TRACES: Dan Flavin

Today is the occasion to bear in mind the American Minimalist Artist Dan Flavin (1/4/1933-29/11/1996), he exploited the possibilities of the most banal and in some ways ugly material: harsh fluorescent lights in standard sizes, shapes, and colors, extracting banal hardware from its utilitarian context and inserting it into the world of high art. The resulting body of work at once possesses a straightforward simplicity and a deep sophistication. This column is a tribute to artists, living or dead, who have left their mark in Contemporary Art. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

 

By Dimitris Lempesis

Dan Flavin (1/4/33-29/11/96) was an American Minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. He was born in New York of Irish Catholic descent and sent to Catholic schools. He enlisted United States Air Force. During military service in 1954–55, Flavin studied art through the adult extension program of the University of Maryland in Korea. Upon his return to New York in 1956, Flavin briefly attended the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts then moved on to Columbia University, where he studied painting and drawing. Flavin’s first works were drawings and paintings that reflected the influence of Abstract Expressionism. In 1959, he began to make assemblages and mixed media collages that included found objects from the streets, especially crushed cans. In the summer of 1961, while working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Flavin started to make sketches for sculptures that incorporated electric lights. The first works to incorporate electric light were his “Icons” series, eight colored shallow, boxlike square constructions made from various materials such as wood, Formica, or Masonite. The “Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy (the Diagonal of May 25, 1963)”, a yellow fluorescent placed on a wall at a 45-degree angle from the floor and completed in 1963, was Flavin’s first mature work, it is dedicated to Constantin Brâncuși and marks the beginning of Flavin’s exclusive use of commercially available fluorescent light as a medium. In 1972 he started to reject studio production in favor of site-specific “situations” or “proposals” (as the artist preferred to classify his work). “One has no choice but to accept the fact of temporary art. Permanence just defies everything”. Most of Flavin’s works were untitled, followed by a dedication in parenthesis to friends, artists, critics and others, the most famous of these include his “Monuments to V. Tatlin”, an homage to the Russian constructivist sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, a series of a total of fifty pyramidal wall pieces which he continued to work on between 1964 and 1990. Flavin realized his first full installation piece, greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), for an exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, in 1966. By 1968, Flavin had developed his sculptures into room-size environments of light. That year, he outlined an entire gallery in ultraviolet light at Documenta 4 in Kassel. From 1975, Flavin installed permanent works in Europe and the United States, including “Untitled. In memory of Urs Graf” at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Additional sites for Flavin’s architectural “interventions” became the Grand Central Station in New York (1976), Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (1996), and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (2000). His large-scale work in colored fluorescent light for six buildings at the Chinati Foundation was initiated in the early 1980s, although the final plans were not completed until 1996. In 1992, Flavin’s original conception for a 1971 piece was fully realized in a site-specific installation that filled the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s entire rotunda on the occasion of the museum’s reopening. His last artwork was a site-specific work at Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, Milan, Italy. The 1930s church was designed by Giovanni Muzio. The design for the piece was completed two days before Flavin’s death from diabetes on 20/11/96. Its installation was completed one year later with the assistance of the Dia Center for the Arts and Fondazione Prada.