Tim Noble & Sue Webster

Executed in 1997 and exhibited at Noble and Webster’s first major solo show that same year, Toxic Schizophrenia was a groundbreaker for the British art duo. Struggling to find representation with a London gallery, Noble and Webster teamed up with Stuart Shave to stage an exhibition of their work at their studio and home in Hoxton’s Rivington Street. One of only three works exhibited, one on each floor of the building, it was an astonishing debut that was greeted by a large audience and met with great critical acclaim, effectively launching their career on the international stage. The work sold immediately, their first major sale, and the two celebrated by taking a trip to Las Vegas, to marvel at the very museums of low culture that had inspired their work.

Illuminated by 516 shimmering and flashing bulbs, the sophisticated sequencing makes for a mesmerizing and seductive display of alternating colours that owes its potency and allure to the mechanics of the advertising industry. There is nothing subliminal about the mode of communication here; resplendent and glitzy, this theatrical crescendo of blinking bulbs in a carefully orchestrated chase effect is an altarpiece to decadence and desire. A brash and glaring hyperbole of kitsch, Toxic Schizophrenia pays homage to the casino chintz of Las Vegas and its hyper-tacky British counterpart: the Blackpool illuminations. Growing up in the North, both Noble and Webster were familiar with this end of summer working-class ritual, when the seaside resort comes alive with flashing lights celebrating unashamed vulgarity. By scrutinising the more spectacular and vulgar aspects of contemporary culture in a manner clearly parodying that culture’s attention grabbing style, Noble and Webster challenge the very norms of art and beauty. Deliberately positioning themselves astride the two ostensible antipoles – highbrow art on the one hand and consumer society’s lowbrow kitsch on the other – their complex pastiche emphasises the surprising similarity between the two.

Although they had made two previous light sculptures in 1996, Forever and Excessive Sensual Indulgence, the latter of which was exhibited with the present work in the Rivington Street exhibition, neither packed the punch of the present work which cast the artists as punk provocateurs, like Martin Kippenberger. Mining the aesthetics of anti-culture, Toxic Schizophrenia takes its title from Tom Wolfe’s 1965 debut book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, in which the author describes the “marvellous impact Las Vegas has on the senses”. Just like Noble and Webster, Wolfe’s collection of essays straddles high and low culture, employing PhD language to uncover trash subcultures. The motif of the giant tattoo, with a knife through the pulsating, bleeding heart, a stock image of adolescent trash romance, is at once repellent and alluring. Reminiscent of Richard Prince’s photographs of bikers’ girlfriends, Noble and Webster here identify with outlaws and the dispossessed – bikers, strippers and punks. As impecunious students, Noble and Webster experienced the punk-rock decade first hand; at the end of the 1980s, they also travelled the USA on a Greyhound bus, sleeping in cardboard boxes in parking lots along the way, gathering materials and experiences that inform their work. Here, in celebrating the anti-culture they address high culture.

The dagger through the heart is also an echo of the classic Christian emblem of the bleeding heart of Christ, adding a further layer of complexity to the work. The adoration of the sacred heart began as a popular cult in the thirteenth century and burgeoned into full-blown devotion in seventeenth-century France. Appearing in devotional images throughout art history, it is a symbol for the imminence of Heaven, the infinite love of Christ and the rewards of sacrifice. In Noble and Webster’s hands, the message is transmitted through the most secular of media, with all the subtlety of an illuminated advertisement hoarding in Piccadilly Circus.

Noble and Webster make their light sculptures themselves, instead of farming out technical work to studio assistants. Sue’s father was an electrician, and as a teenager she would help him repair cigarette vending machines which gave her the practical know-how with circuit-boards to fashion the complex electrical arrangements. An early prototype, Flash-Painting, 1993, which consisted of a three foot by fifteen foot canvas surrounded by sequenced white fairground lights, was exhibited in a show they staged in a Brick Lane warehouse for their peers, among them Chris Ofili.

These experiments find their resolve for the first time in the present work. Simultaneously excessive and minimal, over the top and rigorously systemic, Toxic Schizophrenia possesses the visual assault of a neon nightclub sign and the iconic symmetry of an elegant minimal sculpture. With Dan Flavin as a clear art historical-referent, it overhauls minimalism by dragging it into the Pop vernacular. Logo-like, it has the instant legibility inherent to advertising, but like a punk rock concert it is choreographed into a high energy, high voltage performance: like both, Toxic Schizophrenia is designed to seduce.