March 17, 2004

C. Freeman’s NYC Outdoor Light Sculptures/ or the birth of ‘Guerrilla Neon’:

1982-1991

Preface:

Coming from a background of studio ceramics with a concentration of wheel thrown work.  Lighting an Alfred shale pit in the middle of upstate New York with the Neon hanging on the top edge of the shale (source of clay) to graze the surface with light.  The shale pit was pitch dark except for the Neon that was painted out for half the circumference of the tube. The piece was lit for an evening.  I had been making trips to NYC and wanted to explore the light and texture issue’s there, going from a country environment to an urban one.  Moving from the inside of my controlled ceramic/glass studio to the uncontrolled outdoors. Taking the same 100’ of Neon myself and a team of friends we suspended the 8’ Neon tubes on the wall that encases Central Park on Fifth Ave. at about 60th street.  The object was to get at the beautiful pock marks that are left in the stone work by the masons when the stone blocks were originally cut.  An aesthetic that is in my opinion taken for granted on a daily basis by the public.

What resulted was something entirely different.   There is so much ambient light in NYC there by the wall(street lights, traffic, etc.) that the subtleties that I was after were not able to be picked up from the light of the Neon.  I turned the tubes around 180 degrees to create a 100’ line of Light.  It took about a half hour to set up the piece, It was lit for about twenty minutes and then ten minutes to take it down.  The birth of Guerrilla Neon. 

 This piece and subsequent pieces that evolved from this first one became works of art that dealt with a certain set of criteria for me that evolved over the series of the work.

Guerrilla Neon light works criteria:

1.      To pick an Urban site that had something of beauty (one can find something of beauty in anything) that was unnoticed by the general public to expose with light.  Something that is other wise visually lost in man’s created environment.

2.      To highlight temporarily with light to change the form and one’s environment if only for a period of hours.

3.      To not put the public in harm’s way.

4.      To make the public think about/encounter a space that they would never have thought about/encounter in that way had I not done the piece.

5.      To leave the site completely as we had found it.

6.      The final work becomes the film itself since the mechanical work has a very short lifetime.

Guerrilla Neon works in chronological order:

1.      Fifth Ave. wall piece. 

December 1983, 100’ 12mm Neon in clear glass.

highlight stonewall pock marks by mason’s.  Piece becomes 1st one in the series after we turn the tubes around.  None of NYC public seems to take notice.  A couple of cabs slow down a little to look on Fifth Ave.

2.      “Hudson River Piece”, March 1984.  1200’  12mm Neon in Clear Glass outlining one of the rotten wooden piers down by twelfth street on the Hudson River.  Since nobody seemed to take notice of the wall piece I decided to go up in scale and pick another NYC site with a lot of public traffic.

Outcome:  One NYPD squad car parked at the base of the pier and observed us. They never got out of their car.  Some of the locals from the bars across the street came out to view.  Asked if this was going to be a new addition to the waterfront.  I explained that ‘No’ , one night only, enjoy it while it’s here.  A NYFD ladder truck and fireman stopped by after a false alarm up the river at another pier.  They asked me what I was doing and I explained it to them.  My mission statement, how the transformers were wired up, my portable generators.  I had twelve associate’s with me and we would keep the public away from the equipment while the piece was on.  When we strike the set you will never know we had been there.  My work was not about leaving any form of Art garbage.

Time of work:  Five hours to install the piece in it’s entirety (it was lit in increments of 400’).  Forty-five minutes to strike the set.

3.      Out of these early Guerrilla Neon works grew the Heller series. Doug Heller of Heller Gallery on Greene Street  was excited by the thought of these “Guerrilla Neon” pieces and lent me the use of the fire escape of his building to put up a temporary light sculpture. It gave way to the birth of three piece’s.

3a.) “4X4”, 1986, 160’ was the first.   With out the possibilities of having the authorities after us the element of time was more on my side and I wasn’t needing to be rushed.  With all this clear tubing pumped with the Neon gas (bright orange) from the previous pieces I  assembled “4X4” to accentuate the colonnade of this land mark building.  I thought of Neon in clear tubing as mono-chromatic Lego.  I could address any form with it.  I was not addressing the complexity of color in the early works.  Neon is the first Rare gas to be discovered in the atmosphere that has the ability to produce light when excited with high voltage electricity.

Piece duration: five months.

3b.)  “Color Bars” 1986,  was the second.  This was another turning point in the work for me.  I made a conscious  decision to address the issue of color as well as form with my outdoor Neon works.  “Color Bars” took the same façade and altered the previous vertical exploration w/Neon in clear glass to multiple colored glass(Ruby red, Cobalt Blue, Noviol Gold, etc.) highlighting both horizontal lines and diagonal lines of the same building facade at 71 Greene Street.  Piece duration: ten months.

3c.) “Graffiti on Greene Street”, 1987 was the third and last in the Heller Series.  This piece again was a turning point for me.  I would go to my Neon fires and with no pre determined measurements, patterns, etc. I would see what shapes I would create in the five or so seconds a Neon bender has to form the hot glass once it leaves the fire.  After years of using only straight lines I wanted to explore shape as well as color.  I found that my hands were making basically three different shapes from my subconscious.  With these shapes I let them tumble down the fire escape attached to ¾” 2’ X 4’  pieces of plywood painted black and bolted to the front of the fire escape.  This piece also makes a transition in that it doesn’t high light the columns of the architecture as the two former pieces had.

4.) After the building’s owner passed on and left the building to his son who wanted to know right away what this Neon  was doing on his building!!  I was also ready to go back out into the NYC landscape and create more work in the vein of “Guerilla Neon”. The immediacy and planning of a “Guerilla Neon” creates a certain energy that when time is not of the essence as in the Heller Series I did not feel.

“City Fence Central Park”,1989.  2’X4’X50’ comprised of four bands of 15mm Turquoise and Neo-Blue Neon.  Zig-Zagging in 8’ sections. I had done a Neon fence piece in Alfred and now it was time to bring it to NYC.  Using hues of blues and greens I constructed it for the first time in NYC in Sheep’s Meadow of Central Park.   After spending months on how to best design a freestanding fence armature that could be erected  and dismantled quickly we set off in the Fall I believe to install it.