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Flickering Light: A History of Neon, by Christoph Ribbat
PDF Download Flickering Light: A History of Neon, by Christoph Ribbat
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Neon signs illuminate modernity’s ambivalence. For some observers, they stand for crass commercialism; for others, they light the way to the vibrant heart of popular culture. Energized by this tension, Flickering Light explores neon’s technological and intellectual history, from the discovery of the noble gas in a late nineteenth-century London laboratory to its flickering career in the art spaces of our time.
This wide-ranging book discusses neon’s relevance for the cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno and the British rock band The Verve, for the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and the artist Tracey Emin, for the poet Langston Hughes and the singers of American country and western ballads. It shows how glowing advertisements, carefully sculpted by gifted craftsmen, brought elegance to western metropolises between the wars. It investigates how neon transformed a sleepy desert town called Las Vegas in the 1950s and ’60s. It demonstrates how writers, artists, and musicians, on the move in European, American, and Asian neon cities, turned the blinking lights and letters into powerful metaphors of our time.
And yet there is a melancholy tone to neon’s story, a note of failure. It was only a few decades after their invention that the fragile inventions were seen as dated and as characteristic of the most run-down and problematic neighborhoods of the modern city. Passing from neon spectacles to neon jungles, this book thus tells the story of a glowing tube’s decline – halted only by its most passionate admirers.
- Sales Rank: #1793719 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-06-25
- Released on: 2013-06-25
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“Flickering Light, Christoph Ribbat’s intriguing history of neon, explores neon’s use in art, its value in advertising, and its cultural legacy.” (Slate)
“Ribbat is particularly good at situating the novelty of neon within its larger historical context, elucidating how its development resonated with and reflected the shaping forces of the twentieth century.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
“Wide-ranging history of neon—both the gas and the signage—taking in everything from Nelson Algren’s pulpy novels of urban alienation, to East German adverts, to an obscure album track by The Verve. . . . Ribbat deserves credit for giving this intriguing and neglected subject the attention it has been crying out for.” (World of Interiors)
“Ribbat’s book is a concise and revealing history of this once maligned, now nostalgically fashionable lighting beloved of retro connoisseurs, and also considers neon’s place in modern art and popular music. Neon will never return to prominence, but it will continue to function as a romantic signifier of a rapidly disappearing form of urbanity.” (Reel Ink)
“Flickering Light describes not only the commercial development of neon—as advertising and signage—but more interestingly weaves around this its cultural influences as metaphor and inspiration for the writers, artists, and musicians who throughout the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries have made reference to it in their work.” (ArtReview)
“This survey of the century-old material is pleasingly unconcerned with reclassifying the greatest neon commercial signage as art, as if that were to somehow ennoble it. Presented against the work of neon artists such as Burce Nauman, Lili Lakich, and Dan Flavin, we see how the same material can be a means to different and equally satisfying ends.” (The Art Newspaper)
About the Author
Christoph Ribbat is professor of American studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Paderborn in Paderborn, Germany. Anthony Mathews is an associate lecturer at the Open University.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Glow, Glow Lost, Glow Regained
By Rob Hardy
It is hard to imagine our cities without neon lights; everyone is familiar with the neon glow in the hand-blown glass tubes. They are still around, but they are of another age. In movies, shots of neon signs of nightclubs date the film to the 1930s. Neon was ultramodern, and then became passé, and has now had a boom in nostalgia and avant-garde light art. _Flickering Light: A History of Neon_ (Reaktion Books) by Christoph Ribbat, a professor of American Studies in Germany, explores the use of neon in art and advertising and its surprisingly widespread cultural legacy. Neon is showy, but Ribbat's book (translated from the German by Anthony Mathews) is a sensible and, well, enlightening view of neon's many facets.
The noble gas neon was discovered in 1898, and Parisian chemist Georges Claude found ways to make glowing tubes of it a going commercial concern worldwide. "Cinzano" was spelled out over a Paris roof in 1913; the next year there were 160 neon signs over Paris, and by 1927, over 6,000. In the US, neon started in Los Angeles in 1923 when a car dealer purchased neon signs spelling out "Packard" in Paris for his store back home. It wasn't long before the roofs of service stations and other businesses were sporting neon. Neon crosses were erected over churches. Small businesses in small towns could afford the new signs, and in big cities, there were huge, animated versions. Then the glow faded. Ribbat draws on an astonishingly broad range of neon in popular and artistic culture. He reminds us that in _It's a Wonderful Life_ (1946), when George Bailey gets his vision of Bedford Falls as it would have been if he had never been, it is far from the little town heavily scented with sweet Americana. It is, instead, a riot of neon outside of bars and other stores eager to take the citizens' money. The signs that used to mean good times and modernity and that beckoned with their fashionable glow had instead come to convey sleaze. Neon found a new home in the revitalized Las Vegas, where it can still be found in profusion, although the old neon signs get taken down all the time; the good ones go to the Museum of Neon Art. New Journalist Tom Wolfe was excited by all the glow, describing the colors in the neon palette as "tangerine, broiling magenta, livid pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby, methyl green, viridine, aquamarine, phenosafranine, incandescent orange, scarlet-fever purple, cynic blue, tessellated bronze, hospital-fruit-basket orange." There was also a "new sculpture" movement in the sixties and seventies that relied on neon's electric glow. Artists sometimes made pictures with the tubes and sometimes frankly spelled out aphorisms or platitudes the way signs used to advertise beer. Neon, surprisingly, figures strongly in country music, part of the "honky-tonk" scene found in the city. A startling reflection: "There are two genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in which neon has really prospered: one is light art, the other is country music."
This sort of synthesis is what Ribbat is good at, calling on connections from Kraftwerk, Nelson Algren, Simon and Garfunkel, Nabokov, Chinatowns, _Blade Runner_, and much more. His chapters are essays on different aspects of the subject, with good illustrations (of which, of course, there ought to be more). Ribbat clearly shares the sentiments of neon fans, such as those in Queens who saved a huge 1936 Pepsi sign when it was dismantled in 2004. They lobbied successfully to have it put on top of a nearby apartment building, just because the glow of the neon meant something to them. Reading the essays here, teasing out all sorts of layers of meaning, that isn't at all surprising.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
An extensive history of neon, maybe too extensive...
By Dennis Bell
This is a pretty good book on the history of neon, but includes every possible reference to neon that was ever made in any book which was a little more than I bargained for. It does include information on the inventors of neon signage, and from it's discover as a gas that glows red when electricity arcs through it to it's extensive use in advertising and art. It also has lots of text on books where neon was only mentioned in passing, a lot of which I didn't find very interesting. Still, overall it makes for an ok read.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Okay, but I was rather disappointed.
By lyndonbrecht
I'm not sure how to describe this book. You will learn a good deal about neon, but may find it, as I found it, to be somewhat superficial and disappointing. The writing is reasonably good and the illustrations very good.
It does cover something of the discovery of neon as useful lighting. The book considers how neon light and ads have come to characterize a cityscape at night. There are plenty of references to various media, and of course neon is a media in and of itself. It's somehow still enjoyable but not of much substance.
I am used to better books from this publisher.
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