Untitled 2010

Curator: Immediately, I'm struck by how spare it is, a stark statement in light. Editor: We're looking at a work by Ron Cooper, "Untitled," created in 2010. What we see is a neon sign spelling out the word "white." It’s a study in contrasts, wouldn't you say? Curator: Absolutely. The cool detachment of neon against that background… I see both promise and institutional critique in its simplicity. White: purity, cleanliness, but also, the blank canvas, the silencing. It evokes minimalist aesthetics but almost dares you to see beyond it. Editor: Neon as a medium is intriguing. Think of its origins in commercial signage, advertising. Cooper takes this inherently mass-produced material, traditionally functional, and places it firmly within the art world. How do the associations we have with neon, perhaps from the street, from advertising, shape our understanding of it? Curator: Neon has a kind of ephemeral quality too, it glows so brilliantly and it attracts the viewer like a moth to a flame. Think of its prevalence in depictions of cities, even in film; but also, what does it mean for the viewer? Is white a projection, an unattainable ideal? Editor: Consider too the process of fabrication, bending glass tubing, filling it with gas. The manual skill, labor required contrasts sharply with the clean, almost machine-made appearance of the finished object. It's almost a mass produced commodity transformed into an singular piece. That transition is the work itself. Curator: That play with form really pushes this past Pop Art’s obsession with mass culture. It gets under the skin of our collective ideas. It feels very postmodern in that questioning of value and origin. Editor: Looking closer, I like seeing the wiring extending downward. It highlights the support structure, acknowledging both the material reality and the somewhat manufactured sense of weightlessness the lit form projects into space. Curator: And yet the single word glows and carries layers of meaning... Ron Cooper prompts us to consider those many faces of white—blankness, absence, possibility, challenge, hope. Editor: For me, this piece exposes the means, reveals labor while commenting on both its status as an object and the complex interplay of material, construction, and artistic gesture.