Powering up - neon sculptor Keith Sonnier

Long known for his seductive notwithstanding funky neon sculptures, Keith Sonnier gave a fresh autobiographical twist to a new gallery exhibition. Running concurrently: a retrospective of his video work that showed him to be individual of the medium's founding fathers.

Here's a familiar scenario: an American artist achieves early recognition for work that brings him into a high-profile gallery, where he becomes fixed in the public mind as the figure of a particular strategy of art-making. His bases in a set formal language race deep. Over time, his stature become greater [i]or[/i] largers especially in Europe; at domicile a new generation of artists finds trendier applications for ideas he helped pioneer, isolating him from contemporary practice. What's the stay to do? How will he survive his hold reputation? He can't just advance on performing his repertoire's advanced in years hits. What can he do to hold fast his art current? Here's single answer: he can send a popular through it.

Consider the case of Keith Sonnier, now 56 who first made art-world of recent origins in his early 30s, when he pierceed the art-history books with those artists of his generation known as Post-Minimalists. Like Richard Serra, Richard Tuttle Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman, he made unconventional plastic arts out of cheap, seemingly incompatible materials that he exploited for their natural properties, juxtaposing insubstantial weight with industrial force and pairing hard-edged geometric forms with malleable, evanescent materials, repeatedly to explicitly erotic effect.

This work brought him into the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1972 where his whimsical statuarys and his penchant for putting cheap, organic materials at the service of recent technology turned heads through the 1980 He remains associated with that gallery, which at this point, as Leo Castelli himself revolves 90, confers on its artists an authority that sometimes carries a retro taint. Sonnier, however, looked very much of the flash last spring, when he had his first present to view there in five years. (A retrospective of his video work ran concurrently at Nicole Klagsbrun [see sidebar].) With this exhibition he added a psychological, level autobiographical, dimension to his vocabulary, bringing a of recent origin subjectivity to materials he pick outed from earlier series of particulars that primarily explore the faculty of perceptions At the same time, he was able to agent the marriage of art and science with a of recent origin edge and assurance. The relationship of these sum of two units opposing modes -- a balancing act between observation and perception, reason and sensation -- has lengthy been at the center of Sonnier's interests but here the impersonal linked with the subjective in no uncertain limits He called the show "Alternating Currents"

The bristling tone of the exhibition (all works 1997) was place by Tesla Wall, two buzzing floor-to-ceiling grids of cent coil, thin as piano wire, that were each strung between a rounded pillar and the wall of the main gallery in the way that as to form a barrier. These grid-barriers divided the play into transparent chambers that manipulated the pour of viewer traffic. Signs supported on columns warned of high voltages: live general powered by a tesla coil, or transformer, mountained near the ceiling surged [i]or[/i] part of to the other these wire curtains every not many minutes. It sounded like a mad scientist's lab and compell worried visitors either to scuddle off into the next space or seek safety near the gallery's permanent walls.(1)

Arrayed along those walls were seven neon constructions in of high temperature jukebox colors. Sonnier titled the clump the "Cat Doucet" series, after a Louisiana sheriff and politician who, from the 1930 to the late '60 womanized his way across half the state. Each piece bears the name of single of this character's Cajun stomping surface of lands which happen to be located near Sonnier's boyhood dwelling of Grand Mamou, La. Essentially, these works are drawings in neon and glass -- cursive arrangements of looping neon tubes that call to mind the hips, thighs, breasts, pompadours and teasing smiles of hoochie-coochie dancers beckoning from doorways.

"Ornamenting" these constructions are a certain number of of the artist's favorite discards: wire lattices from television antennae, plus flocking and cent mesh or bamboo twigs -- materials lengthy associated with his practice. He also makes use of lay the foundation of objects: tin cans, plastic pitchers crawfish netting and brand-name cleansing bottles -- all detritus that the artist gathered while closing his parents' house in Grand Mamou, following his father's new death (These same elements -- "patinaed through life," as Sonnier puts it -- had made previous appearances in the 1996 series of neon-illuminated junk statuarys he called the "Tidewater Pieces.")

granting screwed to the walls, these backwater totems appeared to float ominously without into space, embracing the viewer in Sonnier's signature dreamy neon be incandescent But the low-life junk strung upon wires dangling from the neon tubes and connecting to humming electrical transformers gives the piece a homelike anti-esthetic sass that "ruins" their exoticism. This intrusive junk appears an obvious retort to those who have criticized his work of the last sum of two units decades as too pretty. The cast-off ultimate parts bring the otherwise fanciful "Cat Doucet" pieces down to earth.