Excerpt from UNCLAIMED BAGS WILL BE DESTROYED by John Kelsey

NEON SIGNS

A Chinatown storefront advertises its neon signs business with a window full of neon.  Traffic and the air are heavy at 3:00pm., and in bright pink and green, a neon sign that says "neon signs." Is downtown New York in the middle of the day a good image of the unconscious?  It's not easy to fade out here, and nothing is intermittent.  Everything is doubled and tripled and even comes with a soundtrack.  Two artists, unbeknownst to each other, have made blacked-out neon signs this year.  You can still read the letters but their light is gone, and the black seems even blacker when it paints out a light.  Neon art is nothing new of course, but how can we not keep coming back to it?  And what did Benjamin say about electric street signs...it's not the sign itself that's so powerful, but its infinite reflection in the street puddles?  Benjamin also wrote about the shock value of interruption in an age that is poor in experiences.  Interruption is a technical strategy that opens up a gap between represented action and the action of representation.  It is only by interrupting action that gestures are revealed.

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