Follow the light

The incandescent glow of neon holds an allure for advertisers and artists alike

When “America,” that vast, amorphous, contentious idea, is summoned up in the mind’s-eye, neon must somehow play a part.
As linked to our imaginative geography as Disneyland, New York City, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and the almighty cheeseburger, neon is testament to the American belief in the power of advertising and spectacle and an indigenous optimism that seems somehow realized in its incandescent glow.
In sharp contrast to neon’s powers of attraction, in film from postwar noir to Blade Runner’s Chinatown futurescape, neon has often been a beacon of destruction — synonymous with sin or people unhappily drawn like moths toward temptation’s lamplight, as with the blinking neon “Vacancy” luring Janet Leigh to her doom through a rain-streaked windshield in Psycho or the “El Rancho” rooftop sign pointing the way into the broken-down purgatory of chorines gone to seed in Citizen Kane. In 1946’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, neon is a sign of delusional optimism and grasping greed as Lana Turner realizes her big plans for transforming her husband’s roadside hash house from a forgettable dump into a cash trap with a blinking neon sign advertising “Twin Oaks.” The same use of neon to connote upward mobility occurs in Mildred Pierce (1945), where the sudden introduction of neon screaming “Mildred’s” restaurant indicates our heroine’s rising fortune.
From the Greek, meaning “new,” neon was discovered by British chemists William Ramsey and Morris Travers in 1898, though the commercial applications of neon to draw chumps to burgers were not advanced until 1902 when the French inventor Georges Claude was the first to apply an electrical charge to a sealed tube of neon gas. The creation of neon signs involves a rudimentary-sounding, but time-consuming process of bending glass tubes over a flame and removing the air via vacuum. Gas is then added to the tubes, which produces, depending upon the combination of gases, a full color spectrum of up to 200 colors.
The first public display of the neon lamp was in 1910 at the Paris Exposition, and the first neon sign in America was bought from Claude’s company, Claude Neon, by a Los Angeles Packard Motor Car dealership in 1923. In the ’30s, neon became synonymous with Vegas as the town boomed into a gambling mecca under gangster Bugsy Siegel’s influence.
But it wasn’t until the postwar years, in the ’40s and ’50s, that neon really took off across America, as a new form of advertising with a special application for the changing transportation issues of America, when automobile travel opened up the landscape to tourist trade and the country discovered the opulence contained within its borders. The speed of auto travel required an advertising form to capture the blink-of-an-eye attention span of the driver, and neon was that innovative signage used to attract an auto-encased customer.
Sign manufacturers and business owners soon discovered how far-reaching the hypnotic glare of neon could be, legible from a greater distance than any other advertising inducement. In fact, the neon sign may be an extraterrestrial beacon for Club Earth. In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration discovered in a satellite transmission that Las Vegas had the most intense light of any city on the planet.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that artists began exploiting the possibilities of neon, as a related movement arose in art circles for using industrial materials. Throughout its history, artists have struggled with the association of neon with the commercial market, while others, such as conceptual artist Bruce Nauman have exploited its ties to advertising. Nauman’s 1967 work “Window” is a vortex of neon resembling a shop sign that reads: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”
As Kim Koga, a neon artist and director of L.A.’s Museum of Neon Art told the Las Vegas Sun, “One of the biggest challenges is being accepted [and] removing ourselves from [a perceived association with] the sign industry.” Because of its expense, neon art often ends up in corporate environments, like Michael Hayden’s huge sculpture at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, the largest neon sculpture in the world.
In Atlanta, the Atlanta International Museum has launched The Art of Neon: Science, Light & Form, an exhibition of neon works by a variety of artists from around the country that also features examples of vintage commercial signs. The show illustrates some of the possibilities of neon for using, in participating artist John Bannon’s words, “the most neglected element in visual art: light,” as well as the stigma still attached to working in the medium, which is often attested to in the artists’ statements accompanying the work.
The best piece in the show, Mary Sullivan Voytek’s “The Buddha,” somehow bridges the fine art possibilities of neon while alluding to its commercial aspects. A larger-than-life-size yellow Buddha with blue eyes accented with blue pinpoints at its joints sits at the entrance to the show beneath a brushed metal pagoda. While most neon beckons, this Buddha extends one of its hands in a palm out “stop” gesture that rubs against the hypnotic, alluring quality of its phosphorous light.
Various works in the show incorporate glass and neon into sculpture, such as Eric Ehlenberger’s Chihuly-esque blown-glass jellyfish with iridescent neon tentacles, or the “I Dream of Jeannie” bottles ornamented with Seussian appendages and puffs of colored marabou by Michael Cain. Other pieces exploit the humorous possibilities in neon’s suggestively dangerous electric glow, like Alabaman Nancy Hammonds’ “Electric Chair,” an appropriated chair accented with the warning words “Danger” and backed with two lethal-looking, shocking red neon tubes.
In recent decades neon has suffered from a slightly lapsed status. The luminous signage that so captivated postwar Americans became associated by the ’70s with big city tenderloins, corruption, strip clubs, the wrong side of the tracks and sleazy barrooms lost in time like the windowless joints bathed in a violet glow in Barfly.
In years since, there has been a split in thinking about neon. On one hand, preservationists and artists like “The Art of Neon” group have begun to champion the glass-contained gases as a commercial folk art and indigenous American art form. Founded in 1981, the Museum of Neon Art has concocted exhibitions wedding newer fine art uses of the medium with examples of vintage neon, like the Hollywood Brown Derby sign.
On the other hand, there is a growing movement to sacrifice vintage neon signs — whose commercial genesis often gives them little value to traditional preservationists — for development’s sake. In 1993, Las Vegas developer Steve Wynn drew a cheering crowd to the site where he collapsed the 18-story Dunes sign, once the tallest neon structure in the world, leveled to make way for his new super-resort. A city once inconceivable without the sluttish glow of neon, Las Vegas’ recent makeover as a corporate and family entertainment town has caused it to veer away from its neon-synonymous image, emphasizing a new architecture of spectacular design with pyramids and ersatz Eiffel Towers in place of its gaudy glow tubes. Likewise, nationwide the dominance of chain hotels and restaurants, with the uniform neon architecture of Holiday Inns and Outbacks, has significantly erased the individualized lure of Mom and Pop businesses hoping to distinguish themselves from their rivals.
That fading glory of neon has also accounted, perversely, for its rising cachet in certain retro circles. For some, neon has also become synonymous with a vanished glamour, when the pulse of pink and blue crafted into a filled-to-the-brim martini glass conjured images of men and women dressed to the nines out for a night on the town. The association of neon with James M. Cain doom and a high-life gone sour has also served as a powerful modern attraction to the form — in recent years, the glow has taken on an almost sexual association, evoking a world of grifters and gumshoes, taxi dancers, barflies and all the seedy landmarks of life on the other side of the tracks.
Like liquor and dim lighting and good music, neon has the ability to coat the most ordinary daytime sites with glamour come evening. Some of the excitement in the metropolitan crossroads of Times Square and Hong Kong still depends upon its glow to generate that peculiar frisson of excitement and a sense of being at the electric source of life — the feeling that no place is as alive and real as that intersection of venues lit with a thousand electrified bulbs. That same thrilling buzz carries over even to neon’s punier incarnations in the small-time barrooms of Reno, Nevada (a town with some of the most beautifully preserved bar signs in America), or even Atlanta’s own little Times Square, the grid of Ponce and Highland given over to the Plaza theater and the Majestic, or the tawdry appeal of the Clermont, and the enduring glow of the Starlight Drive-In, where neon seems to advertise the promise of nighttime, for adventures only dreamed of in daylight.
The Art of Neon: Science, Light & Form runs through Jan. 6, 2001, at the Atlanta International Museum located on the Garden and Lobby levels of the Marquis II Tower in Peachtree Center at 285 Peachtree Center Ave. 404-688-2467. Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission $3 and Wed. 1-5 p.m.
felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com