Alan Suicide at Deitch Projects - New York - Brief Article

Hindsight suggests that at the time of their conception in the early 1970s, there wasn't much distance between the radical, electric thrashing of Alan Vega and Marty Rev of the seminal punk duo Suicide, and the funky light sculptures made by Vega, who is better known as Alan Suicide. The music of this eccentric two-man band is an unforgettable sensory assault. A plugged-in linkage connects those sounds and Vega's sculpture, and further associations may be found in a broader esthetic context. If Suicide's sonic assault was heir to the proto-electronica of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and Edgar Varese, which it was, Vega's protean assemblies of rewired lights and found objects trace their lineage from Dan Flavin through Eva Hesse, Alan Saret, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier and Robert Morris.

Suicide played the clubs, CBGB's and Max's Kansas City, in the 1970s, and raved on together by invitation in galleries and lofts and on the road, an ongoing incitement to riot. In 1981, famous but essentially still underground, Suicide was invited to perform in concert at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, Vega exhibited his sculpture as works by Alan Suicide for O.K. Harris Works of Art in 1972 and '73, and in 1983 exhibited at Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Among those who took Vega's sculpture seriously along the way was Jeffrey Deitch, who recalls that he first saw the work at O.K. Harris; he reintroduced Alan Suicide, light sculptor, in this show titled "Collision Drive," named for a 1981 LP.

The artist offered a tortured litany of mostly early wired reliefs, updated and in working order, dimensions variable, along with several new works, glowing red and blue and pink and candle white, that flickered like tongues of fire and glowed in the gallery's twilight like punkster votives dangling in a not quite pristine chapel. Among several floor pieces glimmering in midpassage was the subdued carnival of American Supreme 2 (1971-2000), at its center a small black-and-white television incidentally broadcasting the Winter Olympics. Illuminated by the glow of red and pink tubular lights and bulbs were cigarette butts, a handful of tearsheets mounted on ruined cardboard, illegible mementos of some half-forgotten football game. There were readymades of the crucified Christ at the heart of several pieces, among them Angel (1971-2001), with a heaped strand of timely ornamental American flag lights piled at the foot of a dangling cascade of many colored bulbs. These works presaged the estheticized strings of lights and wiring of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Matthew McCaslin, and the nifty plastic letters, photographs and electrified neon of Jack Pierson. The show looked smart and thoroughly engaging.

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