There is a feeling of total body stimulation in Times Square – the visual excess of signage and language that “threatens to overwhelm you, the buzzing artificial light that can shake you.” For Chryssa, the mononymous Athens-born artist, this experience, on her first night in New York in 1955, when she was 21 and still focused on painting, was catalytic. In its pulsing lights and blaring advertisements, she saw a deep poetry; as she told a reporter a decade later: “I knew that Times Square had this great wisdom – it was Homeric.” »
These few square blocks propelled his own series of experiments with electric light, neon, and industrial materials into dizzyingly beautiful wall reliefs of commercial sign fragments, interrogating consumerist ideology with easily obtainable materials , ideas that pop and minimalist artists would take a few more years to realize. arrive, which places it at the forefront of the time.
In 1961, Chryssa exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery and had a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim. Two years later, she participated in “Americans 1963” at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg and Ad Reinhardt. But time has not been kind to his legacy. Like Agnes Martin, with whom Chryssa shared an intimate friendship and whose work has only recently been reevaluated, she has faded from the consciousness of the art world. (It didn’t help that the complexity of preserving 50-year-old wiring made it a harder sell than a tidy board.) There was no major exposure of Chryssa in this country since 1982, a gap fortunately filled by “Chryssa”. & New York,” a survey organized by the Dia Art Foundation and the Menil Collection which opened at Dia’s Chelsea gallery.
With 62 works, the exhibition, curated by Megan Holly Witko of Dia and Michelle White of Menil, does not aim to be exhaustive; “he nimbly examines Chryssa’s fluidity (in addition to her life-sized electrified sculptures, there are examples in plaster, bronze, marble, and terracotta) and successfully argues for her place in the art firmament .
Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali was born in Athens in 1933 and grew up amid the Nazi occupation of Greece, where she remembers seeing the cryptic messages scrawled on walls by the Greek underground resistance, an introduction to the elastic potential of language which colored his work. Her wartime experience led her to become a social worker in the early 1950s, but she quickly grew tired of the government’s stubbornness.
She traveled to Paris, took art classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and wandered museums, where she discovered American art for the first time, drawn to what she considered her home. lack of history. America was, “I thought at the time, a country of barbarians,” she said in a 1967 interview. “Self-expression was no longer possible.” Chryssa’s enchantment with the grime of Times Square was somewhat left-handed, aware of its beauty but not entirely romantic. She recognized the vulgarity of America and considered it a kind of freedom: “How can you work next to the Parthenon? she posed to a journalist in 1962.
Chryssa’s practice is linked to minimalism’s strategies of removing the artist’s hand and using non-artistic materials. She often worked with glassblowers and welders, scavenging her materials from scrapyards and haunting plumbing suppliers along Canal Street. But where her peers could be irritable (Dan Flavin hated being called a light artist, reducing him to technofetishism) or myopic in their rejection of the past, Chryssa approached the novelty of her art with an openness that made way for classicism.
Chryssa’s first experience with Times Square sparked a lifelong fascination with how the transmission of language can be augmented, and her early work with light seeks to harness her complicity in this process. At Dia, his “Projections,” sculptural arrangements of raised points that grow from their cast aluminum surfaces, as if by photosynthesis, create “the suggestion of arrows, letters, or patterns of birds in flight.” They draw inspiration from ancient Greek advances in the sundial, incorporating natural light into their offering, allowing “their surfaces to move and dance as the viewer moves around them.” Chryssa was looking for something similar with the “Cycladic Books”, serene white plaster bas-reliefs, cast into the bottom of cardboard boxes, which flatten the ancient Greek figures referred to in their title into literal tabulae rasae – books whose content is smoothed into indecipherability.
Both series push at the limits of language (“Cycladic books” are hauntingly silent), a concern that finds fuller expression in his series of newspaper prints, densely stamped canvases, often with old blocks of paper. The impression that Chryssa saved from the New York Times. , with the graphic information of newspaper columns, reproduced in ecstatic illegibility. (These were particularly thought-provoking; Andy Warhol debuted his screen prints of repeated dollar bills in 1962, the year after Chryssa’s show at the Guggenheim). Newspaper prints accumulate text to the point of collapse, a recognition of the paradox of language, its capacity to both reveal and conceal. As she told a journalist in 1966: “I have always thought that when things are stated they mean less, and when they are fragmented they mean more.” »
This effect is humorously illustrated in “Times Square Sky” (1962), a writhing wall relief of screaming aluminum letters drowning out each other. Floating at the top, inlaid with an icy electric blue, is the word “air”, as in argon gas passing through the tube – a clever play on words that allows the piece to describe itself – and the familiar relief of pushing your way down 42nd Street into an inch of personal space.
Also here is “The Gates of Times Square” (1964-66), the artist’s masterpiece, a grandiose hymn to the energy of the city street and the complete expression of his original encounter, which took a decade to metabolize. “The Gates” condenses that noise into a 10-by-10-foot exploded cube made of stainless steel, Plexiglas and neon tubes. It absorbs the very essence of the city – its modernist skyscrapers and its tangles of scaffolding, the order of its grid system – but also its psychic effects: its dizzying density, its jumble of languages, and the calls in cascade and the entreaties of storefront signage. . Recently restored, the sculpture hums in a distant corner like an altar to a neon god, both menacing and magnetic.
“The Gates” recalls its heraldic ancestors: the Lion Gate at Mycenae, Greece; Hadrian’s Ark; the Brandenburg Gate ; Torii of the Shinto temple – as if you could access another kingdom through its portal. (You could actually do this in its early days at Pace, in 1966, where the spacing of its four bisected monoliths was a bit more generous.) But like the newspaper prints, twisted signage and neon letters of “ The Gates” are abstract into pointlessness, perhaps suggesting an articulation of the limitless possibilities of interpretation, or how rarely we manage to understand ourselves.
At Dia, “The Gates” is accompanied by smaller neon works that Chryssa considered studies — spools of tubes placed inside Plexiglas boxes tinted the color of smoke, intended to recreate the particular behavior of the light of Times Square at night, the way its polluted haze remains suspended in the air. One of the best of them, “Study for the Gates #2”, harnesses the seductive power of neon and reverses it, thanks to a timer, by cycling for what seems like an eternity (27 seconds ) and blinking for two seconds before throwing. everything returns to darkness. What is revealed is not as important as having to wait for it: a pile of wires and rheostats transformed into a sculpture that breathes endless night.
Neon is an effective metaphor for America: shorthand for its technological progress and inability to produce progress, confiscated in favor of the marketing of consumer products, an idea visualized by Times Square with disorienting effectiveness. But even though Chryssa was wary of mass communications, “she was not resigned to its inevitability. In dismantling language, she identified its obfuscating methods and offered an alternative, overcoming its chaos with her own freer grammar. “The Gates” can be seen as an homage to Times Square but also as an escape from it, the understanding that the only way out is to make your way through it.
Chryssa and New York
Through July 23, Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-989-5566, diaart.org