monuments of on and off art
There is a disco like atmosphere at Hayward Gallery in London, where Dan Flavin’s: A Retrospective is being housed. With a retro-sight and techno-sound, the exhibition certainly has the hint of a disco. But as you trail through the lower and upper tiers of the gallery, you will find a ‘light’ entertainment of photic dance. The light installations of Flavin tread a fine line between Op-art and Pop art to bring Minimalism back to the coffee-table. While leaving the gallery, if you think that you can visit your local hardware store, pick up few fluorescent tubes and fixtures, and feature your own Flavinian art in your living room, then I can assure you that you are not the only one
More than 50 of Dan Flavin’s signature light works are on display. Many of them are being shown for the first time in Europe. His signature material is ordinary tube lights, mainly two-, four-, six- and eight-foot straight rods and circle fluorescent lamps in standard spectrum of ten colours. He structured these limited materials to create a choreography of light in which meaning is no longer accessible in the usual sense of the term. Most of his works are untitled and have dedication to people he personally admired.
This apparent reductibility of minimal art neutralises the notion of creativity and genius. Dan Flavin was closely associated with a group of artists who came to be known as Minimalists in the sixties and seventies. In the 1960s, Flavin along with Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt and others radicalised art through their insistence on clear forms in simple and explanatory arrangements. They were interested in an art of reduced forms and industrial materials.
The Minimalists were very careful in distinguishing their works from that of other avant-garde art of their time. For a starter, they did not want to titillate audience with whimsy. They recognised the stage or gallery space as a convention of language, a form of communication between the artist and the viewers while emphasising on arts materiality. They realised that art is unreal, constructed, invented, predetermined, intellectual, make-believe, objective, contrived, and ultimately useless. Thus if you think you can play around with tube lamps and fixtures and can reproduce Flavin’s arts so that it is indistinguishable from the originals, you are actually walking into the Minimalist logic that gave lie to the long-held definition of art as dependent on an original object, and affirmed its continuity with the world of everyday things.
But that is only one aspect of Flavin’s light works. He choreographed the light from the tubes to challenge the idea of sculpture as form and to make it a sculpture of space. As Jonathan Fineberg puts it, ‘the light articulates the space in a way that makes each piece particularly interdependent with the site.’ (Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. 2000. London: Laurence King) Flavin himself called his works ‘structural proposals,’ but shied away from labelling them ‘Minimalist work.’ He even refused to call his works sculptures. Referring to ‘Minimal art,’ he said that he always thought, ‘people to whom it was applied were making a simple and constructive change, and mostly in terms of themselves.’ There lies the paradox of his works. At one extreme they challenge the grand transcendental scope of art. At the other extreme, Flavin is not ready to accept the nuance of slightness associated with the ‘minimal’ label. However, a touch of humour, if not self-mockery, is present to his works. He even priced one of his art objects in terms of the electric fixtures used. If we leave the dispute over definition aside, Flavin seemed to offer a dazzling display of light that is peculiarly simple, yet clever in its manipulation.
The Untitled (in honour of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977, for example, breaks the corner space of a room with a square-shaped fence-like structure of twelve tube lamps. The viewers can only see the six horizontal tubes (three pink and three yellow) fitted outwardly against six vertical fixture bars, which hide six more tubes in blue and green. When illuminated viewers get the effect of a prism that has transformed the corner of the room. A pure geometrical space has been created through both visible and invisible lights. There is no brushstroke to admire and only lines of light. There is no volume or area to be fathomed, but the controlled radiance of light. And when you look at the illuminated space, the viewers standing in front of it become part of it and create a chiaroscuro.
The first work that appears in the display is another fence-like installation. This extensive ‘barrier’ is also untitled and dedicated to his friend and supporter, Heiner Friedrich. Flavin arranges the tube lamps in such a way that the lamps are drained of their colour to create the illusion of a wall. We have of course seen glowing walls such as these in many commercial spaces. Nevertheless, in the gallery-space it assumes an artistic aura. It is an installation that is lifeless and formless, yet illuminated. Fittingly, Flavin calls his works ‘icons,’ with an obvious Catholic overtone.
Dan Flavin started taking notes on lights while working as a security guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1961. Towards the end of the year he constructed three installations, ‘icons’ in his coinage. Before I consider his works in detail, here is a brief biographic note on Flavin.
Daniel Flavin was born in New York on April 1, 1933. His parents were Irish-Americans of Catholic heritage. He studied to become a priest, but ended up going to the Korea to work as a meteorological technician for the US Air Force. During his military service in 1954-55, Flavin took a correspondence course through the University of Maryland Extension programme. Upon his return from the Korean War, he attended the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and studied Art History at the New School for Social Research. In 1959, he took drawing and painting classes at Columbia University. He married Sonja Severdija in 1961 who has contributed to many of his works. With a recommendation from Marcel Duchamp, Flavin received an award from the William & Norma Copley Foundation, Chicago, in 1964 after he had shown his ‘icons’ at the Kaymar Gallery and the Green Gallery, both in New York City. It is at the same time he began his nearly life-long series of monuments dedicated to the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin.
The irony implied in his preference for the term ‘icons’ to describe his works is obvious. In his own words, ‘My icons differ from a Byzantine Christ held in majesty; they are dumbanonymous and inglorious. They are as mute and indistinguished [sic] 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.’ (Dan Flavin, in Dan Flavin: three installations in fluorescent light. Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Kunsthalle Köln, 1973, p. 83.)
Many of his monumental arrangements took the steeple-like shape of a cathedral. But the obvious religious connotation is to be found in the work that he did with the help of his first wife Sonja. East New York Shrine (1962-66) is made out of an empty container of a Pope brand tomato paste, and is fitted with an aerolux lamp shaped like Virgin Mary with her figurine inside. A pull chain for the lamp that creeps out of the tin looks like a rosary. The inscription on the container reads: ‘Mother loaded with Grace. Please help David.’ Despite the temptation to find a symbolic value in his work, however, Flavin is against meaning. He writes, ‘It is what it is, and it ain’t nothin’ else. . . . Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered. There is no overwhelming spirituality you are supposed to come into contact with. I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is no invitation to meditate, to contemplate. 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.’ (Quoted by Michael Govan in a curtain raiser article for The Guardian).
Flavin’s early ‘icons’ in the sixties used a painted box-like background and toyed with the impact of stray light from fluorescent tubes attached to them. But in 1963, he made a breakthrough by using a strip of fluorescent lamp as the only material of art. In The Diagonal of May 25, 1963, he placed a golden lamp at a 45 degree diagonally to the floor. He dedicated the piece to the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who had died in Paris six years earlier. The golden glow that bathed his studio in Manhattan alluded to Brancusi’s Endless Column, created in memory of those who had fallen during the First World War. The endless repetitive form of Brancusi’s columns found its photobathic shape in a fluorescent strip. For the next 33 years and till his death in 1996, Flavin remained focused on the permutation and combination of standard fluorescent lighting units and tubes that were commercially available. His colour choices were limited to the standard spectrum of coloured tubes, as well as the full range of white lighting – warm white and soft white, daylight and cool white. He occasionally used the ‘black light’ of ultraviolet tubing as well.
The seeds of The Diagonal, as the exhibition label to one of the artist’s early drawings indicates, involved some collage constructions he titled, Apollinaire Wounded (1961). In an onion paper following he scribbled with pencil:
fluorescent
poles
shimmer
shiver
flick
out
dim
monuments
of
on
and
off
art
This piece shows Flavin’s literary bent. In another sketch, Chamber Music, he quoted James Joyce: ‘Strings in the earth and air/Make music sweet…’ These literary influences were instrumental in shaping his attitude towards the materiality of art. But instead of using words or paints, he chose light as his material. And he was more than aware of the pun attached to light that enabled him to create dim monuments.
Hence his ‘Monuments’ are always written with single-quotes. He once explained ‘I always use “monuments” in quotes to emphasize the ironic humour of temporary monuments. These ‘monuments’ only survive as long as the light system is useful.’ Between 1964 and 1990, Flavin produced 50 works dedicated to the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin. He was particularly moved by Tatlin’s unrealised utopian dream of making a monument for the Third International of a colossal 1,300 feet spiralling tower. Thus Flavin acknowledged his interest in the Situationist art that was gaining ground in continental Europe at that time. Then again, he reminds us of the tragedy and fallacy of transcendental symbolism that revolutionary art proposed through his temporary engineering construction of light.
Flavin described the dedications he made in his works as ‘mostly extraneous but personal. They’re sentimental… a lovely incidental thing.’ He dedicated his works mostly to his fellow artists, art collectors, friends or family members. The piece dedicated to his father is an L-sped arrangement of circular fluorescent lights. Instead of representing anything particular to his father’s memory, the size corresponds to the architectural space of the gallery. It is made of modular units, made from two 12-inch circular fixtures, one above the other, and a two-foot fixture attached vertically on the right side, extended in height and length to fill the particular dimension of the gallery wall. These white lamps provide a series of angelic halos that has lost their shape in its present arrangement. There is a sense of incompleteness as the short vertical line on the edge cuts short the long one.
Flavin was influenced by nominal philosophy. The Nominal Three (dedicated to William of Ockham, 1963) places six tube lamps vertically in an arrangement of 1, 2, and 3. Ockham was a fourteenth century Franciscan scholar who refuted Catholic obsession for pomp and aura maintaining that ‘Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.’ The seriality and repetitive simplicity he had learnt from Ockham became a pattern in many of Flavin’s works.
In the seventies, Flavin started making more complex blend of colours. He directed inward lights towards the corner of the room and outward lights towards viewers. Thus the speed of light is cornered, and the effect on the viewers becomes direct, dramatic and dynamic.
‘There is something inescapably monumental and architectonic about Flavin’s light installations, imperious acts that transform space,’ observes art critic Norbert Lynton. But given Flavin’s reservation against meaning, how do we explain this profusion of light that leak into one another? How do we explain the shape of light that can be switched off and switched on at one’s convenience? How do we deal with the arrangement of lights that can change our perceptions and make us aware of the illusory nature of reality? Is it an art or a gesture?
For hundreds of viewers who have traversed the corridors and gallery space of Hayward Gallery, and bathed into the illumination of Favlin’s constructions, these questions are sweet if explained, but for others, sweeter if unexplained.
The exhibition continued until April 2, 2006.
Shamsad Mortuza teaches English at Jahangirnagar University. He is presently pursuing a doctoral degree at Birkbeck College, University of London
There is a disco like atmosphere at Hayward Gallery in London, where Dan Flavin’s: A Retrospective is being housed. With a retro-sight and techno-sound, the exhibition certainly has the hint of a disco. But as you trail through the lower and upper tiers of the gallery, you will find a ‘light’ entertainment of photic dance.…