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It’s a five hour drive from Los Angeles, California to Las Vegas, Nevada. Though originally joined along a dusty colonial trail, the distance was first crossed by railroad in 1905 as a part of the route between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, centre of the Mormon Church. Throughout the preceding nineteenth century, California and the vast desert to its east were part of an immense Western expanse first under Spanish rule, then Mexican, then under a gallimaufry of semi-autonomous realms (mini-nations like The Bear Flag Republic and Deseret). Finally, the region was officially divided and admitted as States to the Union. A visiting German friend of mine was recently surprised to learn that California was never an English colony (nor, for that matter, was much of the US). While the American identity was solidifying along the Atlantic coast, the West was a marvellous, wild mess.

Beverly Hills, on the other hand, was built upon a different sort of frontier, that of the early motion picture industry. There, today, among the high-end retail stores, stands the Gagosian Gallery where Tim Noble and Sue Webster have installed a three-piece capitalist spectacular. Following their already familiar trajectories of flashing signs and tricky silhouettes, Noble and Webster’s show draws upon their particular mode of British art production as well as the tropes of American consumer aesthetics. In this case, the match is well-made.





In the main room of the gallery, a brilliant casino-styled sign – a near replica of the enticing old signs on the Vegas strip – blinks and shines in alternating red, white and blue lights, spelling out the word ‘forever’ across 20 feet of the largest wall. There is no way to miss the work; its light emanates throughout the large space, capturing even the most unsuspecting bystander in a dazzling display of flashing reflections. The choice of text seems to be an attempt to encapsulate the infinite, something like the built-in function of a capitalist machine to absorb and commodify everything, even that which should be its undoing. In this interplay of materials, the piece borrows from the largess of ‘forever’, while thrusting the constructed idea of endlessness into a realm of the perpetually gaudy.

Upstairs, ‘bling-bling’ came instantly to my mind at the sight of two large dollar signs, propped against adjoining walls, flashing emphatically with golden-white bulbs. These are signs, as in both business and semiotics, but they are signs which nearly bypass the refraction of value that most perform. The objects are so fully crass that their clean light seems innocent, unaware of the corrupted wealth and mass degradation for which they stand. To best articulate the completeness of these objects, the price of the piece should have been set at $2. Once I realised that these symbols are meant for buying and selling beyond my own capacity, the cynical glow of the lights began to damage my retinas.

The third piece in the trio is Instant Gratification, a large slot-machine filled with a crumpled mass of dollar bills. When one inserts a specially designed token into the object, a whirring fan blows the bills about. Behind the machine, a carefully placed spotlight reveals the form of two faces meeting for a kiss, drawn in shadow upon the stark white wall. The form becomes unrecognisable as the machine dies down and the mess of money settles into place. Nearby, a trick bill sits stuck to the ground: that old prank designed to embarrass and exacerbate he who is broke or greedy enough to reach for the misplaced cash.





An art work’s subject can be anything, even the basely mundane, even the inescapably cheap. Throughout the past century, this statement has been constantly reiterated, an ever-unfolding development of Western art history. This is a programme which challenges the terms of high and low culture like a never-ending line of Hegelian dialectics (one movement’s infiltration of low becomes the next generation’s high, and so on). From the present view, Duchamp and Warhol are as significant as Da Vinci, despite their attempts to shirk that kind of authenticity.

But here I return to the American West, as its cultural history bears heavily upon the problem at hand. While New York was beginning to imitate Paris, the West was made up of forts and outposts and violently subjugating missions. There were saloons and showgirls, raiding warriors and lines of covered wagons. Here, the ‘art’ was never intended to replicate its European counterpart, it was bound by market interests and based upon the premise of mass entertainment. There was never a noblesse oblige of the elite to arbitrate good taste or an objective centre upon which to nurture universal values of beauty or worth. As a partial result, the goals of Hollywood and Las Vegas have been much the same throughout the last century: to light artificial beacons until people forget themselves, for better or for worse.
As for the work of Noble and Webster on display at Gagosian, it fits so neatly into this tradition of popular spectacle that what these pieces articulate, here in California, is not excessively clever. It is another boardwalk showcase, a bejewelled song and dance, a Rodeo Drive shopping-spree. The artists are certainly skilled at making what they make and have an immaculate sense for composing an entire space. But their boldness is at the expense of a meaningful subtlety. But then again, I’ve always been one to enjoy a silly show.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster: Instant Gratification was at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

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