"Bridgeinstallview" - Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin -
Essay by Michael Govan
Few artists are so identified with a
particular medium outside painting or sculpture than Dan Flavin. After 1963, Flavin’s
oeuvre consists almost entirely -- except for drawings and prints -- of light in the form
of commercially available fluorescent tubes in all nine colors and all five shapes (one
circular and four straight fixtures of different lengths). His art, systematically
deployed in this limited vocabulary of form and color, is often situated in relationship
to a specific architectural context. One of Flavin’s last installations, untitled
(1996) in the two four-story staircases of Dia’s exhibition building, exemplifies the
aesthetic principles consistent throughout his work; a simple line of two-foot lights of
two colors (blue and green), placed vertically in a corner, fills the space with luminous
color. As Flavin himself concluded in 1965, just two years after his first manifestation
of an art of pure light: "What has art been for me? In the past, I have known it
(basically) as a sequence of implicit decisions to combine traditions of painting and
sculpture in architecture with acts of electric light defining space."1
The three defining moments in Flavin’s
career presented in this exhibition -- his first invention of fluorescent light art in
1961–62, his most ambitious free-standing work created in 1970, and the site-specific
staircase work commissioned last year -- illustrate the artist’s enduring
preoccupation with the diversity of artificial light’s aesthetic application. The
simplicity and systematic character of his work, as well as the almost scientific
ingenuity of his discovery of an art of light and the relentlessness with which he
explored it, has earned Flavin a reputation as a progenitor and chief exponent of
Minimalism. Yet the artist himself disliked the label Minimalism and even an abbreviated
review of his early works requires a more complex reading.
Flavin’s proclaimed discovery of
fluorescent light art came in an instant:
From a recent diagram, I declared the diagonal of
personal ecstasy (the diagonal of May 25, 1963), a common eight-foot strip with
fluorescent light of any commercially available color. At first, I chose
“gold.”...
(I put the paired lamp and pan in position at an angle
forty-five degrees above the horizontal because that seemed to be a suitable situation of
resolved equilibrium but any other positioning could have been just as engaging.)2
Flavin later dedicated the gold diagonal to Constantin
Brancusi in reference to the systematic elementary structure of the Romanian artist’s
Endless Column:
That artificial Column was disposed as a regular
formal consequence of numerous similar wood wedge-cut segments extended vertically -- a
hewn sculpture (at its inception). The diagonal in its overt formal simplicity was
only the installation of a dimensional or distended luminous line of a standard industrial
device. Little artistic craft could be possible.
Both structures had a uniform elementary visual nature, but
they were intended to excel their obvious visible limitations of length and their apparent
lack of complication. The Endless Column was like some imposing archaic mythologic totem
risen directly skyward. The diagonal, in the possible extent of its dissemination
as common light repeated effulgently across anybody’s wall, had potential for
becoming a modern technological fetish.3
The serial and systematic repetition of form
in the Endless Column was ubiquitous in not only Flavin’s work but that of
many of his contemporaries, including Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Donald Judd, Sol
LeWitt, Agnes Martin, and Robert Ryman. Its influence persisted in Flavin’s
work—albeit usually in horizontal form, as seen in untitled (1970), a
large-scale barrier in red and blue light.4 (Flavin
invented the “barrier” in 1966/68 as a free-standing series of fixtures that
physically block a passageway or segment of a space with light.)
Flavin’s confident matter-of-fact update
of Brancusi’s masterpiece in his diagonal and his later unparalleled application of
those ideas in the monumental barrier belie the more ironic and self-conscious qualities
of his first experiments with light in 1961 and 1962: a series of eight painted boxes with
attached fluorescent and incandescent light fixtures of differing types, colors, and sizes
which he called “icons.” Among their memorable dedications are icon I (the
heart)(to the light of Sean McGovern which blesses everyone), icon II (the
mystery)(to John Reeves), icon V (Coran’s Broadway Flesh), and icon VI
(Ireland dying)(to Louis Sullivan). Flavin continued to dedicate most of his work to
friends, acquaintances, and others throughout his career with equal doses of respect and
irony, but rarely with the sentiment intimated in these early pieces.
By investing the archetype of the icon with
ironic significance, Flavin devised his own subtle theology of form and material:
Last week in the Metropolitan, I saw a large icon from
school of Novgorod. I smiled when I recognized it. It had more than its painting. There
was a physical feeling in the panel. Its recurving warp bore a history. This icon had that
magical presiding presence which I have tried to realize in my own icons. But my icons
differ from a Byzantine Christ held in majesty; they are dumb—anonymous and
inglorious. They are as mute and indistinguished as the run of our architecture. My icons
do not raise up the blessed savior in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed
concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.5
Despite Flavin’s claim to have made an
arbitrary choice of color in his breakthrough diagonal, the selection of gold light
obviously conjures the traditional religious artefact, if ironically.6
Forced by his father to attend a Roman Catholic seminary, Flavin had cultivated an
educated rejection of traditional theology. Two of his first fluorescent works of 1963
were dedicated to William of Ockham, a medieval philosopher and founder of Nominalism who
proposed that faith in God must be held separately from any rational deduction from facts
of this earth. Flavin’s invocation of Nominalism -- known in the more popular dictum
that “no more entities should be posited than are necessary” (Ockham’s
Razor) -- could be considered a Rosetta stone for Minimalism. Flavin’s art neither
rejects nor summons faith since the question of God is never raised. For, art is matter
and is, therefore, no proof of anything spiritual.
Created by an artist steeped in traditions of
art and canons of Catholicism, Flavin’s icons and fluorescent works offer
nothing less than a reconsideration and deconstruction of art’s past through both the
systematic use of form and light and the tool of irony. Thus, he pits the transcendent
aspirations of art against the practical commonality of the commercial light fixture,
allowing neither to prevail.
Notes
1. Dan Flavin. "'...in daylight or
cool white:' an autobiographical sketch," Artforum 4, no. 4 (December 1965),
p. 24. Flavin later revised and republished this text in several exhibition catalogues.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. untitled (1970) is an
eight-foot tall version of a work made in 1967, an artificial barrier of blue, red, and
blue fluorescent light (to Flavin Starbuck Judd). untitled was also installed in
Donald Judd’s Spring Street loft in New York.
5. Dan Flavin, quoted in etc. from Dan
Flavin (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1969), p. 176. The notes are taken from a
record book dated 9 August 1962, which is related to a drawing for a proposed icon VI
(Novogorod) dated 22 October 1962.
6. Flavin also describes the diagonal
position of the eight-foot tube as arbitrary, although it is difficult not to imagine its
connection to the diagonal dynamic of compositions of Russian avant-garde artists such as
Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and El Lissitzky, whose work was constantly of interest
to him.
For More, click on the following interesting links:
http://www.diacenter.org/ltproj/flavbrid/index.html
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