Mysteries of Neon

By ROBERT HUGHES

The neon tube, etching its innumerable messages across the skyline, is at least as familiar a sight to urban Americans as a tree or a dog. But not to a woman named Chryssa Mavromichaeli, when she arrived in the U.S. from Athens, age 21, in 1954. "I saw Times Square with its lights and letters, and it made me realize that they were as beautiful and as difficult to make as any Japanese calligraphy," she later recalled.

Taking a studio in Manhattan, Chryssa, as she came to be known professionally, produced Plexiglas, metal and neon sculptures and boxes with serried ranks and repetitions of forms based on lettering. They became familiar spectacles in Manhattan's galleries and museums during the '60s. Then, suffering from the blanket rejection of Pop art (with which it was vaguely and in fact wrongly connected), her work seemed to drop out of sight. As can be seen in her current show, which will travel from New York to Paris and Dusseldorf, her preoccupations remained constant and her sculptures became stronger than before.

Chryssa responds, she explains, to "ancient presences in contemporary commercial and industrial symbols. Times Square, I relate to Byzantine art; the background of the sky against the neon signs resembles the gold in the background of an icon." But Times Square is already a work of art which, like the Vegas Strip, cannot be mimicked in a gallery. No painting can be as immediate as a billboard. No artist, with a limited budget and space, can equal the circuitry and programming of a full-dress neon display. Knowing this, Chryssa prudently went into neon as fictive archaeology.

The result is a chimerical amalgam of cultures, as though Chryssa's eye had got ahead of the present and were looking back on Times Square from a vantage point as remote in time from it as ours is from ancient Greece. The neons still work, but they do so with fitful spareness; a cunningly formed squiggle lights up here or there, or a labyrinth of reversed and superimposed red letters glows inside a dark plastic box. They spell AUTOMAT, but in fact they defy reading. The signs have ceased to signify. They are fragments--not in the sense of being broken, but in the "historical" sense of archaic fragments: the illegible pictograph, the stone bearing a message in a dead language, the passage written in Minoan Linear B. The work is meant to suggest endurance--despite its dependence on paying the electricity bill.

What Chryssa extracts from modern commercial symbolism is not its vulgarity and blatancy. Rather she attempts to distill its cool independence as form. "The less I am in love with 'nature' and 'people,' the clearer is my work," she explains. Craftsmanship is part of her art, and Chryssa's work is constructed with a sort of fastidious anonymity that rarely wavers off into slickness: ineloquent hieroglyphs reflected to infinity within their polished, night-colored cases.

At times, Chryssa's work is prone to the weaknesses that bedevil a good deal of other technology-oriented art.

There is a dry repetition, a sense of being stuck with an unresponsive program. But at her best--as in That's all or the large and visually splendid Today's Special--she can give her apparently explicit light-sculptures an intense mystery, transforming the gallery space into a small Delos of the neon sign.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.