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02/13/2006: "KUNST MACHT FREI: Flechtner’s Neon"
(Kunst Macht Frei- Mike’s conceptual image and word play twists the Nazi slogan“Arbeit Macht Frei” [work makes free)
In 1979 I was an undergrad student at the Columbus College of Art and Design. One night while painting late in the old Cadillac studios I heard two voices from behind me. One said “what do you think? I told you he could paint” The other said “I think he’s one of us.” When I turned around I saw Roger Bisbing and Michael Flechtner, both sculpture majors from the studios one floor down. I knew who they were but it was the first time I’d officially met either of them. They were at the time about the most interesting two artists in the fine arts department. The reason I hadn’t met them yet was because I was in the Illustration department and hadn’t had any classes with either of them. I think I said something like “It’s nice that you 3 dimensional people can accept a flatlander like me.” That began a long friendship with Flechtner. He even once fixed my car in return for a bottle of Courvoisier.
Mike’s work was not just technically sound but technically inventive, visually they are poetically lyrical yet hard to define and inevitably conceptual! Mike has always been interested in technology. I remember one piece that was essentially a model of an Inter Ballistic Missile with the letters ICU2 on the side and ICBM on the other. Of course that comment revealed a lot about the cold war that spawned the missiles with references to spy satellites and other forms of technological eavesdropping and ultimately commentary on the uselessness of it all. I also have a slide of a wooden piece, a submarine actually. But it only looks like a submarine from one particular point of view. Otherwise it is a strange and interesting set of blue and blonde wood bars constructed with parallelagrams and other strange angles falling into place only when the right view was obtained. I also remember a large fish made of wood slats with a web chair in its belly just large enough for someone to sit in as it was suspended above the floor. I think it was called “Jonah in the Whale“. Well that may not have been the title but it certainly referenced the bible story among other possibilities. What I didn’t know at the time was that what he was doing then would eventually be considered post-Modern. But not because he’d read some cliff notes on post modernist theory. Mike simply had a sense of what had been done and what was left to do. He had a need for both form as well as content. And he had a lot to say. 
(Submarine, Micharl Flechtner. Painted wood. 1980)
He and I were both older students both having come to art school some time after high school unlike most of our classmates who were often quite a bit younger than we were. Mike rarely made anything that looked like anything I’d seen before-- at least not like anything I‘d seen before labeled as art. Because of his background (he’d been a truck mechanic) and his ability to think both in a linear logical method at the same time that he understood the idea of visual metaphor his art immediately connected at a level above the academic exercises many students eventually achieved. In comparison Mike’s work always looked more like graduate level work. I remember him handing me a small electrical circuit board about 1 and a half by two inches wide with a small battery, some diodes, resisters and an LED. There was a pin attached to the back like you might find on a political button. I asked him what it was. “Pocket sculpture!” he said and grinned quite pleased with himself. That’s when I noticed he had one pinned to his shirt pocket. As I fooled with the little sculpture no larger than my nose there in the palm of my hand I noticed that the LED went on and off in a totally random fashion…as if it had a mind of its own. “How does it work?” I asked. Mike said “it blinks when an alien being is present. Later I found out it had a mercury gravity switch that caused the LED to blink for a few moments until the balance was shifted. Mike said it was a great way to meet women. In the annual student exhibition that year he had two black obelisks about 5 feet tall each facing each other both with two blinking LEDs near the top. I can’t see the Washington Monument at night with its blinking red lights without thinking of Michael‘s obelisks facing and talking to each other. He has executed the ultimate appropriation. In contrast I don’t think of Duchamp whenever I see a urinal.
(WSU Drawing experiment. Mike Flechtner, colored pencil drawing on black painted masonite.)
After undergrad school Mike went to Wichita State University to study with a sculpture professor whose work he’d seen and was interested in. I can’t remember the Professor’s name but the guy made Long Horn chairs. Really, these chairs were made from the horns of Long Horn cattle. They were bizarre and interesting but I couldn’t see how it made him someone to study with. But Mike’s mind traveled tracks differently than mine. What he saw was a kinky and kindred creative spirit.
I was trying to get into Yale, made the first cut from about 600 applicants to around 75 who were given interviews but eventually was cut from the list of about 23 who got into the program that year. When Mike found out he called me and suggested that if I didn’t have any other plans why not apply to Wichita? He said he’d aleady talked about me and my work to Ron Christ, the head of the painting program, and that Christ was interested and wanted to talk to me. And besides there was a great bar nearby called the Coyote Club where this great punk band called the Embarrassment played. So I found myself rooming with Flechtner in the basement of Mrs. Peckham’s boarding house just across the street and a few blocks down from the painting studios. It didn’t take long before we owned the program. Kansas simply wasn’t ready for Mike Flechtner. That was the fall semester of 1981. The drawing above was from a drawing class in which we were to reinvent and explore drawing as an idea. Mike’s gridded circuit board-like piece took on a digital quality that now seems prophetic given his interest in electronics and computer technology.
One day I was up in the painting studio when the building maintenance lady burst through the doors in a huff. “What do you know about these blue boxes out here in the hall?” she demanded. “Who did this?”
I confessed I had no idea and suggested she show me what she was talking about. She lead me out into the hall and up to the thermostat. Just below the fitting on the wall was a small blue box about 2” x 3” with a blinking yellow LED. I looked at her without answering and she grabbed my arm and hauled me down to the fire alarm under which was another blue box similar in design with the same blinking LED. “There’s another one down here” she said as she shoved me down the hall towards a fuse box with yet another blue box with blinking lights. “I have no idea what these are” I said with a grin on my face. “It looks like an act of Gorilla art to me.“ I smiled. The installation of each blue box next to official switches, fittings and fixtures lent a certain authority to the cute little blue blinking boxes. I left the maintenance lady in the hall fuming and went back into the painting studio. I was the only other person working late that night so it was pretty quiet. I heard the studio door slam open again and this guy in a padded protective yellow bomb squad outfit yelled at me. 
(Mike installing one of his wooden pieces in the WSU art building. 1981)
“There is a bomb threat! Evacuate this building immediately! Is there anyone else in this building?” “No” I said and of course I left the studios post haste. As I was walking towards the stairs I could see him pull one of the little blue offenders off the wall and say “Shit! These are harmless. False alarm!” I never even got out the door before I was back in the studio chuckling to myself. No one ever found out who installed those blue boxes. It remains a mystery to this day.
I went to visit Mike’s studio space over in the Sculpture labs one afternoon to see what he was up to. He invited me in and showed me a large wooden chair that looked suspiciously like an electric chair and suggested that I sit and take a load off. I was hesitant but but at the same time game for one of Mike’s experiments. Above the chair was a coiled cone about 3 feet wide at the bottom and spiraling up to a few inches at the top made of clear plastic tubing about half inch or so diameter with what looked like an input and output tube that disappeared beneath the chair. I sat with my feet just slightly off the floor laying my arms on the arm rests which were a little too high and not terribly comfortable. I began to hear a gurgling sound above my head. Slowly the coil filled with water and began to slip down around my shoulders. Before I could find a toe hold to get out of the chair I was caught with the coil all the way down to just above my lower arms as they rested on the arms of the chair. “Cute Mike!” I said just a little perturbed and maybe a bit close to full blown panic. “Now how do I get out of here?” As Mike left the room he said “Let’s see how long it takes you to figure it out.” I’m too embarrassed to say how long it took but I tried everything… I felt for a hidden switch with my hands and my feet, I tried shifting my weight thinking maybe there was a balancing factor. I tried reaching the floor with my feet and standing as much as I could. I tried pushing down with my hands on the arms of the chair. I lifted my arms thinking I could just push the coil up but the weight of the water was quite heavy. I quickly gave up and began to put my hands back down thinking I’d better get quiet and calm down. Just before my hands returned to the arm rests I heard that gurgling sound for a brief moment. That’s when I realized I’d been trying to use force with each idea I had. I remembered the anecdote about the monkey who finds a piece of candy in a jar. The opening of the jar just large enough to slip his hand through. He grabs the candy but soon finds that he can’t get his hand out with the candy in his grip. Eventually he gives up, lets go of the candy and both his hand and the candy slips out of the up turned jar. I laughed at myself and lifted both hands off the arm rests. I couldn’t lift them much, maybe an inch was all. But within a minute the water gurgled out the other end of the plastic tubing, the coil lifted and I stepped out of the chair just as Mike came back into the studio. He seemed to know exactly how long it would take me to figure it out.
(My Military Industrial Complex- Mike Flechtner. From the Heroes and Victims show, Katz and Dawgs gallery, Columbus, OH 1991)
I only stayed at WSU for one semester. I was broke and had to drop out and go back to work for a while. Eventually I ended up at Boston University, then took a teaching position here at CCAD in Columbus. Mike ended up in Van Nuys California. We did stay in touch over the years and sorta kept up with what each other was doing. Every so often Mike would show up in Columbus cause his mom lived up in Northern Ohio. Mike showed up one time with a video tape of his new work. He was working with neon lights.
You can see in some of the wooden sculptures started at CCAD and pursued for a while at WSU Mike had already experimented with a kind of sculpture that was more or less drawing with lines in space. Neon is after all drawing with lines of light and in that sense very graphic.
I’m sorry that I can’t actually up load one of his animated neon sculptures on this blog. My favorite image is a neon toaster with a shark that leaps 15 feet into the air and flips over before falling back into the toaster below. He called it “Pop Shark”. I was fascinated because he’d found a way to sculpt and paint with pure light. His technical mind had found computer chips that could set up both the analog kind of animated systems that he liked along with randomness that allowed him to get all sorts of effects from his glowing chromatic tubes. I was working with Leslie Constable curating a big show of artists responses to the first Gulf War at that time. The show was called “Heroes and Victims” and appropriately shown at Katz and Dawgs gallery here in Columbus. Remembering Mike’s “ICU2” piece I asked if he wanted to contribute something to the show. Mike sent me two sculptures of jet fighter bombers. They were beautiful.
(Pop Shark, Michael Flechtner. Neon animation.)
Eventually I had a chance to visit Mike in his Van Nuys studio. I think it was a trip to Disney on which the college sent me back in the mid 90’s. I called Mike ahead of time to tell him I’d be in L.A. for a few days and he met me at the hotel on my one free afternoon. We drove to his studio while he told me stories about panning for gold in the mountains. His space looks like it had been a storage unit-- like those rows of garage units one sees in the suburbs all around the States. He’d built himself a sleeping loft since the space had 15 foot high ceilings. He had tubing everywhere, tanks of various gasses, sketches and drawings, ballast units, a computer and of course a variety of works and works in progress in every available space and nitch. He told me he’d been an adviser for a TV pilot about a beautiful blonde detective who was also a neon sculptress. But he said the director never got the idea that the actress shouldn’t work barefoot in a bikini in a neon shop for all the broken glass. He was also making some neon signage to pay the bills in between various commissions. He took me to dinner later that night at a restaurant where he’d traded signage for a running meal tab.
I was out there again just a couple years ago. He was still in the same studio. But he’d been getting a lot of attention and had cultivated a number of collectors and received a few choice commissions for large installations. One was for a University in San Diego. He made the image of his girl friend on either side of a 90 foot long wall. Then the animated neon face spit’s a watermelon seed across the 90 foot expanse and is caught in the mouth of the doppler image of his girl friend and summarily spit back again. She’s not his girlfriend anymore but she‘s still spitting that seed back and forth all day and all night long.. He’s done installations in California including a huge animated undersea mural above Starbuck‘s on the corner of Olympic and Sawtelle in West Los Angeles one of the busiest intersections in West L.A.. These murals often require a tremendous amount of engineering- both electrical and via computer technology and are tremendous feats of both neon craft and computer technology. The first one I saw was at Wittenberg University in Ohio. There he made a Rock, Paper Scissors game with a computer chip that will play the game in an unending and totally random sequence. That piece is installed near the entrance of the cafeteria and is approximately 10 feet by 12 feet as I recall.
(Aquarium, Michael Flechtner. 1997)
Michael has defined a very interesting place for his work. He is trained as a fine artist but has chosen to work in a medium traditionally used for signage…essentially a commercial art. On his page at L.A.’s Museum of Neon Art site (MoNA) there is an essey that discusses this issue…
“One of the oddities of the 20th century is that while an entire industry dedicated to entertainment was coming into being and inexorably eclipsing the mass appeal of the fine arts, critical attention remained fixed on the relatively inconsequential activities of a self-inflated avant-garde. The various little avant-gardes that populate textbooks dedicated to 20th-century art history owe both their radicalism and their short life span to their insular self-removal from society. They played to the critics and the critics returned the favor by favoring art in such a way as to make it synonymous with their frankly marginal activities.
A consequence of this cozy arrangement has been the critical disdain accorded any form or work of art guilty of being to easily in sync with popular taste. Characteristic too have been an essentially artificial distinction between "commercial" art and the real thing, which qualifies as the real thing by affecting an exaggerated disinterest in its own marketability.” --from the Museum of Neon Art website.
Mike has found a form that can express his emotional interests and intellectual ideas, a form that has made him a living in tough times and is now becoming quite collectible. While some might call it ‘kitch’ others would say that it is challenging new ground using images from popular culture in a commercial medium to comment on both society and the human spirit. Again this leaves us at loose ends if we’re looking for a clear and distinct categorical distinction between fine arts, commercial art or even craft (the art of neon lighting certainly requires fine craftsmanship.) Personally I call it art and am continually fascinated by the machinations of his mind and technology. He’s done major works in Alaska, Minnesota, Tokyo and is represented in the Museum of Neon Art in California as well as a continually growing list of private collections. And so to quote the title of one of Mike’s pieces “Kunst macht frei!” (Art makes free.)
