ART CITIES: N.York-Dan Flavin – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

Beginning in the 1960s, Dan Flavin made wall-mounted, floor-mounted, and site-specific sculptures and installations composed of intersecting and parallel lines of white and colored commercial tubing. These works create a glow throughout their exhibition spaces, drawing attention to the relationship between art and the architecture it inhabits. In one of his most ambitious interventions,

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Two sculptures by Dan Flavin are on show in Gagosian Gallery, seen together, the two works also underscore Flavin’s interest in serial configurations. Dan Flavin used widely available fluorescent tube lights to radically alter and rearticulate the space shared by work and viewer while maintaining formal and material consistency from one project to the next. In doing so, he also circumvented the limitations imposed by handwrought armatures, as well as by pedestals and other conventional means of object display. In this way, Flavin, alongside his contemporaries including Carl Andre and Donald Judd, played a key role in directing the course of art making in the 1960s and 1970s toward the eradication of the artist’s hand.

“Untitled (to Sabine & Holger)” (1966-71) comprises four red eight-foot fixtures forming a square, placed in a room framing the crevice of the corner. The horizontal fixtures face the viewer, throwing light into the room, while the vertical fixtures face the wall, bouncing light back into the room. As art historian Tiffany Bell noted, “the square or rectangular configuration of the lights also allowed Flavin to refer to the picture plane of painting and the idea of perspective, and thus inscribe his work within long-established art-historical categories”. In this work Flavin transforms the viewer’s experience through what artist Mel Bochner has characterized as “an acute awareness of the phenomenology of rooms.” The work both defines the intersection of the walls and masks the darkness of the receding corner. “I knew the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with,” Flavin explained, “by planting illusions of real light, electric light, at crucial junctures in the room’s composition.”

One of four sculptures with the same dedication, “untitled (for Barnett Newman) two” was produced for Flavin’s solo exhibition at Dwan Gallery, New York, in 1971. The sculptures were intended as memorials to the painter, their colour combinations referring to Newman’s four-painting series “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” (1966–70). Two parallel and identical yellow lights placed horizontally reach from one side of the wall to the other. Vertical blue lights complete a square. Furthermore, red lights located directly behind the structure reach towards the gallery’s ceilings. The stronger hues are balanced in the red lights’ extension. As with “untitled (to Sabine and Holger)”, the work’s autonomous formal qualities are impossible to consider independently of the environment with which they interact. Saturating the exhibition space with ambient colored light, “untitled (for Barnett Newman) two” effectively transforms our perception of the room’s internal dynamics without altering its physical structure.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 821 Park Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 9/11-23/12/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com