New York’s Poet of Light and Letters

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Critic's Pick

"Chryssa & New York" at Dia celebrates the Greek American pioneer of neon innovation.

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By Max Lakin

There is a feeling of total bodily stimulation in Times Square — the visual excess of signage and language that ‌threatens to overwhelm you, the buzzing artificial light that can shake you upright. For Chryssa, the mononymous, ‌Athens-born artist, th‌at experience, on her first night in New York City in 1955, when she was 21 and still focused on painting, was catalytic. In its pulsating lights and screaming advertisements she saw profound poetry; as she put it to a reporter a decade later: "Times Square I knew had this great wisdom — it was Homeric."

Those few square blocks propelled her 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-had materials, ideas that the Pop artists and Minimalists would take another few years to get to, and that put her at the fore of the period's avant-garde. ‌

By 1961 Chryssa was exhibiting at the Betty Parsons Gallery and had a solo show at the Guggenheim. Two years later, she was part of "Americans 1963" at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg and Ad Reinhardt. But time has been unkind to her legacy. Like Agnes Martin, with whom Chryssa shared an intimate friendship and whose work too has only recently been reappraised, she slipped from the art world's consciousness. (It didn't help that the complexity of conserving 50-year-old wiring makes for a tougher sell than a tidy painting.) There hasn't been a major Chryssa exhibition ‌in this country since 1982, a breach happily cured by "Chryssa & New York," a survey organized by the Dia Art Foundation and the Menil Collection‌ that has opened at Dia's Chelsea gallery.

With 62 works, the show, curated by Megan Holly Witko of Dia and Michelle White from the Menil, does not mean to be exhaustive‌; ‌it nimbly survey‌s Chryssa's fluidity (in addition to her human-scale, electrified sculptures, there are examples in plaster, bronze, marble and terra-cotta) and argu‌es successfully for her place in art's firmament.

Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali was born in Athens in 1933 and grew up amid the Nazi occupation of Greece, where she recalled seeing the cryptic messages scrawled on walls by Greece's underground resistance, an introduction to the elastic potential of language that colored her work. Her wartime experience led her to become a social worker in the early 1950s, but she soon tired of government obstinacy.

She traveled to Paris, taking art classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and stalking museums, where she first encountered American art, attracted to what she viewed as its lack of history. America was, "I thought at the time, a country of barbarians," she said in a 1967 interview. "Self-expression was more possible." Chryssa's enchantment with the grime of Times Square was somewhat left-handed this way, alive to its beauty but not entirely romantic. She recognized in it the vulgarity of America, and took that as a kind of freedom — "How can you work next to the Parthenon?" she posed to a reporter in 1962.

Chryssa's practice connect‌ed with Minimalism's strategies of removing the artist's hand and using non-art materials. She often worked with glassblowers and welders, scavenging her materials from scrap yards and haunting the plumbing suppliers along Canal Street. But where her peers could be petulant (Dan Flavin despised being called a light artist, demeaning it as technofetishism) or myopic in rejecting the past, Chryssa approached the newness of her art with an openness that made room for classicism.

Chryssa's first blush with Times Square ignited an abiding fascination with the way language's delivery can be augmented, and her earliest work with light seeks to exploit its complicity in that process. ‌At Dia, her "Projections," sculptural arrangements of raised spikes that sprout from their cast aluminum surfaces, as if by photosynthesis, create ‌the suggestion of arrows, letters or the patterns of birds in flight. They riff on the ancient Greek advancements of the sundial, making natural light part of their deal, allowing ‌their surfaces to shift and dance as a viewer moves around them. Chryssa was after something similar with the‌ "Cycladic Books," serene white-plaster bas-reliefs, cast from the bottoms of cardboard boxes, that flatten the ancient Greek figures to which their title refers into literal tabulae rasae — books whose contents are smoothed into indecipherability.

Both series prod at the limits of language (the "Cycladic Books" are, hauntingly, mute), a concern that finds fuller expression in her series of newspaper prints, canvases densely stamped, often with old printing blocks Chryssa rescued from The New York Times, with the graphic information of a newspaper's columns, reproduced into ecstatic illegibility. (These were especially pacemaking; Andy Warhol debuted his silk-screens of repeating dollar bills in 1962, the year after Chryssa's Guggenheim show). The newspaper prints accumulate text to the point of collapse, an acknowledgment of language's paradox, its capacity to at once reveal and conceal. As she told a reporter in 1966, "I have always felt that when things are spelled out they mean less, and when fragmented they mean more."

That effect is wittily illustrated in "Times Square Sky" (1962), a writhing wall relief of clamoring aluminum letterforms suffocating one another. Floating at the top, inset in icy electric blue, is the word "air," as in the argon gas passing through the tube — a canny bit of self-reflexive wordplay that allows the piece to describe itself — and the familiar relief of pushing your way on 42nd Street into an inch of personal space.

Also here is "The Gates to Times Square" (1964-66), the artist's masterwork, a hulking paean to the city's street-level energy and the complete expression of her original encounter, which took ‌a decade to metabolize. "The Gates" condenses that thrum into a 10-by-10-foot exploded cube of stainless steel, plexiglass and neon tubing. It absorbs the very stuff of the city‌ — its slick modernist skyscrapers and tangles of scaffolding, the orderliness of its grid system‌ — but also its psychic effects: its vertiginous density, jumble of languages, and the cascading come-ons and entreaties of storefront signage. Newly restored, the sculpture buzzes in a far corner like an altar to some neon god, at once ominous and magnetic.

"The Gates" calls back to its heraldic forebears — the Lion Gate in Mycenae, Greece; Hadrian's Arch; the Brandenburg Gate; Shinto temple torii — as though you could access another realm by passing through its portal. (‌You could actually do this at its debut at Pace, in 1966, where the spacing of its four bisected monoliths was a bit more generous.) But like the newspaper prints, the torqued signage and neon lettering of "The Gates" is abstracted into uselessness, suggesting an articulation of the limitless possibilities of interpretation, maybe, or how infrequently we succeed in understanding one another.

At Dia, "The Gates" is attended to by smaller neon works that Chryssa considered studies‌ — coils of tubing set inside plexiglass boxes tinted the color of smoke, meant to recreate the particular behavior of Times Square light at night, the way its polluted haze remains suspended in air. One of the best of these, "Study for the Gates #2," exploits neon's seductive ‌power and inverts it, courtesy of a timer, cycling for what feels like an eternity (27 seconds) and blinking for a two-second gasp before throwing the whole thing back into darkness. What is revealed is hardly as important as being made to wait for it‌: a pile of wires and rheostats transformed into a sculpture that breathes in an endless night.

Neon is an effective metaphor for America: a shorthand for its technological advancement and its failure to produce progress, forfeited to market consumer products, an idea visualized by Times Square with disorientating efficiency. But while Chryssa was suspicious of mass communication, ‌she wasn't resigned to its inevitability. By dismantling language, she identified its obscuring methods and offered an alternative, surpassing its chaos with her own, freer grammar. "The Gates" can be viewed as a homage to Times Square but also an exit from it, an understanding that the only way out is to elbow your way through.

Chryssa & New York

Through July 23, Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-989-5566, diaart.org

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