Installation view, Keith Sonnier, Castelli Warehouse, 1970. Background: Untitled (Also: Neon and Cloth). Photograph by Peter Moore.
The possibility of loss is inherent in everything, really. You can also relate it to the basis of language, to drawing, and to thought… We base our language on something else, we base it on the written words, but they can also be lost.
-Keith Sonnier
In December of 1968, Robert Morris curated the now legendary show 9 at Castelli at the Castelli Warehouse, located at 103 West 108th Street, in the heart of Harlem. The gallery was a raw and dark open space, typical for a warehouse, but atypical for an art exhibition space. Among other artists, Robert Morris included Keith Sonnier, who had been his student at Rutgers University.
Keith Sonnier, Untitled (Also: Neon and Cloth), 1968/2012
Neon, fabric, electrical wire, transformer; 112 x 42 x 12 inches
The work that Sonnier exhibited was titled Untitled (Also: Neon and Cloth), 1968, (now in the collection of Dia). Untitled (Also: Neon and Cloth) consists of a line of white neon that forms a crescent, and several pieces of cloth of different colors that hang on the wall. Already in this first work, Sonnier presents his vision for a new type of sculpture. Challenging the traditional idea in Western culture, of conceiving sculpture as objects isolated from their environments and presented on pedestals, Sonnier removed the pedestal. He instead valued the relationship between artwork and the architecture surrounding it, allowing the wall to become the substitute for the pedestal. Whereas in Western cultures sculptures were often made of materials that survive time, such as bronze or marble, Sonnier chose ephemeral materials from everyday life, such as neon and cloth. Sonnier once stated, “My choice of ephemeral materials was deliberate, and it was another way to react against the permanence of traditional sculptural materials [...] It was the psychological “buzz” from the material that prompted me to transform it into an artwork.”
Keith Sonnier had his first solo exhibition at Castelli Gallery two years later, in March 1970. The exhibition simultaneously took place in two locations, the gallery on 4 East 77th street and the Warehouse in Harlem. At the warehouse, together with a video installation, the exhibition included several works from what became known as his Ba-O-Ba series. Works in this series consist mainly of glass and colored neon. For the exhibition at the Warehouse, the artist chose to leave the space completely dark. To the elements of glass and neon that he normally used in the Ba-O-Ba series, he added foam and fluorescent powder, which provided an additional strong color.
Keith Sonnier, Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent, 1970
Foam, neon black light, glass, fluorescent powder; 61 x 188 x 72 inches
Sonnier’s use of light, further emphasized by the dark space, was largely influenced by Robert Morris’s 1964 show at the Green Gallery, the groundbreaking event that contributed to the emergence of Minimal art, at which the artist exhibited eight simple works, made in plywood and painted gray, among which the viewer was free to walk. Sonnier said that seeing that exhibition “…(it) led me to the idea that you could alter a space with light and move through it.” Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent, included in Sonnier’s first exhibition, and currently on display at Bourse de Commerce- Pinault Collection in Paris, consists of a large rectangular sheet of glass leaning against the wall, and a large three-dimensional block of foam on its right. Two tubes of neon black light connect the glass and the foam, as if to create a dialogue between them. The block of foam is covered by fluorescent powder, freely applied by hand, which is then activated by the neon, giving the impression that light and energy emanate from inside the foam. While the black neon light is cold and linear, the fluorescent light on the foam is fluid and reminds of brushstrokes on an expressionist canvas.
Sonnier’s use of foam, a spoilable material, exemplifies the idea of loss being inherent to everything. Furthermore, the neon black lights, the foam, and the glass that leans against the wall in Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent illustrate Sonnier’s curiosity of how these materials relate not only to one another but also to the space, and in particular the wall and the floor. When speaking about this concept Sonnier says, “I liked that I could use the wall and the floor as the support for something that was so soft and pliable and that had no structure.”
Even though Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent was made in 1970, a trip to India in 1972 solidified what he was attempting to do, which was to change the preconceived Western ideas about art. Sonnier was raised in Louisiana in the French Acadian Catholic Church and his experience with religion was entrenched in the concept of viewing from a distance. When visiting temples in India, Sonnier was taken with the phenomenon of “touch, caress(ing), wash(ing)” that was encouraged in the worship experience. The materials in the work themselves embody this concept in the way in which they touch or lean on each other in order for the work to function within the space.
While the trip to India after the work’s conception was critical in Sonnier’s entire oeuvre, it was an earlier trip to Haiti that largely inspired the work, or at the very least the title. Growing up bilingual, Sonnier had a tendency to be influenced by tonality in language when titling his works and the dialect in Haiti caught his interest. Sonnier recalls seeing a boat in a harbor that said “Ba-O-Ba” on it and when he asked the boat’s owner the meaning behind it he said to Sonnier, “It’s how you feel when you are in the boat, and the moonlight touches your skin.” It can be inferred that in the case of Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent, the foam resembles the skin while the fluorescent powder represents the moonlight.
For Sonnier, his sculptures always started with a drawing, geometric in nature and minimal in color, and as he suggests. The drawings were the only permanent part of his work and served as a script for what was to come. In fact, as time goes on and technology advances, many of the materials in Sonnier’s work must change. As he explains it, “Nothing is ever exactly the same. I’ve had the technological components have advanced since the sixties… but otherwise the work is true to the original drawing.”
-Castelli Gallery