Neon Museum--Where to Go for a Glow : Light: The Museum of Neon Art is celebrating its 10th anniversary with an exhibition of the works of 25 neon artists.

For those to whom the only adjectives for neon are garish or gaudy , there are those of us to whom neon is something magical. Real neon, made of gases with sci-fi names like argon, xenon and krypton, which flow expensively through specially bent glass tubes. Not the cold, dead, illuminated plastic signs that seeped in on the cheap during the late ‘60s. Beckoning neon is a glorious Jezebel, and I love her.

Maybe it has to do with a childhood in Los Angeles during one of its most unabashed architectural periods, when a Brown Derby outlined in a crisp streak of white light or the squat friendliness of the Toed Inn, a green and white neoned eatery, were simply the signs of the times. In other words, maybe the twig had to be a little bent to begin with.

All I know is that the very stuff that’s celebrated by the Museum of Neon Art seems like institutionalized joy to me. What place better than MONA for someone who cherishes the look of “One From the Heart.” The museum, known by its acronym MONA, glows softly on Traction Avenue, a little east of Little Tokyo.

What an innately female thing neon is; pulsing, arterial, mysterious. If great steel ships are forever “shes,” then certainly luscious neon, glimpsed only after dark, must share the same berth. MONA heightens that sense as you enter its unpretentious studio-doorway under its logo, the Mona Lisa, the lines of her face reiterated in a haunting neon quick sketch by Lily Lakich, co-founder of the museum.

For someone who wants to catch up with MONA’s doings, its 10th anniversary show, which will be extended through October, is a good place to begin. One might complain that the powerful and the trivial sit side by side in this collection. So be it. Any art whose third cousin once removed was the Times Square Camels sign, puffing smoke rings across Broadway, gets to have a little tackiness to its tubelines. The show is still an arresting cross section of the field.

Many of the 25 artists in this 10-year round-up are represented by an early and a late work and the progressions are revealing. Take MONA’s supercharged power source, Lakich. “Blessed Oblivion,” her 1975 piece exhibited during MONA’s first year, is like a powerful neon primitive: a line of light tracing the death throes of a panther and python, their design taken from tattoo art, the entire piece on a flat gravestone-shaped backing.

In the intervening years, Lakich discovered honeycomb aluminum and her work soared into airy and sculptural three-dimension. The aluminum lends itself to painting and subtle shading, it’s lightweight enough to stand away from its wall mounting. Now the neon softens the space behind the work; it outlines an architectural detail; it traces the sensual line of a cheekbone or a breast . . . or the steam from a cup of coffee, in a commissioned piece in homage to Dolores’ Drive-In (R.I.P.).

At the opposite visual extreme, Larry Albright puts a vast round globe, crackling with visible static electricity, on top of a ‘30s-looking koa-wood cabinet. His work is an homage to Nikola Tesla, the relatively unsung grandfather of the neon tube. Its big old housing may jog memories of old-time radio days, but when the crackling “lightning” inside the globe comes docilely to the touch of your hand, it’s “The Wizard of Oz.”

To see the fine, the arresting, the contemplative, the furious and the trifling displayed together, is to see the many directions in which neon’s lickerish glow can be taken. Helen Cohen fits out miniature rooms in cake boxes or worn 1930s suitcases, to be glimpsed only by peeping in like a pulp novel detective. Here, her bleak suitcase-bedroom is pure film noir, its only light source a tiny blinking red-orange HOTEL sign. Way across the room William Shipman’s double arc of neon rising from a wheelchair and shrouded in clear plastic bandages is like a ghastly update of the armless, legless veteran of “Johnny Got His Gun.”

If MONA’s current show looks forward, with an elegant stainless steel, aluminum, reflective glass and computer-programmed piece like Eric Zimmerman’s haunting “Y,” Lakich also looks back to neon’s past, with nostalgia and affection. And muscle. It took muscle for Lakich, with MONA co-founder Richard Jenkins and Gayle Rendleman, to wrestle MONA’s oldest and tallest display, the Art Deco light-bulb lady, from her perch on top of the Melrose Theater, where she’d held her urn of falling water since 1923.

(In 1974, when she was salvaged, the Melrose Theater lady could be had for the hauling. Those days have passed. In the late 1980s when Lakich came after the Steele’s Motel sign in the San Fernando Valley--three stages of a diver in a pike position ending in a spray of water--she just beat the bid of a collector offering $10,000 for it.)

Brightening MONA’s corner, the Melrose Theater’s light-bulb odalisque holds her urn yet, on tiptoe next to the marquee of the old Fox International’s, a glorious design in neon pastels they’ve stopped making: orange sherbet, pale yellow, clear light greens and pinks. The two are a tip-top blast from the past and Lakich has nearly 50 more where they came from, waiting for “a big old space,” which would expand nonprofit MONA’s current 5,000 square feet to the 25,000 of which Lakich dreams.

The anniversary show has a cross section of kinetic pieces as well. MOCA may have Jean Tinguely in its enthralling “High and Low” show currently; MONA rebuttal is Dave Quick’s “Homage to Duchamp: Pig Descending the Staircase,” a feat the black and white piggy does spectacularly.

Quick borrowed the title of his mechanized “Nothing to Read in the Reagan Library” from a Los Angeles Times article that pondered that oxymoronic situation at some length. Press the button and a counter clicks the national debt upward, a dollar at a time; copper warheads turn; its single, tiny book is displayed with the preciousness of the Gutenberg Bible and no fewer than three smiling Rons smile on, and on, and on.

If MONA’s neon fever is inspirational, its monthly “Neon Cruise” can open the eyes of even the city-smart. It’s a true Saturday-night special, a friendly, informed in-depth tour of the city’s neon heritage and its current high points from the top of a London double-decker bus. To watch Michael Hayden’s gloriously beautiful “Generations of the Cylinder” whiz its rainbow by, in infinite computerized variations, is worth the whole trip. (Hayden’s new million-dollar installation has just brightened Chicago’s O’Hare airport.) And it’s one stop among dozens that crisscross the city, from Chinatown’s pagodas to the Holy Superet Light’s pinky-mauve neon heart, welcoming all from 3rd Street, to neon’s stunning renaissance along Melrose Avenue.

* The Museum of Neon Art, 704 Traction St., Los Angeles, open Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m. to5 p.m. Admission $2.50. Saturday bus tour: $35 ; reservations required , (213) 617-0274.