By Ben Planer, Wrightwood 659 Educator

While thinking about Chryssa’s works as signs, I’ve begun to pay more attention to the signs in my everyday life. I thought about how road signs and billboard advertisements communicate and what kind of impressions they left on me. Previously, I had not often stopped and really looked at signs, especially not for their forms or as an art. In our busy and complex lives, it seems shocking to me that signs are so one-note and static.

In Chryssa’s practice, she begins with recognizable signs, then abstracts them—making us pause, take notice, and sends our thoughts moving in many different directions. With abstraction, there is a transformative act of taking away in order to reveal more. Through this talk, I’ll hopefully perform my own transformative act, by changing the way we might see The Gates to Times Square.

Created from 1964-1966, The Gates to Times Square is 10 feet tall by 10 feet wide, and weighs hundreds of pounds. Given its massive size, this sculpture could be interpreted as a monument. To me, a monument implies a heaviness, carrying the weight of tradition, and a sort of stasis that will endure through the distance of time. Chryssa, a Greek-born artist, would have been abundantly familiar with these kinds of static monuments through her exposure to the ruins of ancient Greek sculpture and architecture. However, she also would have been familiar with a modern kind of ruin, that of a shattered Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Early 20th century Europe was a time of great change and upheaval. Chryssa herself lived through the Nazi occupation of Greece, and the subsequent Greek Civil War of 1946 to 1949. It was a cultural environment characterized by disorientation, rapid technological change and the collapse of traditional values.

When we take these contexts into consideration, we can appreciate how The Gates to Times Square reflects this sensation of fragmentation and uniquely modern dynamism. One of the foremost critical thinkers on Modernity, Walter Benjamin, wrote how it was imperative for the artist to rethink how they interpreted the modern, by privileging more immediate, more ephemeral, and more explosive practices. For Benjamin, the era of long-winded “weighty tomes” was long past, and a new, urgent language was essential to capture this new era. This language would be inspired by the artistic avant-garde and by the burgeoning contemporary mediums of journalism, radio, photography, and film. I’ll be considering The Gates to Times Square through the perspective of film montage. By revealing how a seemingly static sculpture can be a literal medium of motion, we can appreciate Chryssa’s efforts to never allow meaning to settle.

So what exactly is montage? Originating as a technique in early cinema, montage is typically defined as the arrangement of a succession of images to emit an association of ideas. Walter Benjamin thought montage was a politicized and progressive form, where a fragment “interrupts the context into which it is inserted,” producing a shock in the viewer. Montage has a distinct lack of “unity of meaning”. This prevention of a settled singular meaning is the essence of Chryssa’s efforts in abstraction. In her studies for The Gates to Times Square, the neon elements turn on one after the other, interrupting the moment and sensation which preceded it. The shock that montage produces can be felt in Study for the Gates #2 literally turning on, shocking our senses and leaving little time to settle on its meaning before it then plunges back into darkness.

Due to the passage of time and gaps in conservation, the neon elements in The Gates to Times Square no  longer blink on and off, but through close looking I’ll show how the elements of film montage can still be observed. First, it possesses a distinctly square frame like that of a film screen. The sculpture is divided into four layers, each distinct like an individual frame, while also connected in succession to form a single unity like a strip of a film reel. There is a transparency, like a film reel, which we can see through the sculpture, allowing us to perceive the elements that remain consistent overlaid with those that change from one frame to the next. If we could move through the layered sections of Chryssa’s Gates it could be like watching a sequence of a film. And lastly, these paper rolls which contain all the written designs for The Gates to Times Square’s construction up high in a clear container, as if it was a film projector playing the sequence of the film. We can see the entire collection, but we cannot actually read its contents, just like how looking at a wound up reel of film we can see the entire film, but cannot recall a single scene. Like Walter Benjamin suggests; these are no longer “weighty tomes” of the past, but collected fragments of modernity.

The title of the work The Gates to… evokes movement, a journey, a change of location. Interestingly, the work was once displayed in New York’s Grand Central Station, which is a place of constant change and movement from one place to the next. The gap in the sculpture suggests we can move through the gate, but it is a tight squeeze. We can’t just walk through, but we must watch our step, interrupting the shape and position of our bodies to avoid the heat of neon and jutting metal.

Walter Benjamin suggested that it was through film, where the public occupied the position of critic, that montage could create an experience where the “absent-minded” viewer was able to critically examine the work. This sculpture as a montage means we must be actively engaged, causing constant criticism, therefore preventing any one definitive meaning to settle.

If settled meaning is what Chryssa is working against, then the traditional signs of New York’s Times Square are one of her greatest enemies. To figure out why I think Chryssa would feel this way about signs, let’s examine what exactly is the purpose of a sign and how exactly do they function? Signs are made essential to the functioning of society whether that be road signs to enforce an ordered structure or for economic purposes, where in a way advertisement signs become monuments for products. A sign should be a single structure with the purpose of portraying a single meaning. Advertisement signs for example, should forever represent the product it promotes and if interpreted in more than one way, it has failed its commercial function.

Looking at the neon sign present in Times Square Sky is helpful in understanding the purported rules of a sign, and how Chryssa challenges them. The sign, which reads A-I-R, air, is 2-dimensional to mimic the flat typography of letters on a page. The letters flow conventionally, in a horizontal direction that is clear and legible. It’s a singular unit rather than fragments of letters. The neon component sits on a structural metal grid that holds up the heavy mass while remaining relatively unseen from the front, creating the illusion of a weightless glowing symbol surrounded by transparent air, when in fact, there is a strict order to the formal elements of the sign. First is the metal sheets forming the general outline of the word, next is the roughly welded metal background plate, and finally there is the neon which is confined to fill in the predetermined outline, once again flat as the letters it is representing. The neon emits this signal to us with the intention of clearly projecting a single, unambiguous message. With Times Square Sky, there is a playfulness in how Chryssa challenges the concept of the sign and its ability to represent. Here, the neon sign has almost become dishonest, inverting our expectations of how things are versus how they appear, with actual air being something transparent and fluctuating, however now as a sign is turned into something solid and static. The shocking absurdity of a sign advertising air, something freely available, calls into question the very purpose of a sign.

This rigid order is juxtaposed by the rest of the sculpture, whose metal forms undulate below, forming an “amorphous fragment” that produces a multiplicity of meanings. It is crafted from the discarded fragments of signs and advertisements that Chryssa found in scrapyards. At this time, many of the metal and neon signs that adorned Times Square were being scrapped and replaced for newer, more inexpensive plastic ones. In scrapyards, signs were failures, deemed ineffective for advertisement and tossed away in the endeavor of constant progress, reflective of the destructive nature of capitalism. In scrapyards, signs were shattered and no longer static in their intended meaning, but rather in a constant state of change as they were disassembled and decayed.

For Chryssa, the sign can’t merely be destroyed and then replaced in a continual progression of technology, capitalism, and order, but must be destroyed conceptually. Interpreting The Gates to Times Square as a montage is to acknowledge that the meaning we attach to things, even signs, can change from one moment to the next. Meaning isn’t just an exact answer to be solved from a problem, but a constant puzzle with shifting pieces. Moving layer by layer through this montage, we can see these pieces shift. With each shift, we become farther away from arriving at any exact answer, until it’s better to just reject the idea of finding an answer entirely.

If we return to The Gates to Times Square,  we see how with each layer of abstraction, formal elements of a traditional sign are inverted and undone. Chryssa said that, “signs have tremendous energy and depth. I want to get inside them, to study them from all angles, to turn them inside out.” The metal frame, once intended to be hidden from view, is now clearly visible. The welded metal back plates are now the foreground. Rather than filling in the background to the letter form behind the neon as it does in Times Square Sky, it now creates the shape of the letter, a massive capital A, which is more transparent than solid. Looking further into the sculpture, we arrive at a cinematic climax. The neon elements, previously imprisoned by the surrounding metal sheets, have been liberated. The neon now takes on three dimensional shapes mirroring the metal outline of the channel letters in the layer behind it. This subverts the previous relation of neon and metal, here it is difficult to determine which signifies the other. Due to the montage of these two layers, it is in a constant shift, unlike the static-ness of a traditional sign.

Further on into this montage is a large wall of letters. These letters are no longer horizontally aligned in a legible sequence, rather they are collected and stacked up vertically making an almost impenetrable wall of meaning. Across these metal letters, is a paneled pattern that makes them appear even less distinct. This pattern reminds me of bricks making up a wall. It is as if the sign is camouflaged to the wall behind it, becoming almost transparent. Now onto the conclusion of the montage is the last section, which is shockingly empty. Thanks to the grid that has run through the montage since the start, we can visualize the bareness. It’s as if the sign’s letters have rusted, broken, and fallen off the structure and down into the scrapyard. What’s left here is the fragmented scrapyard signs, real evidence of the ruin. In this final sequence of the montage, we can see the sign in a state of decay and its meaning shift into complete nothingness.

If we watched this montage of imagery from start to finish, like frames of a film, it would be like watching a sign distort, decay, and disappear entirely. When art critics first saw The Gates to Times Square, one of them called it “a car crash”, which I don’t know to interpret as praise or insult, but it is interesting. A car crash is a sequence of sudden transformation and destruction. It is a shocking interruption to the passive flow and order of traffic. Amongst this disorder, we think back to the simple signs meant to establish order, and how they now become much more complex as we figure out how they have failed. There is a morbid curiosity while passing a wreck that sends our minds shifting to many conclusions, including our own. Maybe a car crash with its lack of conclusive meaning is an accurate way to describe ours and Chryssa’s modernity. Chryssa’s abstraction allows us to view her sculpture in these many different ways. We can set it in motion like film montage, alleviating it of its frozenness. It is a montage of perspective, interrupting the old monumental view of sculpture with the shocking fluidity and fragmentation of modernity. To view The Gates to Times Squareas a film montage, is to see it as ever shifting, never allowing it to comfortably settle.