116 LIGHT + TECH
THE FLUORESCENT TUBE was never a lovable source. Its association with uniformity, industry and the workaday make it at first glance an unlikely medium for art. But US artist Dan Flavin, part of the minimalist school that included Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, famously transmuted it into a tool for artistic expression, using it to distort space, blur spatial borders and play with visual perception.
He juxtaposed tubes of different colours (or the same colour), positioning them singly or in choreographed clusters, angled, vertical and horizontal. He stood them in corners, created compositions on walls and constructed entire freestanding structures that ran the length of a gallery space. His installations trigger visceral sensations through the effect of light, bathing surfaces and somehow the space itself with vivid colour. What makes his structures more complex is not only the radiant light that emanates from them but also the subtle coloured shadows, the penumbra and play of colour on colour. Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, which held a retrospective of Flavin’s work in 2016, described one characteristic corner work (Pink Out of a Corner, to Jasper Johns, 1963), an 8ft lamp between two walls, as ‘eradicating darkness from the extremity of the room to the point of obliterating any proper perception of it.
‘Flavin was very aware of the traditional placement of religious icons in corners, like the Russian constructivist Kazimir Malevich, known for his black squares,’ continues the gallery description, ‘but instead he made icons of light, with what he referred to as “blank magic”.’
Born in New York in 1933, Flavin returned from military service in Korea, where he had begun studying art, to take up art history at the New School. In 1959, he took drawing and painting classes at Columbia University. He began with
drawings and small paintings in gestural abstract expressionist styles (a term used to describe the work of Jackson Pollock and William de Kooning among others) and small constructions using found objects. His first one-man exhibition was at the Judson Gallery, New York, in 1961. But that same year he began to make ‘icons’, which combined electric lights with plainly painted square-fronted constructions. In 1963 these evolved into his work with fluorescent tubes. The Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy, created in May 1963, a yellow fluorescent placed on a wall at a 45° from the floor, was Flavin’s first mature work and marked the beginning of his exclusive use of commercially available fluorescent light as a medium.
He confined himself to a limited
palette (red, blue, green, pink, yellow and ultraviolet, together with four different whites) and linear forms (straight 2ft, 4ft, 6ft and 8ft tubes) and, beginning in 1972, circles. He eventually started to reject studio production in favour of site-specific ‘situations’ or ‘proposals’ (as he preferred to call them). His first full installation piece, Greens Crossing Greens (to Piet Mondrian Who Lacked Green), was for an exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, in 1966.
The title of the latest exhibition featuring his work, Dan Flavin: Dedications in Lights, reflects that, while often untitled, his work was frequently dedicated to fellow artists and people he admired, or were expressions of social consciousness. ‘His pieces, although initially without clearly recognisable signature, frequently make reference in their titles to concrete events, such as wartime atrocities or police violence, or are dedicated to other artists,’ says the museum
Flavin categorised his various ideas according to the spaces they inhabited,
This image Pink Out of a Corner (to Jasper Johns), 1963 – pink fluorescent light. Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Philip Johnson
Right Alternate Diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd), 1964 – red and yellow
fluorescent light. Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. The Dan Flavin Estate, courtesy David Zwirner
Below Untitled (to You, Heiner, with Admiration and Affection), 1973 – green fluorescent light. Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne München
‘It is what it is, and it ain’t nothin’ else… There is no overwhelming spirituality you are supposed to come into contact with… It’s in a sense a “get-in-get-out” situation. And it is very easy to understand. One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find’ – Dan Flavin
Left Dan Flavin, pictured in New York in 1970
GIANFRANCO GORGONI © MAYA GORGONI
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