Ved Prakash Bhardwaj
ATHENS.- Today, an artist is free from the restriction of mediums for expression. He uses many such materials in his art, which till yesterday were not accepted as art material. The neon light is also such a material. The glowing words and images of neon lights on the boards of shops and advertisements are used to attract people. Now artists are making this neon light the medium of their expression. Many artists have experimented with it, but there are only a few artists who have used the possibilities of neon light properly. One such artist is Douglas Gordon, whose solo exhibition has been organized by the Gagosian Gallery in Athens. Basically, creating words in neon light gives new life to many memories and ideas.
Douglas Gordon’s neon artwork is on display at Gagosian. The pieces were created in the on-site workshop Gordon set up for his exhibition at the gallery’s Davies Street, London, location in 2022, where craftsmen toiled to bend Murano glass tubing into short texts.
Gordon explores the distortions of time and space in human life, collective memory, and a sense of psychological security through films, videos and other installations, photographs, and other artworks. He often innovates by combining the work of other artists and filmmakers with his own work. For him, the works of art of others are like a series of timepieces; only by adopting them, we can understand our time properly. Since the 1990s, she has created text-based artworks, mostly in the form of vinyl wall-mounted displays, but in 1998 she used neon lights in an alleyway outside a Glasgow pub as an artwork.
In addition to being autobiographical, Gordon’s new neon works also evoke memories of childhood for many viewers who grew up in a similar environment. They also speak to the ways in which concepts and skills are developed, expanded, and connected. “Because it’s a gas,” he has said of neon itself, “and because it was discovered, not invented, it quickly became a byword or symbol for the very essence of discovery.” Gordon was captivated by neon’s blend of novelty and illicit splendour after first seeing illuminated signs in old movies and then experiencing the genuine thing in London’s Soho.
Each neon piece in the exhibition includes a “partner” that completes a well-known movie or song lyric that isn’t on display. The word “feeling” is borrowed from a Smokey Robinson song from 1968 that was popular when Gordon was in high school and was covered by the UK’s new wave band Japan in 1980. I Don’t Care I Don’t Care features a passage from both Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair” and the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” from 1986. (1994).
The exhibition also notes neon’s transformation from a common platform for commercial signs to a rare technology that has been surpassed by digital display. The alchemical nature of neon and its role in the history of modernism is in harmony with the gnomic verbal substance of Gordon’s works. Neon has a long and illustrious creative history, having been used by many artists, including Dan Flavin, Joseph Kosuth, and Bruce Nauman.
