ART CITIES:Paris-Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin’s work is clean, industrially produced, and serially repeating. These qualities were developed in opposition to the gestural expressionist painting dominant in postwar American art. The use of ordinary light bulbs also references the twin modernist obsessions with pure technology and everyday life. By basing his work as much in radiated light as in the bulbs themselves, Flavin set the stage for much of the experience-oriented installation work that continues today.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie kamel mennour Archive

A year before his solo exhibition “dan flavin: fluorescent light” (18/11-12/12/1964) at Green Gallery in New York which would consist entirely of assemblages of fluorescent tubes, Dan Flavin made his first foray into the medium, using a simple metal fixture and a tube emitting yellow light for his piece, the “diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi)”. This pioneering piece already contained the key elements of Flavin’s future body of work: no ‘manual’ intervention on the part of the artist, the use of ‘ready-made’, commercial materials privileging a minimalist syntax, and above all the impalpable evanescence of light, its pre-eminence, the very immateriality of the medium placing the work at the crossroads between the visible and the invisible. Soon after finishing his homage to Brancusi, Flavin planned a work dedicated to the medieval theologian William of Ockham. It too was to consist of a single fixture, before Flavin decided to extend the form to include three lighting segments. In their verticality and the use of ‘cool white’ light, they prefigure the version of his ‘monument’ exhibited here. Apparently, Flavin discovered the Constructivist work of Vladimir Tatlin through Sol LeWitt, who at the beginning of their friendship in 1963 is said to have given Flavin’s wife Sonja a book on modern Russian art. The following year, Flavin put together a series of wall configurations with white fluorescent tubes that he would group under the generic title “monument” for V. Tatlin. It would become one of Flavin’s most emblematic series, and he would continue working on it until 1990. He experimented with different variations, changing the size of the fixtures and the tubes, their order, configuration, and direction. Sometimes he made the arrangements symmetrical, sometimes not.  Some 20 or so sketches for this series were made between 1964 and 1970. “I’ve never counted the designs. Perhaps, I will not draw more … I believe that there is one diagram for 1965, one for 1966, none in 1967 and so forth. The last, at present, is of 1970”. Though some of them have the tubes set vertically side by side rising to an apex at the centre like a tower, others have the tubes in diagonal positions and even separated at various angles from the vertical or horizontal. Each installation is in an edition of five, three to be sold, one to be left in a complete set, and one at the artist’s disposal. All the Tatlin ‘monuments’ are in cool white fluorescent light to enhance their emphasis on structural design.

Photo: Installation view “Dan Flavin – title “monument” for V. Tatlin, Galerie kamel mennour-Paris, Courtesy Galerie kamel mennour

Info: Galerie kamel mennour, 6 rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris, Duration: 19/3-17/4/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-17:00, sat 10:00-17:00, https://kamelmennour.com