Word: neon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...feel that this is a visual blight and isnot appropriate," Duehay said. "If you carry thatargument to a logical extreme, you would havesigns everywhere--in residential areas, commercialareas, blinking neon signs everywhere...
...doesn't shine on the desert towns where California, Arizona and Nevada converge. It glares, searing the asphalt highways lined with truck stops and trailer parks until the air shimmers with heat. In the neon nights, the listless and the luckless -- dropouts, boozers, gamblers and speed freaks -- take refuge in cheap motels. No one knows how many drifters travel the roads, how many alienated Americans hole up in motel rooms, in anger or despair. No one can even say if there are more of the rootless in this desolate corner of America than elsewhere. Theirs is an invisible subculture...
Nauman is good at a particular sort of put-on, a sour clownishness. He makes art so dumb that you can't guess whether its dumbness is genuine or feigned. When you see his spiral neon piece The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, you assume it's irony, the cadaver of "inspirational" American romanticism-until you reflect that maybe that's what Nauman really thought, or what the vestigial romantic in him would have liked to think, but in no case can the mere neon sign deliver on its promise, and this frustration (one assumes...
Much is made of Nauman's use of words. His slogans--EAT AND DIE, TOUCH AND LIVE, HATE AND DIE and so on, done in flashing neon--are laconic, all right, but Beckett and Wittgenstein they're not, though the co-curator, Robert Storr, tries stubbornly to argue otherwise. Such eminent names--and Alain Robbe-Grillet's too--function as votive tin cans hung on the tree of Nauman's reputation, enhancing the piety with which one is meant to approach...
...sounds better--or, at any rate, odder--as a conceit than it looks on the floor or the wall. It may be that the impulse to multiply the height of the letters of his written name 14 times their normal size and then trace the result in neon tubing satisfies some inner necessity for Nauman, but for anyone who isn't Nauman, it's meaningless. And you soon lose interest in the "animated" neon pieces, with their spasmodic one-two, on-off movements of violence or puppet sex. They are one-liner art, no matter what windy claims surround them...