Flickering Light
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Flickering Light

A History of Neon

Christoph Ribbat, Mathews Anthony

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eBook - ePub

Flickering Light

A History of Neon

Christoph Ribbat, Mathews Anthony

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About This Book

Without neon, Las Vegas might still be a sleepy desert town in Nevada and Times Square merely another busy intersection in New York City. Transformed by the installation of these brightly colored signs, these destinations are now world-famous, representing the vibrant heart of popular culture. But for some, neon lighting represents the worst of commercialism. Energized by the conflicting love and hatred people have for neon, Flickering Light explores its technological and intellectual history, from the discovery of the noble gas in late nineteenth-century London to its fading popularity today. Christoph Ribbat follows writers, artists, and musicians—from cultural critic Theodor Adorno, British rock band the Verve, and artist Tracey Emin to Vladimir Nabokov, Langston Hughes, and American country singers—through the neon cities in Europe, America, and Asia, demonstrating how they turned these blinking lights and letters into metaphors of the modern era. He examines how gifted craftsmen carefully sculpted neon advertisements, introducing elegance to modern metropolises during neon's heyday between the wars followed by its subsequent popularity in Las Vegas during the 1950s and '60s. Ribbat ends with a melancholy discussion of neon's decline, describing how these glowing signs and installations came to be seen as dated and characteristic of run-down neighborhoods. From elaborate neon lighting displays to neglected diner signs with unlit letters, Flickering Light tells the engrossing story of how a glowing tube of gas took over the world—and faded almost as quickly as itarrived.

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Year
2013
ISBN
9781780231273

1 READING NEON

A Call from Rattlesnake Gulch

The town seemed to be burning. The telephone rang at the fire department headquarters in Missoula, Montana, way out on the American prairie. A man was calling from Rattlesnake Gulch, 26 km away. He reported a glow right over Missoula; he was so beside himself that the fireman had trouble calming him down. Then he asked the caller whether what he thought was a blaze was long and rectangular. When he said it was, the fireman assured him that it was not flames lighting up the night but the neon sign of the Florence Hotel in Missoula. It had turned the night sky red in that year of 1928.1
In its natural state neon gas is unremarkable, without colour or smell, something for the chemist rather than firefighters. Its symbol in the periodic table is Ne. Its density is 0.838 g/l; its boiling point –246.08 degrees centigrade. Like helium, argon, krypton, xenon and radon, it is one of the ‘noble’ gases that are derived from air and which British scientists identified in the late nineteenth century. These gases are called ‘noble’ because, like noble metals, they resist chemical reaction. For a long time scientists thought that it was impossible for them to combine with other elements. This theory was, however, disproved in 1962. In French they refer to gaz rare rather than gaz noble since in the air we breathe neon amounts to only 0.00046 per cent.2
The neon signs associated with modernity are less rare: those tubes all over the world shining out over hotels, bars and casinos or advertising the sale of beer. It all started in Paris in 1912, when the first-ever neon advertising sign lit up a barber’s with the words ‘PALAIS COIFFEUR’. Then it was the turn of the ‘FAHRSCHULE VIENNA’ to get this kind of advertisement, for the Vienna Driving School. ‘STAR NOODLE FRIED SHRIMP’ in Ogden, Utah, was similarly promoted, as was ‘CARTA BLANCA’ beer in Mexico City. In East Germany, the state-owned ‘EISENHÜTTENKOMBINAT J. W. STALIN’ (J. W. Stalin Ironworks Combine) lit up Communist nights in neon – at least for a while. At the Gare du Nord, the same sort of lights held out the prospect of ‘PARIS À LIÈGE 367 KM EN 4 HEURES SANS ARRÊT’, and in Hong Kong they made it easier to find the ‘RAM LUNG NIGHT CLUB’ and the ‘ITALY FRANCE JAPAN FOOD PLAZA 24 HOURS’. In Schöneberg, Berlin, people were likewise reminded about ‘BESTATTUNGEN KLUTH’ (Kluth Funerals).3 It’s worth noting that English uses the general term ‘neon lights’ for all fluorescent light tubes, even when these are filled with other gases (argon produces violet, helium pink, xenon pale blue and krypton silvery white, while a mixture of mercury and argon radiates blue).4
The uniquely designed tube that is blown by mouth and shaped by hand became an advertising medium, an element of architecture and eventually a favourite material for installation artists. It has played a highly individual role in the whole story of modernity. It challenges what countless cultural critics have been saying in the last few decades about how, in the course of the twentieth century, our culture has become increasingly less concerned with the material object and with human agency. For a time it seemed as if every new technology and every new medium would make our everyday existence more artificial, more remote from the body and from objects. For historians this process began during the heyday of modernism, during the early years of the cinema, fluid architecture and flickering advertisements.5 In the era of artificial lighting and illuminated signs the city was becoming more and more superficial and theatrical, clamouring for more and more effects.6 Going along with the ideas of a thinker like Guy Debord, one could read the flashing light shows as part of the overall hypnotization of passive consumers, continually dazzled by light in a capitalist ‘society of the spectacle’.7 From this perspective the postmodern metropolis represents a ‘fantasy city’ dedicated to nothing but pleasure and sales gimmicks. It has its roots (if it has roots) in the period when illuminated advertisements first transformed the streets.8
image
Erecting a neon sign, Fargo, North Dakota, c. 1940.
A closer look at the handmade neon tube, however, discloses a technology of modernity which did not turn everyday life into a virtual reality. On the contrary, it created a new craft product. This was not made in anonymous, automated factories but in down-to-earth workshops where glass blowers and sign writers produced these new signs using their breath, mouths and hands and all their own acquired knowledge and skill. Contrary to the blatant scorn heaped upon the flashing of advertising slogans by cultural critics and theorists, neon workshops reveal the kind of characteristics described by Richard Sennett in his study The Craftsman: artisans using both head and hand, mind and material.9 The neon signs they created, often unique objects of exceptional originality, shine out as representative of a form of creativity, of craftsmanship. The philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly argue that well-made objects create meaning in a secular world – since creative engagement with the material brings out the best in the human being.10 From this point of view the history of neon stands out against the overly pessimistic story of the ongoing dematerialization of our cities and the virtualization of our everyday life. The letters glowing in the dark may seem to be disembodied, as if capitalism itself was emblazoned across the sky, but in fact the neon tube brought the handmade object back into the city. And indirectly to Rattlesnake Gulch, too.

The Most Beautiful Pig in Winnemucca

In March 2004 Vera Lutter, a 44-year-old from Munich, climbed up every morning on to the roof of a Pepsi factory in the borough of Queens, New York, heading for a shed there. The wooden structure, 2 m wide and 3 m high, had been built by the artist herself. She had drilled a hole measuring 2 mm in its front wall. On arrival in the morning she spread out three sheets of highly sensitive paper on the back wall inside. After four hours she took them down again and transported them in a totally light excluding container to her studio in Manhattan.
The artist had set up the shed as a camera obscura in order to record the dismantling of a neon sign. The words ‘Pepsi-Cola’ had shone out in red over the East River, almost unchanged, since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Harshly glowing tubes were mounted on the steel letters of flowing handwriting. In the dark they concealed the metal construction behind them. They appeared to be floating in the night air over Queens. Now all this was being removed. And Vera Lutter did not want to miss a single moment of the work in progress. ‘First they took the bottle down, then the P, E, P, S, and I – and then the hyphen’, the artist recalls. Her observation of the process led to the series of images, ‘The Deconstruction of Pepsi-Cola’.11 It consists of non-reproducible originals: the photographic papers of the camera obscura on the factory roof. But the neon writing itself was a unique original for the artist, an object possessing what Walter Benjamin calls ‘aura’, the passing of which appears to be celebrated by her images.
The success story of neon is short. This advertising technique spread throughout the world in the 1930s, dwindling in the benighted Europe of the war years. In the post-war period it saw a short revival, until by the 1950s and ’60s it began its unstoppable decline, replaced by backlit plastic structures that were becoming considerably easier to use, more flexible and more durable than fragile glass.12 For a long time the brightly coloured tubes were not seen as signs of innovation and commercial success, particularly in the United States. They became the typical advertising medium for those cheap, rather run-down bars, hotels and restaurants which could not afford brand-new advertising displays. Then, between the 1950s and ’70s, Las Vegas developed into a neon oasis. In that period its casinos went in for spectacular innovations in order to attract gamblers. A later flowering sparked by the enormous success of contemporary light art brought about a revival of interest in these glowing letters and signs. But even this postmodern renaissance was marked by a desire to rescue a dying technology from obscurity. Thus Vera Lutter’s photographs of the slow disappearance of the P, E, P, S and I appear to fit seamlessly into the gloomy story of neon advertising, with its short rise up to the heights and its long decline.
But Vera Lutter was not the only one hooked on that piece of writing on the East River in the spring of 2004. Instead of being all for the dismantling of an advertising symbol of a worldwide con sumer product, various politically active New Yorkers campaigned to keep the advertisement. For a while it sparked heated political debates over town planning issues. Citizens wrote letters and signed petitions, discussions took place and involvement escalated until the sign’s supporters got their way. This New York City landmark was saved and the letters were reinstalled some hundred metres from their original location. There the lights shine still, just as in Roosevelt’s time.
The demise of neon has met with similar counter-reactions on a number of occasions. In the late twentieth century various American cities experimented with preserving their traditional bright lights. Neon museums, coach tours and tax concessions for the renovation of advertisements with cultural significance all served to save the most popular of the urban icons. Despite the fact that the advertising industry always preferred the most up-to-date and cheapest of techniques, fans of sophisticated neon lights were passionate in the struggle to preserve them.13 Supporters were also fighting to save a trade skill. In 1950s Philadelphia, for example, there were still around 40 neon producers at work blowing, shaping and filling the glass tubes. By 1989 the city only had six of these specialists left and five of them were old enough to be retired. This state of affairs prompted collectors and conservationists to take over the threatened workshops.14
On both coasts of the United States there were quite enthusiastic fans of neon. None of them were more active than Rudi Stern, the painter who had studied under Hans Hofmann and Oskar Kokoschka and developed psychedelic light shows for the LSD guru Timothy Leary in the 1960s. In 1972 Stern set up a New York City gallery called Let There Be Neon. He also produced a lavishly illustrated eponymous volume outlining a history of the topic. In the book he hailed neon lights as a form of folk art that needed to be championed alongside the claims of sculpture.15 In one particular interview Stern announced that he had plans for ‘neon sidewalks, neon highways, neon tunnels, neon on bridges and under water’. Even his first daughter’s name was part of the project: Stern named her Lumiùre.16 On the West Coast, in Los Angeles, the light artist Lili Lakich founded the Museum of Neon Art in 1981. It was designed to be ‘the Disneyland of the Fine Arts’, showing off the spectacular light effects of neon art along with the practical skill of their producers.17 For the historian Michael Webb, neon activists like Lakich and Stern are part of a general cultural movement of the 1970s and ’80s that brought colour, ornament and glamour back into architecture.18 Among them was the Austrian Dusty Sprengnagel, who in the late twentieth century was always off on his travels in search of the bright lights. Sprengnagel captured the best of neon advertising around the world on his camera. At nightfall, he wrote in 1999, the cities of the world reveal themselves. They turn into a ‘dark playground for shining dragons, cowboys, fish, lobsters, palms, naked bodies’.19 Sprengnagel’s illustrated volume Neon World shows the results of such games. Its pages reveal a world of shining advertisements reaching all the way from Las Vegas to Bangkok. (The last part of the book consists largely of advertising for Sprengnagel’s own neon productions – but that is part and parcel of the world of neon.) His colleague Rudi Stern called Sprengnagel a sort of ‘neon archaeologist’, documenting an ‘electric Pompeii for future visitors to our planet’.20
Many neon fans prefer to stay local rather than global in search of neon lights. In the 1970s Sheila Swan and Peter Laufer, a married couple living in Nevada, set out to explore their home state in a quest to scout out neon art. In the little town of Elko, Swan and Laufer found an advertisement for Shorty’s Club which put a caricature of the somewhat vertically challenged owner of the bar up in lights. It even remained there long after Shorty had sold his club to a slightly taller entrepreneur.21 In Winnemucca, halfway between the towns of Reno and Jackpot, Laufer and Swan came across a neon pig with wings, on the Flyin’ Pig Bar-B-Q. It switched on and off in such a way that the hog pictured in blue neon lights appeared to take off on its yellow wings...

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