I’m no fan of fashion – Shakespeare once called it “a deformed thief” – but this season my covert scans of the glossy magazines are showing me a lot of neon. Neon is everywhere. Day-Glo hues have been elevated from safety vests to the gallery, and it’s not just because of the long-awaited summer season.
Day-Glo’s appearance in contemporary art is a sign of our times, even if those times are not easily definable. The allure of these colours in the past, and still today, is their ability to shake the viewer out of habitual modes of observation. Challenging the expectation of a well-lit art object, Day-Glo’s luminosity and black-lit environment dazzle and jolt. Duchamp’s installation of coal bags in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (1938) in Paris aspired to a similar outcome. Disturbing traditional modes of viewing art, visitors were supplied with flashlights and expected to move through a darkened gallery space. Likewise the 2008 Dark Art Fair at the Swiss Institute in New York offered an alternative art fair experience. In the dark, with bright neon hues bouncing off the walls, a casual, if not chaotic, atmosphere was encouraged- another reason why Day-Glo is worth thinking about- neon paint seems to bring it all down a notch. It’s accessible playfulness shifts it away from the usual art viewing experience. No matter what the subject being dealt with, one’s first perception is one of cheerful joviality.
The long history of Day-Glo can be traced all the way back to its invention in the 1930s by the Switzer brothers, Robert and Joseph. Their scintillatingly named neon range included Horizon Blue, Corona Magenta Saturn Yellow, Blaze Orange, Aurora Pink, Neon Red and Signal Green was soon picked up en masse; to name a few, magicians, hippies and the US Army. Day-Glo was first seen in the art world as a tool of Pop Art, but since then its meaning and the reasons for its uses have diversified. Contemporary artists have been appropriating the various historic uses of Day-Glo to suit their needs, and although it’s use is not necessarily new, it still comes off fresh and edgy (when used well, obviously).
Warhol’s silkscreens were almost all based on photographs and incorporate luminous colour as a device to examine the relationship between art and popular culture. Day-Glo’s synthetic appearance makes it a compelling visual tool for this investigation. Duplicating the image over and over again Warhol would vary only the colouring. Through this repetition meaning becomes vague while the image is systematically reduced to the realm of the cliché. As the viewer’s eye moves through the various reproductions, its links to reality seem to atrophy. Warhol is playing with the power of the sign, but also the power of plastic, exaggerated hue and mechanical process to create these signs and further remove them from the reality that they refer to. This is evocative of Plato’s ‘Myth of the Cave’ in The Republic, the story of a group of people imprisoned in a cave who stare at the back of their prison, watching projected shadows of the external world passing in front of a fire at the cave’s mouth. In order to see this world, the unprojected reality, all they need to do is turn around, but instead these shadows have become their truth, their reality. Day-Glo is not a colour often encountered in the natural world, it is, to reference Plato’s tale, the metaphorical shadow. By choosing to work with Day-Glo’s palette, Warhol, and many other artists today, profess not to represent reality, but rather to exaggerate it.
Warhol’s Day-Glo Flowers (1964) reference a long history of still-life flower painting spanning from as early as the Northern Renaissance, through to the Impressionists, and much later, Dali’s Meditative Rose (1958). He was also evoking the 60s era, possibly with a degree of irony; its Flower Power brightness that later became part of mainstream culture and highly merchandizable. Warhol then adjusted the imagery for screen-printing in the 1970s. Here he made use of the Day-Glo Corporation’s then-innovative new range of luminous pigments to make the flowers “pop”. The fluorescent colours in Day-Glo Flowers further reinforce their status as imitation, their unnatural brightness pushing as far away from the naturalness of its subject as possible. The colour distortion through the use of Day-Glo pigments causes the image to be more imposing and more ‘real’ than its primary.
The flowers were outrageous for their time. Warhol’s appropriation of photographic imagery and subsequent addition of manufactured and copyrighted paints showed an adroit combination of instruments of popular culture. Although markedly less pioneering, contemporary artists Ben Jones and Takeshi Murata replace Warhol’s silkscreens and photography with computer based media. Jones’ shockingly vibrant video projections use angular neon geometric forms clearly referencing a Pac-Manesque era, the plastic flatness of computer visuals emphasised by the plastic flatness of colour. Mass communication’s shift toward the digital is further explored by Murata’s luminous video fragmentations. Interfering with the video viewing experience he disrupts how a computer reads a DVD, in the process creating crazy, atypically toned imagery.
Through referencing graffiti and corporate design, Ryan McGinness also softens the boundaries between high art, design and mass communication (much the same way Warhol did in his time). Black-lit paintings such as Aesthetic Comfort (2008) (above) combine Graffiti, hieroglyphics, Art Nouveau organicism and gothic illuminated manuscripts at the risk of illegibility. McGinness does however succeed in creating his own overwhelmingly intricate symbolic language. His work offers the perfect site for a Day-Glo summation. Confronting the neon glow of Aesthetic Comfort is akin to experiencing the slew of advertising imagery and signage that we are exposed to on a daily basis. It reiterates Day-Glo as part of the toolbox of mass communication, aided by approachability and cheerfulness. Like in Warhol’s silkscreens, the unnaturalness of McGinness’ Day-Glo paint emphasises the artificiality of representation. Perhaps a bit of a leap, but the use of this exaggeration of natural colour challenges the naturalisation of imagery. This synthetic encounter is, however, taken one step further than it was in Warhol’s day. A black-lit space brings the otherwise latent Day-Glo to its full realisation offering a bright and weird experience that spruces up our habitual modes of viewing. Admittedly we’re a long way from neon nail-varnish, but one can’t help connecting notions of the artificial with ‘What’s hot this season’.
