Talking with Doug Wheeler II

When I saw Doug Wheeler's Eindhoven, Environmental Light Installation (1969) at the Hirshhorn yesterday, I was confused. The documentation I had from the museum said that the work was made of nothing but neon. That couldn't be right: There was a seemingly unusual white paint that covered the walls and ceiling of an entire gallery. The corners of the room looked like they had disappeared. The light appeared to come from behind a scrim. Finally it looked like there was fog in the gallery, the kind of winter fog that moves hovers above a snowy field. The space wasn't just activated, I thought it had been changed. The light was tactile.

So I asked the museum to give me the actual list of what Eindhoven was made of. Reply: 'Neon. That's it.' It was installed in the 'coves' that make up Gordon Bunshaft's weird Hirshhorn galleries. I felt both awed and stupid.

Doug Wheeler was not the first artist to use neon. Mario Merz, Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman and others were all there first. But none of them used neon as cleverly as Wheeler. With one exception (this SFMOMA work-on-paper), all of the Wheelers in American museum collections are neon pieces. I asked him how he went from being a painter to using neon.

"Neon wasn't a thing of itself for me. I was making paintings, white paintings. I basically wanted the plane of the canvas to be..." Wheeler trailed off, unsure of how to describe the effect he was after. "I put neon behind the canvas' back, and then I sprayed the edges [of the painting] with color. If you want to know what it looked like, look at [Robert] Irwin's later paintings. Same effect, in a way, and mine 'floated' on the wall. The reason I picked neon is that it's an incoherent light. It's very soft on the wall.

"Then when I saw what Bob was doing, I quit canvas. I felt I had to find another way. He was a more established artist. He was someone I knew, and he was doing these things that were way too close to what I was doing, so I changed to plastic encasement. Then I put the light inside. I made not many of those, but I did make a number of those playing with space and light. I wanted the freedom of activating space without an actual object, and that's what I went to with the thing we've got here at the Hirshhorn.

"For me neon goes back to '65 and '66. I didn't have any money in those days, so I didn't do that many. I had to make them myself. I didn't have any support or a gallery. Irving Blum was going to pick me up at once point. He said something to me, asking me what they cost. I think it was something like $1600, $1800. And he said, 'Your aesthetic is only a $700 aesthetic.' I shrugged. I said, 'I guess I'm not going to sell them then.'

But curators were intrigued. Light and space -- and Wheeler's neon installations -- were such a hit that by 1970 Wheeler, Larry Bell and Bob Irwin were the subject of major exhibitions at the Tate in London and in a Fort Worth Art Center show that traveled to the Stedelijk in Amsterdam.

"It was a very clean show," Wheeler said about the Stedelijk exhibit. "I got the museum to turn all the heat off. Otherwise the place would be sweaty feeling, and it was really cold outside and it really benefitted the space I did. I think someone wrote about it being like walking into an ice cube."

Previously: Doug Wheeler's work. Talking with Doug Wheeler part one. [Image above: LACMA's 1968 Untitled (Light Encasement).]