to the past or feel ultra-modern. It can become political. Be utterly timeless. Or impermanent.

Is this then, how to explain its enduring power? Is it sexy, glamorous (a la Soho and Raymond)? Or seedy and a little bit dirty (a la Soho and Raymond)? Does it hark back to a sense of youth, freedom, optimism, intoxication, somehow vibrating with nights from the past lurking in my sub-conscious?

Perhaps the essence of the gas, captive in a tube forever, makes us feel energy, or empathy. The sense it might shiver, and go out. Is it not the electrical charge that ignites the gas, but the emotional charge we ourselves bring to it?

Whatever. Surely we just need to look to Tracey and Martin for the answers. The writing is on the wall, dummy! Up in bold cursive at St Pancras station: I want my time with you. Or in chunky capitals all around the world, a glowing Proust’s madeleine.

 So believe in art. The light isn’t just at the end, it’s inside the tunnel. Everything is going to be alright.