Jonathan Jones untitled (the tyranny of distance)Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney
14 ⁄ 08 ⁄ 2008 – 11 ⁄ 10 ⁄ 2008
NEON , curated by Tania Doropoulos
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney
30 August - 25 October 2008
Robert Irwin Light and SpaceWhite Cube Mason's Yard, London
17 Sep—19 Oct 2008
Newell Harry Fish or Cut Bait?Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
21 Aug–13 Sep 2008
Glenn Ligon:
Some ChangesTouring 2006-2008
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus
Musée dArt Moderne Grand-Duc, Luxembourg
Above © Estate of Dan Flavin, Site-specific installation, 1996, Courtesy the Menil Collection
Above: © Jonathan Jones,
untitled (the tyranny of distance), 2008 . aluminium, tarpaulin, fluorescent tubes and fittings. 6 walls, each 3.4 x 1.9 x 8.27 m, courtesy the artist, Gallery Barry Keldoulis and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney
Above: © Jonathan Jones
Lightscapes installation view, foyer, Westpac banking Corporation. Courtesy the artist, Westpac and Gallery Barry Keldoulis.
Above: © Robert Irwin
Light and Space (Detail), 2007. 115 fluorescent lights, courtesy the artist, White Cube and Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Photo: Philipp Scholz Ritterman
Above: NEON – installation view, courtesy the artists and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Above: © Newell Harry,
Fish or Cut Bait?Installation view, showing
Beginnings and Endings / Endings and Beginnings neon work across far corner, and
Ovid/Void: Rousing the Rubble (for David) to the right, courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.
Above: © Glenn Ligon
Warm Broad Glow, 2005
neon and paint, 24 × 190 in, courtesy the artist and Fogg Museum, Harvard.
Neon and flouroscent tubes are more popular now than ever, it seems, and it's increasingly difficult for artists to carve out their own style in a medium that tends to suffer from 'sameyness'. Flouro tubes deliver an aesthetic that was comprehensively explored by the late, great Dan Flavin (1933-1996). The extraordinary retrospective of his work that travelled the world, ending up at LACMA in August 2007, reminded us just how elegantly he used the medium, and leaves us with the feeling that everyone else has been covering the same ground, with added irony.
Jonathan Jones is Australia's flouro and lightbulb king, although it's not all he does. He has a elegant way with 'threading', and this has manifested at times in some rather beautiful knotting and looping of electrical cabling. As an Indigenous man he subtly references traditional motifs, and his more recent flouro projects, including the work currently showing at SCAF and his massive lobby installation at Westpac Bank's Sydney headquarters manifest this kind of geometric patterning, but there is some spookily similar work around, for instance Robert Irwin's show which has just opened at White Cube in London. Which isn't to suggest that either is even aware the other's work, but that there are only so many things you can do with linear tubes.
Neon has a greater flexibility, literally, but the medium itself tends to be unsubtle, and carries all those corny old echoes of Vegas and cheap motels, which tends to impose a 'jokiness'. Imagery is difficult, so most artists end up doing words, the problem being that in formal terms one set of neon words tends to look much like another. In response, these texts have had to become increasingly cryptic - the medium referencing itself with ever greater levels of irony. The current show at Anna Schwartz's magnificent Carriageworks space is a perfect exemplar. Anyone who's anyone has to do a neon sculpture these days, and this show, which holds so much promise curatorially, is really a flashy collection of novelties assembled around a common medium, without much depth. Which isn't to dismiss the quality of some of the works, or the fact that AS has mounted such a technically difficult and expensive show.
Joseph Kosuth's deadpan 'Neon' of 1965 in some ways says it all - spelling out N E O N, in neon. Another much more recent Kosuth piece 'W.F.T. #1 [yellow]' (2008) is also impressive. Kosuth has said of its pregenitor 'The Language of Equilibrium':
This project, in yellow neon, has as its basis language itself. It is a work which is a reflection on its own construction… The work engages the cultural and social history of the evolution of language itself, how the history of a word shows its ties to cultures and social realities being quite distinct and disconnected. It is only in the present when a word is used, as it is with a work of art being experienced, that all that which comprises the present finds its location in the process of making meaning. Here, in this work, language becomes both an allegory and an actual result of all of which it should want to speak. Without 'independently wealthy' entities like AS and SCAF mounting such shows Sydney would be much the poorer - long may they continue. Go see, both have long runs.
Newell Harry has worked with neon quite a bit, and in his just-closed show at Oxley9 incorporated a number of neon elements into an interlinked series of installations. This was much more satisfying than the compilation show at Schwartz. Harry has a strong sense of material as metaphor, and much of his work (from paintings to woven mats) utilises fragments of text and notation, and the neon component acts as a stylistic extension of these concerns, rather than as a stand-alone novelty.
There are strong echoes of Glenn Ligon's approach here, and not just in the use of the medium. Ligon references black identity and cultural conudrums in similar ways, often working with texts, famously in 'Warm Broad Glow' (2005) referencing a passage in Gertrude Stein’s novella
Melanctha (“the warm broad glow of negro sunshine”). This work made the cover of Artforum in 2006, coincident with the much-praised touring show
Some Changes, which ended its run in Luxembourg in February 2008.
Finally, the definitive exhibition of light art
Lichtkunst aus Kunstlicht (Light Art from Artificial Light) was mounted in 2006 at ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Karlsruhe, Germany. The fine catalogue from the show is still available and should be required study, along with the Dan Flavin retrospective, for anyone contemplating making a light sculpture.
A la prochaine.
YINKA SHONIBARE MBE
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