A Times Square of the Mind

"We are flooded with light," says Gyorgy Kepes, M.I.T.'s professor of visual design. "We switch light on and off, send it where we will, and when we will, negate it. We project, reflect, fix, focus, chop, diffuse and scatter it. Why, then, are we not struck by the realization that the palette of a stupendous new civic art has been put in our hands?"

The palette may soon be even more stupendous, once laser beams can be used to produce full-color, three-dimensional images (see SCIENCE). Already neon lighting has freed some artists from pigment to experiment with pure colors that need not be squeezed from their tubes. So far, those who have tried out this plug-in Promethean palette have achieved mostly primitive op and pop effects. A few who are pioneering in the new art medium:

BILLY APPLE, 30, a New Zealander (real name: Barrie Bates) who works in Manhattan, believes "neon is the purest, hippest color in the world; Day-glo phosphorescent paint looks 1929-ish next to it." In Auckland, he wanted to be an engineer, now carefully varies the diameter of his neon tubes to produce different hues. Apple turned to art and working in a paint factory, he contracted dermatitis and a lasting dislike for turpentine. Even before he arrived at London's Royal College of Art, he says, he found his solution in electric colors. While experimenting with them, Apple learned to make highlights by bathing bronze objects in neon. The bronze tints are erased and only the fluid splash of reflected neon remains like a cloak of many colors.

sb MARTIAL RAYSSE, 30, is a Frenchman who, in his addiction to brightness, persuaded his wife to wear fluorescent-hued shoes. Then, he says, "I found neon. It is living color, a color beyond color. The pen and the brush are outdated." He thinks of himself not as pop or op but as "a neon-realist." Says he: "I want everything in my work to be good-looking and brand-new. If you draw a Picasso and put neon on it, you don't have anything new." Raysse has fallen in love with painting in light: "Neon most accurately expresses modern life; it is standard all over the world. With it, you can project the idea of moving color, that is, a sensitive movement without agitation." He tries to avoid using pure light simply to outline objects, letting a blue aura suffuse a red one, as in his Another Moment of Happiness, to produce a purply halo.

sb CHRYSSA, 33, a Greek-born artist (she does not use her last name) discovered the new medium when she arrived in New York in 1954, and was stunned by that acropolis of billboard communication, Times Square. "It was a garden of light," she says. That, combined with her native love of calligraphy, led her to study sign lettering, and soon to neon itself. "Neon is made out of a clear, light material--like glass buildings. Transforming the cultural world into the world of the laboratory, it brings art nearer to science." For her just-opened show in Manhattan's Pace Gallery, Chryssa made a 10-ft.-sq. chamber, analyzing the letter A in neon and stainless steel through which people can walk. It is titled The Gates to Times Square, and is an actual journey through a symbol of city lights and mass communication.

As a synthesis of street-scene pop and the cool world of science, Chryssa's Gates, like many other neon artists' works, is just a flickering glimpse of what pure light sources may someday offer when incorporated into art. Rembrandt depended on sunlight to unmask his carefully constructed layers of color. The impressionists struggled to depict in dabs of oils the natural light that bounced off haystacks into their eyes. Tomorrow's artists may ladle their color, at 60 cycles per second, right out of the rainbow.

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