Jeffrey Chiplis's found neon art: ranging from altered signs to images both pictorial and abstract, works by this self-styled semi-outsider are as likely to be found in neighborhood bars as in conventional exhibiting venues - Report From Cleveland

After Jeffrey Chiplis graduated from art school, with a B.F.A. in sculpture, some 25 years ago, he didn't make art works for six or seven years. He was not disenchanted with art, but with some of the conditions under which it is practiced and marketed. Instead, he participated in less direct ways, such as working with an alternative space in Cleveland, called Spaces, where today he sits at board meetings and can still occasionally be seen helping out with hammer and nails on installations.

A few years later, Chiplis began rather quietly making art, which he is still doing. The way he operates involves an attitude--toward a creative profession he saw as degraded by market forces--along with a method and a style. A part of his compromise with the art system has involved incorporating some traits of the outsider artist's type of career.

When I met him by chance on a trip to Cleveland about a year ago, we went out to bars on a couple of nights in the resuscitated Tremont area, which not long ago was a crack-ridden low-rent neighborhood but is now the "art district." Every bar we went to seemed to have a work of Chiplis's in it.

These works were made of recycled neon. Other artists known for their work in neon--Keith Sonnier, Bruce Nauman, Francois Morellet, Mario Merz and, above all, Stephen Antonakos--have bent glass themselves or worked with technicians who bend glass for them to their specifications. Chiplis, by contrast, does not bend glass and rarely has it done for him by others; he usually works with retired neon signs or parts of them, which he obtains when they are deinstalled and replaced. His process involves recontextualizing chosen elements outside their original commercial uses. His studio is filled with thousands of neon components waiting to be recombined into art works--alphabetic letters in different scripts, sizes and colors, plus curves long and short, angles, circles, ripples and other abstract motifs.

Chiplis's emphasis on reclaiming discarded materials is one of the outsider characteristics he has incorporated. His work relies ultimately, and in a kind of ethical way, on the patient, lifelong procedure of finding and gathering used materials (much in the way outsider artist Lonnie Holley did for his vast yard show which once stood near the Birmingham, Ala., airport but has since been demolished for the sake of airport expansion).

Though some of his work has been made for gallery exhibition, much of it is what might be called "bar art"--pieces installed in his neighborhood establishments of conviviality such as the ones we visited together. If one thinks of the classical definition of the gallery or museum space--say, as described in Brian O'Doherty's Inside the White Cube--the point of this shift of venue becomes clear. The White Cube, O'Doherty argued, involves only the disembodied Eye; no human appetites are permitted expression in it; all reminders of the outside world are excluded. Alienation becomes "a necessary preface to experience." The traditional neighborhood bar has the opposite traits. It is the place of appetites, of the full person, of exuberant self-expression. Neon, perhaps most commonly seen in beer signs, seems to occur almost naturally there; it thrives in the dark, gleaming with hues at once beautiful and decadent. Extending his quasi-outsider approach, Chiplis disseminates his works into the community, always unsigned, hanging anonymously on the walls of places where people gather and wind down.

The pieces Chiplis has sited in bars are usually his simpler works, tiny gems of wit floating through night-town. Lit (1995) is a small neon among various beer signs on a wall of the Literary Tavern in Tremont. It was part of a sign for Lite beer, with the "e" obscured by black paint. Altered as little as possible from the found condition, it has a stack of meanings: it is lit, because it is a light; it is a sign for "lite" beer, in a bar; "lit" is also slang for "drunk"; and it is the local nickname of the Literary Tavern.

Another prominent bar is Pat's in the Flats. Entering, one sees the massive sign Pat's--simply four letters and an apostrophe, each letter a different script and color, widely spaced out. It is a powerful presence. (Pat, the bar's proprietor, had once remarked to Chiplis, "I would like to see my name in lights.") Farther back in the dark shadows beyond the little bandstand one finds Butch--the altered first word of a Busch beer sign, with the exaggerated "T" suggesting phallic (or ego) inflation.

Neo (1988), installed over the outside bar in the garden of Edison's in Tremont, once spelled the prefix so dear to art historians in letters of radically different scripts. The piece also spelled out most of the name of its medium, neon, offering the quiet suggestion that neon is neo: look at it again. And indeed, the destiny of such works is not to get old. They are irrevocably involved in process, as is illustrated by the history, or evolution, of this piece. As time passed, first one of the three letters of Neo, then another, then finally the third, were broken in bar accidents. Each time Chiplis replaced the broken piece with an unrelated nonlinguistic element, till the work today, by acting out its original mandate ("Make it new," as Ezra Pound put it), has become a completely new thing--the art work formerly known as Neo.