Glass Graphics: The Joy of Signs
by Bill Concannon
Remarks delivered to the Glass Society conference,
Portland, 2008

Here are some observations about why I like the work that I do and how I find meaning it. I am not talking of my work as a neon sculptor but about my day job as someone who makes neon signs. While what I will talk about is very personal I know from talking to other neon artisans that my experience is not that different from theirs.

I came of age in the midwest and of course neon signs were there both on Michigan Avenue where my father’s office was and in the small sleepy suburb where we lived. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a place where there were no neon signs--to me they seem ubiquitous. When I was sixteen our family moved to Los Angeles and I attended Hollywood High School. There was a lot of neon in Hollywood. Shortly after coming to LA my father took the family to Las Vegas and seeing those huge moving walls of color for the first time I was reminded of the rock ‘n roll light shows of the era. After college at U.C. Riverside, where I studied Art History and took an occasional side trip to Las Vegas, I moved to Long Beach and apprenticed to John MacLaughlin of Quality Neon. In 1975, I started my own neon business Aargon Neon.

Here’s what I like about neon signs: their elegant lines in shocking colors, their garish sense of humor, the occasional howling malapropism, the way the colored light bathes the street scene or makes those crazy swirling patterns in the gravy of my chow fun when I sit under the neon window sign. What I find interesting about signs is that they not only make the unknown familiar but they tell us something about ourselves and the times we live in.

Neon signs transform and decorate buildings, and form our image of the urban night. As a maker of neon signs, I find it satisfying to be part of that process. As I go out at night through Oakland and Berkeley or in my small town of Crockett, I see a nightscape that I and my fellow neon sign makers had some part in shaping.

The highest and best use of neon is for signs. As its bright colored line penetrates the night, neon finds its perfect application in neon signs depicting line drawings of funky images or as text or as decorative neon outline lighting for buildings.

Many of the signs that I make are used in motion pictures or in sets for still advertising photography. For the motion picture industry, neon signs are cheap. When you want a tuna cannery (or a roadhouse) you don’t need to build one or even go out and find one as a location, you can just find an old warehouse and put up a sign that says “This is a Tuna Cannery.”

In both still and motion picture advertising photography neon signs are frequently used to signify the dangerous, the wild, the suspect, the urban “Brand X” in contrast to the safe, the corporate brand, the suburban mall look of individual internally illuminated channel letters. Such channel letter signs were once internally illuminated with “safe and sane” plastic covered sanitized neon but are now increasingly lit with LEDs (light emitting diodes.) City planners sometimes recognize the dangerous chaotic and erotic associations with neon in their sign regulations--that is when they are not mandating its use.

But what may you ask does this all have to do with art? Actually quite a bit. From the 19th century beginnings of gas discharge tubing neon as Geissler tubes “neon-like ” tubes were used to depict images and text. As early as 1923 Sony Deluaney was applying paint on neon tubes to make art signs. In the 1960’s the Pop artists embraced commercial design and brought reprocessed advertising art into our homes as well as into our art museums. This art movement produced the culture shift from the days ofPeter Blake’s “God’s Own Junkyard” where neon signs were seen as part of “urban blight” to the world we now live in where grandpas have collections of neon beer signs in their garages and labels are on the outside of our clothing.

A generation beyond Pop, artists such as Lili Lakich, Bruce Nauman, and others used sign techniques and had neon fashioned graphically by neon glass benders to mimic sign conventions. Some artists mixed graphic neon with blown glass forms and paid the price. In some of my own work I also use neon graphically and use the cultural associations with neon signs. Why do I use it? For the same reason sign makers use it: its strong colored line, its directness, its sculptural physically. As Lili Lakich says, “Artists are always talking about the use of light in their work, with neon the metaphor is real.”

Why do I like making neon signs? I enjoy both the repetition and the challenge of my glass work. Most neon sign shops do not have productions items but make work as I do on a “one off” basis. Even though there is a lot or repetition, with one heat of the glass tubing following another, it seems like we are always encountering something new and learning how solve new problems for the first time.

The neon tubes found in signs are the last hand made electric lights in common usage, and almost all neon tubes are made to the human scale. With a handful of exceptions, of the hundreds of millions of neon tubes that are made annually all are made by hand and all neon tubes have a maximum overall dimension of no more than 8’ in length. This is true even on huge Las Vegas displays. Such a tube might weigh no more than two pounds.

Craft and designs techniques of neon signs are essentially transmitted orally from one generation to the next. While there are some books on how to fabricate neon tubing, almost no one learns solely this way. Most people who work with neon learn from other neon artisans whether it be one on one as apprentices, at neon schools, or by finding a mentor who assists them as they need help.

While some neon artisans have a formal design background and training, most that I know learn sign design like they learn the tube bending and filling craft, by a combination of reading books and trade journals, and learning design techniques and approaches from other sign makers. While most glass artists would be loathe to admit that they copy other artist’s designs, sign makers shamelessly copy designs and design approaches from other sources and from existing neon signs. Almost every neon artisan I know has a story about how some “old hand” who showed them how to snag designs for signs out of the yellow pages. And even amongst neon designers with formal training, design plagiarism is rampant, but within the sign community that is not necessarily considered a bad thing.

The author Tom Wolfe in his article about neon signs in Las Vegas observed that neon signs were a 20th century form of folk art, and indeed the artisans who make neon signs have many qualities that define the Japanese folk art theory of “mingei.”

Neon signs are made by anonymous artisans. Think of a favorite neon sign that you’ve seen while traveling across the country. Do you know who made that sign? Most likely not. While most outdoor signs have small labels that no one but city building inspectors read, most inside signs unless they are production signs made by large shops are “unsigned.”

As with the folk art identified with “mingei,” neon signs are functional in daily life and exist in the world of common objects as distinct from “art.”. I personally get satisfaction in making something that is not just about me and my ideas but that serves another person and works with their vision and fits in their life.

Connected to this, one of the most interesting aspects of my work is the randomness of the all the weird people I work for: the shopkeepers and restaurateurs, the set builders, designers and photographers. I work with a lot of sole proprietors--people like me who are working on their own, playing without a net.

Unlike my sculpture which is exhibited publicly but, which more often than not ends up in storage, my sign work always has a home.

Today neon is threaten commercially by the rise of inexpensively manufactured LED lit signs. LED signs may have a similar design to neon signs but instead of having the sensuous line of our hand made luminous glass tubes such signs use a string of very bright machine made plastic points of light which look like so many glowing polka dots strung together. One of the current selling points of LED lighting for signs besides their unbreakable quality is that “anyone can do it.” By contrast it takes a long time to train and develop the talent of neon glass benders. Neon with it’s fragility and high labor costs verges now on being obsolete, and as this happens it becomes a more interesting art material.

—A shorter version of this article was published in the Glass Society Journal, Seattle, Washington, 2008.

“Glass Graphics, the Joy of Signs”
Bibliography and Recommended Readings:

American Signs: Form And Meaning On Route 66, Lisa Maher, The Monacelli Press, NY, 2002

God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape, Peter Blake, Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, New York, 1964

Learning from Las Vegas, Revised Edition, The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1977

Neon Techniques & Handling (Third Edition), Samuel C. Miller, Signs of the Times Publishing, Cincinnati, OH, 1977

Neon Engineers Notebook, Morgan Crook and Jacob Fishman, Lightwriters Neon, Northbrook, IL 2002

Vintage Neon, Len Davidson, Schiffer Publishing Ltd., Atglen, PA, 1999

Neon World, Dusty Sprengnagel, ST Publications Inc., Cincinnati, OH,
1999

Let There Be Neon, Rudi Stern, Harry Abrams, NY, 1979

The Magic Sign, Charles F. Barnard, ST Publications Inc., Cincinnati, OH, 1993