Plugged In Art and Electric Light (Photo – nortonsimon.org)
“Good Old Neon” is a story by the late David Foster Wallace, and when I first read that title, I thought it was ironic and humorous. However, after seeing Plugged In: Art and Electric Light at the Norton Simon Museum, I’m not so sure that nostalgia isn’t an appropriate response.
By Garrett Rowlan
Perhaps it’s because the artwork in the exhibition is from the late Sixties, and while it’s not entirely accurate to say the works celebrate Pax Americana, certainly the pieces in Green Shirt by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) linger on the shores of nostalgia. The neon-rendered bicycle, the green shirt, and the tie with psychedelic slashes among other shapes—rendered in colors that catch the eye—are like fragments of a collective memory returning in brilliant bits and pieces.
The nearby, parallel grids of lit tubes by Dan Flavin (1922–1996) suggest a power both raw and refined, as if form follows some function whose nature is unknown but which embraces the marshalling of forces both ancient and modern. I sensed in his works a postwar energy that required a purity of design, like nuclear rods glowing within the cooling water of a reactor.
If these works suggest a new kind of optimism or power, the two “Untitled” pieces by Robert Irwin (1928–2023), consisting of two large discs—one of aluminum and one of transparent acrylic—hint at some kind of ambiguity. Perhaps it’s the shadows cast backward from four lamps positioned at four angles. These wall-captured shadows lurk behind the pristine surfaces, a beveled shading that hovers on the verge of metaphor, the suggestion of darkness hiding behind the polish.
Located in Norton Simon’s nether floor, the exhibition is accessed through a collection of statues celebrating the Buddha, reminding us that while gods have different shapes and names, they are all one underneath the museum roof.
The exhibit closes on February 17.
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