The High Life: Billboards in Los Angeles

Over the past couple of months, West Hollywood's MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Shindler House has been celebrating billboards all over Los Angeles in one special way: Handing the space over to artists and letting them create the message. The art center says of this unusual experiment, "The sudden existence of artistic speech mixed in with commercial speech provides a refreshing change of pace." It distinguishes billboards as a product of the country's "aggregate of dynamic histories," of combined pop culture and commercialism, and says its billboards provoke one "to look and think."

This exhibition, "How Many Billboards? Art in Stead," remains with only a few of its original 20 still on view throughout the Beverly Hills and Culver City area; and a show book is scheduled to debut in June.

As a relative to ubiquitous Los Angeles palm tree, billboards are more equal counterparts to neon signs for its role and commercial purpose in the vast urban landscape. If you love the bright lights of neon, then "How Many Billboards? Art in Stead" is something to explore. Below, a brief list of billboards that remain from this exhibition.

Artist-scholar Ken Gonzales-Day's board sits on Olympic Blvd. west of Gramercy Pl. (close to Wilshire Center) and reminds how much of present-day visuals come from the past. [Photo Source: MAK Center]

Artist Kerry Tribe's billboard makes us dream-bound on La Brea Ave., north of Venice Blvd. [Photo Source: MAK Center]

Kenneth Anger gets to the point on Beverly Dr., north of Pico Blvd. [Photo Source: MAK Center]

Discovering Light in L.A.'s Museum of Neon Art

BRIGHT Finding the Museum of Neon Art in downtown L.A.

It's bright. It's dark. It buzzes and glows. It's one of its kind. It's in our city. And it's all about neon.

Nestled in the hip, cultural epicenter of the Arts District in downtown L.A., the Museum of Neon Art (136 W. 4th Street, Los Angeles; 213-489-9918), of MONA for short, has hosted a number of exciting exhibits in the electrical medium of neon art introducing artists who work with bringing light to new life forms. The museum expands its mission twofolds with another objective in mind: to save old, vintage neon signs around town that are otherwise headed for the dumpster. MONA has been restoring what they find since its founding year of 1981, when locally-based neon artist Lili Lakich and scholar Richard Jenkins opened doors at a Warehouse District studio space, where Lakich operates today.

Two years later in 1983, MONA sent its first traveling exhibition to the bright city of Tokyo with a show called "Seibu." More, outgrowing its original location on Traction Ave., it headed to Universal Citywalk in 1991, which seems like an open-air neon gallery today for anybody who visits because of its lovely excess of neon signs.

Most recently MONA celebrated a fundraising banquet at the tune of the internationally famous Circque du Soleil, Cirque du Neon. For the summer, the museum will hit the streets for its 12th season of its award-winning MONA Neon Cruises. In the near future, fans can expect the museum to find a new address. Word is, its lease has expired and it's looking for a new home.

Made in the Dark: Neon Workshop with Lili Lakich

HANDS ON Artist Lili Lakich at work in her L.A. neon studio.

Neon sculpture artist Lili Lakich's downtown studio is a candy land of color and visions. When in workshop season from mid-February to late April, her studio unfolds into a double-faced playing field, where a small group of students gather for lessons on the history and basics of neon, the artistic designing process, picking colors (Lakich's favorite part) and then hands-on assembling sessions. When that's all over, the working tables and drill tools sweep back into their hidden compartments, and her illuminated sculptures return to the forefront, only now being witness to the multiplication of neon art.

Lakich's collection of work spans over four decades and covers a spectrum of themes. She's captured the unique attention of light-frenzied art houses around the world, having solo shows from Paris to Tokyo. Locally, she was the founding director of the Museum of Neon Art in the downtown Arts District. She has also worked on a few, fabulous eye-popping for-public-display pieces. Her studio sanctuary—neighboring a Jonathan Gold hangout, the Wurstkuche; a cool architect school; and a wacky warehouse down the way—is open around the clock and proves how neon is still hip and here to stay. And it all makes Lakich the most exciting teacher anywhere for the course.

Her current Neon Workshop students—including a filmmaker, former art school teacher, and a handful of local sign makers, to name a few—just wrapped up their 8-week session with Lakich. Now they're ready to show off their casino housings and exceptional wiring—a show not to miss for the curious and stalwart art aficionados, and all friends and family of the students. There will be everything from a beginner's whimsy self-portrait, to Lakich's iconic sculptures on display at her Traction Avenue studio.

Neon Workshop Exhibition Saturday, May 1 2 - 5 p.m.

The Studio of Lili Lakich 704 Traction Avenue, L.A. 90013

WORK IN PROGRESS Students in Lakich's studio finishing projects.

A GLIMPSE AT THE NEON-BENDING PROCESS...

As a student of the workshop, I admit that a huge dose of inspiration for this blog came directly from being surrounded by Lili and her colorful, buzzing neon sculptures for several weekends in a row. When I learned that our neon-bending work would be outsourced, I immediately took my glass tubes and design patterns to my father's company, San Pedro Electric Sign Company, a South Bay business known for its exceptional work in custom neon for over 35 years.

DIRECTIONS (top to bottom) My dad, Gus Navarro, the head of SPESCO, gave me the idea to make a sign of my face, so I outlined it and came up with the sign pattern. / Francisco, SPESCO's glassblower/neon-bender handled all my TechnoLux glass. He works in a dark neon shop (it's better to see the light in a dark room) full of glass tubes and fire torches. / My jaw! / Lighting up my pink, velvety lips. / Neon glass is delicate and cools off fast. Neon-bending becomes a process of slow and fast work.

The completed work of my self-portrait will be on display at the Neon Workshop exhibition (details above) with the rest of my classmates who learned the exciting art of NEON.

You Can Bet on It: 'Learning from Las Vegas'

"We shall be analyzing and categorizing the signs of Las Vegas by content and form, by function (night and day) and location as well as by size, color, structure and method of construction, trying to understand what makes the 'Las Vegas style' in signs and what we can learn from them about an impure architecture of form and symbols. A stylistic analysis of Las Vegas signs would trace the influence of the greats (the designers in YESCO) through to the minor architecture of wedding chapels and sauna baths, compare the national and general sign imagery of the gasoline stations with the unique and specific symbolic imagery of the casinos, and follow the influence patterns back and forth between artists and sign makers."
— Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

Standard practice dictates that signage on any property is a precise, calculated dividend of total property square footage. City planners in Los Angeles, for example, have stuck to this formula since the young days of artist Ed Ruscha (pronounced “Ru-Shay”), which sparked his series of books (published in the '60s) chronicling the city’s mundane, repetitive architecture—Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Some Los Angeles Apartments. When high-brow architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown got the hint, they set their path to study Las Vegas in a similar fashion.

Their manifesto, as sampled above, suggested they sought great answers to what made Las Vegas rich in image and allure. Most surprisingly, however, they found Las Vegas was doing exactly what Los Angeles had been doing for so long, but to maximum degrees: empowering its car-bound visitors by building space according to car paths. In contrast to Los Angeles, however, Las Vegas' strength resided in the city's uniform effort in building the biggest, most meaningful signs. Cities worldwide—like L.A., New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo—would strive mimicking the Las Vegas way in future years (or present day), which is why this Venturi and Scott Brown exhibition is fascinating. In the show, over 100 photos and a handful of studies reveal "sign scientists" building sign models, the inspiration to some of the boldest colors and designs, charts examining the thorough sign makeup to every hotel landscape, and so much over-the-top glittering goodness more. VIVA LA SIGNS!

VIDEO: "Las Vegas by Car, 1968" [press play below]

LEARNING (top to bottom) Museum-goers enjoying MOCA's "Learning from Las Vegas." / A photo from the exhibition of a quick sign sketch. / Like Ed Ruscha, architects Venturi and Scott Brown snapped shots of car-bound scenic space in Las Vegas. / An interesting photo in the exhibition, of sign models in observation.

Explore Venturi and Scott Brown's Las Vegas in "Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown." Now in exhibition view through June 20 at MOCA Pacific Design Center.

Lighting the Way: Neon

LOCAL LANDMARKS (top to bottom) A view from the US-101, looking onto neon-buzzing Hollywood skyline. / Larry Albright's crackle tube, as found in one of neon artist Lili Lakick's sculptures. / Huge "SPACE" letters from Space 15 Twenty, on North Cahuenga Blvd. / A light-scenic view onto Hollywood's Vine Ave. showing Patron, Hollywood & Vine and the Taft Building, lit in neon. / A TechnoLux sample suitcase, pictured in Lili Lakich's neon studio. / Fluorescent, neon-looking lights fixed in an empty Sunset Blvd. storefront.

Light alone has developed its share of good and bad. It would be a logical assumption to see struggle in associating those sharp, bright neon lights with any exceptional claim to beauty. But the hundred-year-old-plus medium still has its great followers and admirers, like neon artist and historian Don Concannon, who exercised his praise to a group of Southern California sign industry moguls during a California Sign Association meeting last month.

"Their elegant lines in shocking colors... Their garish sense of humor... How the colored lights penetrate the night so perfect... Go neon!" he went on excitedly. Similarly, neon artist Larry Rivers shared his view in the iconic 1979 book, Let There Be Neon. “Neon has gaiety, joy, pageantry. Circus qualities. I like it story-telling, information-giving qualities. The fact that it has to do with the night distinguishes it from all art forms. The canvas is the night.”

To briefly explain, neon is a chemical element extracted straight from the air and used as a gas pumped through glass tubes, producing (in its natural state) the ubiquitous red-orange glow we see everywhere. Tube manufacturers around the world, like EGL, TechnoLux and the now defunct Voltarc, have long produced tubes of varying colors, intensity and diameters by either coating or tinting them with color, or lining the inside with rich phosphorus powders. Another rare gas used just like neon is the wondrous blue argon, known as “The Lazy One” for its heaviness and lower resistance.

Add electricity, and viola. NEON.