Neon time: Light, language and duration in the work of Cerith Wyn Evans

Abstract

This thesis examines temporality in the works of Cerith Wyn Evans. While the theories of Gilles Deleuze offer a persuasive description of an image of time based specifically in a cinema of movement, Wyn Evans’ works suggest that a form of temporality can be manifested in expressly static artworks. His neon signs and associated works confer an image of time that is achieved through a delicate coalition of light and language. Words from authors and musicians who have long since passed are animated by neon’s spectacular artificial light. The past returns in the present moment through an intense, visual luminosity. In this regard, Wyn Evans is accompanied by a cohort of contemporary artists whose neon signs are, in turn, influenced by the work of Minimalist and Conceptual artists of a previous generation. Questions of time are extended to consider neon’s rich semiotic history which is informed by the contingencies of linguistic communication and the phenomenological properties of light. Wyn Evans’ works are shown to accumulate an abundance of references to art historical and philosophical trajectories established in the complex framework of language, light and time.