It just … glows.
A single 8-foot-long, white fluorescent tube. You’d beg a maintenance man to dim it if it hung over your head at the office. But even given pride of place in the plushest of settings — the sculpture gallery at the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth — it’s an irritant.
“That’s not art.”
The words have probably been uttered, with and without the emphasis of expletives, hundreds of times since Dan Flavin’s “Diagonal of May 25 1963” was installed in 2002. If a lone bulb can set off so much sputtering derision, what’s going to happen when an entire wing of the Modern is buzzing with Flavin’s luminous light sticks?
“Dan Flavin: A Retrospective,” which opened Sunday, should go a long way toward calming nerves and clearing the minimalist master’s reputation in this area. The 40 fluorescent light works and numerous sketches that make up the exhibition — which comes to Ft. Worth directly from Washington’s National Gallery of Art and runs through June 5 — illuminate an artist whose use of everyday, off-the-shelf materials launched the minimalist movement of the early 1960s. And whose personality was as agitating and vexing — as colorful, even — as his brilliant work.
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“It is what it is, and it ain’t nothing else,” Flavin said famously, chafing at critics determined to affix symbolic and sometimes religious meaning to his uncluttered fixtures. But if Flavin’s resistance to critical analysis and praise (he routinely is referred to as the Father of Minimalism, a title he rejected with extreme prejudice until his death, at age 63, in 1996) reflected extraordinary stubbornness, his steadfast commitment to the elemental idea of art as light changed the cultural landscape forever.
Born in Jamaica, N.Y., in 1933, to, he once said in characteristically caustic words, “an ascetic, remotely male, Irish Catholic truant officer … and a stupid, fleshly tyrant of a woman,” Flavin found refuge as a young child in paper, pen and ink. His nascent imagination ignited by wartime images, he doodled and sketched obsessively (“bloodied boxers with broken noses,” among other things) through grade school. And in a whimsical diversion that likely informed so much of the vivid and warm luminosity of his work to come, he even trained his hand “in the peaceful uses of watercolor.”
In 1959, after a trouble-plagued parochial-school education and in the throes of an increasingly turbulent emotional life, Flavin “burst from Columbia University into a belated full-time love affair with art,” he said. At the time, abstract expressionism was in full splatter, and Flavin found stimulation in the work of Pollock, Rothko, Gorky, Kline.
Conceptual art
Ultimately rejecting what he perceived to be the vanity and preciousness behind Pollock and company’s self-conscious canvases, Flavin and his New York contemporaries — artists Sol LeWitt, Tony Smith, Carl Andre and, most significant, Donald Judd — began thinking less compositionally and more conceptually.
“Judd and Flavin came to have an interest in artworks that refer to nothing but their factual presence, with particular emphasis on the use of industrial materials and intense color,” says Michael Govan, director of the Dia Art Foundation and co-curator of the Flavin retrospective.
In Flavin’s case, the idea of a minimal light bulb quickly became a maximum turn-on. It wasn’t painting or traditional sculpture — it was light. And it utterly confounded the chroniclers of art.
But not Judd, who saw in it a rough, spartan, revolutionary beauty. Quoted by Tiffany Bell in her text for the retrospective’s catalog, Judd wrote about the “icons,” seminal Flavin light pieces that showed at New York’s Kaymar Gallery in March 1964. “There are several interesting aspects to the pieces: They are things themselves; they are awkward; they are put together bluntly; the materials are considered bluntly — the paint is flat and the lights come that way; the lights are strong and specific.”
Bell writes that the success of the “icons” and subsequent fluorescent works placed Flavin “at the vanguard of a new art.”
He’d spend the next 30 years here, working only with fluorescent tubes (he eventually depended on assistants and electrical engineers to construct the works from his drawings). He never made apologies for the pedestrian materials he used. And he had strict parameters.
No neon. Unlike the standard-issue industrial bulbs he bought, neon tubes could be manipulated and their colors intensified. He would work only with what was available at local retail stores. And he limited his palette to the 10 stock colors — predominantly pink, yellow, blue, green, red and filtered ultraviolet, in standard 4-, 6- and 8-foot lengths. (A brief dalliance with circular fixtures was fast abandoned.)
Flavin’s exhaustive experimentation and pioneering genius left little room for other artists to follow in his fluorescent footsteps. His impact as a minimalist has been immeasurably profound. If his influence as a master of light has been slight by comparison, it has still been significantly felt.
Set the stage
“Any artist that has used artificial light after 1964 would have to be considered someone who has been influenced by Dan Flavin’s work,” says the Modern’s chief curator, Michael Auping. “It was that important. Specifically, James Turrell, Bruce Nauman, Robert Irwin, Jenny Holzer or, more recently, Tatsuo Miyajima.”
That collective of hipster artists probably would have found the difficult Flavin to be remote, at best. He was not an art-scene player. And with the exception of Donald Judd, Flavin did not enjoy the camaraderie of his peers. (When asked in 1982 if there was work of any contemporary artist that he particularly admired, he said ungenerously: “As little as possible. You can’t lend your appreciation to too much because it’s false.”)
As years passed, Flavin hunkered down outside Manhattan in a series of rural New York settings and consciously reduced his visibility.
It did not stop his renown from growing. But even as the minimalist experimentation of the time blossomed into an official movement, he refused to elevate his work to something rarefied. He wanted it to be as temporary as the life expectancy of the bulb itself — 2,100 hours, according to Sylvania, Flavin’s fluorescent tube of choice.
Now, decades later, that radical flicker of an idea — that his work, and art in general, isn’t meant to last — has made buying, selling and exhibiting Flavin’s art an unusually complicated matter.
During Flavin’s lifetime, he rarely sold even a major piece for more than a low five figures. But even then, the realities of the marketplace demanded that he confer authenticity on his pieces. (He had designed more than 750 of them, in editions of three or five.) So he issued a certificate with every one of the light sculptures he sold — and tried stealthily to assure the work’s impermanence by printing the certificates on paper meant to disintegrate over time. In the years since his death, the increasingly fragile documents are worth almost as much as the fixtures themselves.
Vetted Flavin works, with the accompanying piece of flaking pulp, now command as much as $735,000. Which raises fascinating and pricey questions for Flavin collectors: With a bulb-life of only 2,100 hours, do I dare plug the thing in? Is it art if I “don’t” plug it in? And if I replace a burned-out bulb, is it even still a Flavin?
Seeking an afterlife
Some owners admit that they do not often turn the pieces on. Burning a Flavin invites its inevitable demise. And to look too deeply into a multitube construction is to regret it.
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Although he said he wanted his work to be impermanent, Flavin assiduously worked with the Dia Art Foundation during his last years to ensure an afterlife. Still, with advents in technology, his beautifully hued light tubes — even if you were “willing” to risk devaluation by replacing them — are becoming more and more obsolete. At some point in the future, Flavin might get his wish, after all.
“One has no choice but to accept the fact of temporary art,” he said. “Permanence just defies everything. There’s no such thing. I have no hope for that.”