The Charged Line: Neon in art and culture

The UK’s biggest ever survey of neon art opens in Blackpool – but why does neon still fascinate us over a century after it was first commercially produced?

Feature by Polly Checkland Harding | 29 Aug 2016

Look up the word ‘charged’ in the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ll find two meanings: ‘having electric charge’ and ‘filled with excitement, tension, or emotion’. The Grundy Art Gallery’s title for its new exhibition, then, does a rather good job of suggesting how neon, first commercially produced in Paris around 1911, has come to have more associations than your average lightbulb.

NEON: The Charged Line is the UK’s most significant survey of neon art to date, featuring work by world-leading artists in the medium across eight rooms, as well as sending new commissions out onto the streets of Blackpool. The exhibition explores works from a range of time periods and countries, and with different aesthetic preoccupations, showcasing pieces by French artists François Morellet and Bertrand Lavier – two of the earliest experimental practitioners – alongside work by modern artists such as Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk.

The location could hardly be more appropriate: not only will NEON coincide with Blackpool’s Illuminations, the annual six-mile long lighting display that has taken place along the promenade for over 100 years, but it also opens in the seaside town that was one of the first places to show neon in the UK, in the early 1930s.

Neon’s popularity had first taken hold in Paris, with one of the first commercially produced signs hung over the Champs-Elysees, before transferring to Los Angeles and New York. Neon went on to dominate the advertising hub at Piccadilly Circus in London from 1908 until the last neon hoarding, for Sanyo, was turned off in 2011. In America, shops initially used neon signs to keep their brand competitive, until cheaper alternatives isolated their use to cheap motels and sex shops. While New York was populated with tens of thousands of signs in the 1970s, only hundreds remain today.

Artists like Bruce Nauman have reflected on neon’s role in consumer culture, using its links with advertising to question the role and function of art in society. Where once a fluorescent doodle of a comely woman signalled a strip club, it’s more difficult to define what ideas are being pushed by Nauman’s installations of sexually explicit silhouettes – or by Tracey Emin’s confessional neon phrases, which lit up Times Square’s billboards at midnight throughout February 2013.

Other artists have used neon as a technology that goes beyond itself, exploiting the way that light and colour bleed from the gas-filled glass tubes when lit. Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin have both explored how the use of light can affect the experience of space – although, ironically, the European Commission has ruled that Flavin’s works are ‘light fittings’, not art (for tax purposes at least), a definition that would have served Nauman’s preoccupations better.

Then there are artists like Joseph Kosuth (on display in NEON) and rising star Jung Lee, who have used neon to consider how we think about language; Lee lights up sentimental, romantic phrases like ‘HAPPILY EVER AFTER’ in desolate landscapes.

Neon’s many and varied uses make it difficult to pinpoint a single reason why it has such enduring fascination for artists and viewers alike. From transforming an otherwise featureless space to layering semantics with symbolism, it is perhaps its versatility – as well as its live beauty – that makes it so powerful. Richard Parry, curator of NEON, has the last word: “Neon is one of the most evocative mediums… It is a light that is designed to be seen rather than merely to illuminate.”


NEON: The Charged Line, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, 1 Sep 2016-7 Jan 2017

Blackpool Illuminations run 2 Sep-6 Nov

http://grundyartgallery.com/programme/forthcoming