It was more than a coincidence that a nation that gave us Donald Judd could also produce the artist Dan Flavin. In fact, the two met in 1962 at a gathering in a Brooklyn apartment organised to discuss the possibility of a cooperative artist-run gallery. Their friendship developed and the two became known as “Flavin and Judd” for a while, indeed Judd named his son Flavin Starbuck Judd.
Untitled 1970
Many of Flavin’s installations were site-specific, such as the one above. In the December 1965 issue of Artforum, Flavin wrote “I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctions in the room’s composition.”
In the final episode of his 1996 series “American Visions”, critic Robert Hughes referred to the age of anxiety in modern America, fed by the cold war and the general disillusionment with government following the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. He visited the Judd ‘shrine’ in Marfa, Texas to illustrate his point, but he could equally have visited a Flavin installation for while the play of coloured light could be construed as beautiful, there is an anxiousness with his vast empty scenes.
Untitled (for Ksenija) 1994
Flavin was born in New York in 1933. He became a Catholic altar boy and trained to be a priest. He recalled being ''curiously fond of the solemn high funeral Mass, which was so consummately rich in candlelight, music, chant, vestments, processions and incense.'' This, no doubt, became a major influence on his work as an artist. He is described as a minimalist sculptor and is considered to be the first artist to employ electric light in a sustained way.
Installation at Menil’s Richmond Hall 1996
An article in the New York Times describes Flavin’s art as “brazenly radical and very much in the vein of Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades”, but apart from the use of manufactured materials, I don’t see any correlation at all. But then the article goes on to describe Flavin’s installations as having an “ecstatic beauty that was at once painterly and architectural”.
Flavin became adept at combining the intense lines of colour of the light tube with their softer diffuse glow and the geometric arrangements of the tubes. In 1971, he illuminated the entire rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, but he was just as successful illuminating a corner as below.
It was very daring of Flavin to move sculpture away from the figurative to the impersonal use of industrial materials. In 1989, he extended his range by illuminating the exterior of the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden Baden, Germany. Works such as these have been described as symphonic. I often wonder if he had an influence on artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Kimsooja who I covered in earlier blogs.
Flavin arrived at the idea of using fluorescent tubes after several years of painting and drawing in the abstract expressionistic manner. These were followed by a brief period in the late 1950's and early 60's of making boxy wall reliefs in strong monochromatic colours, to which he attached coloured light bulbs and fluorescent tubes.
According to the PBS program The Art Assignment, minimalist sculptors decided to abandon the pedestal to dismantle the separation between the viewer and the art. Judd argued these works were neither painting nor sculpture but specific objects occupying space that didn’t necessarily reference anything. And it’s worth noting that the artists themselves hated the term minimalism.
Work such as Flavin’s contains no secret, no hidden meaning, there is nothing to interpret. It is what it is, and thus it was a complete break with the past where meaning may lie somewhere inside the object waiting to be unlocked. Instead, the meaning lies in the viewer’s interaction with it, the context and the strong feelings it can evoke for presence, absence, space and light. It is argued in the PBS program that in a world filled with complexity and information and “lots and lots of stuff”, minimalist art can be a balm. I’m not about to argue.
Flavin died in 1996 from complications arising from diabetes.
It’s now hibernation time for me, I’ll be back around mid January.
References;
The New York Times
PBS: The Art Assignment
Art Forum