Dan Flavin, Posthumously

Art in America, Oct, 2000 by Tiffany Bell

Three major projects developed by Flavin have been completed since his death: a church interior in Milan, an indoor and outdoor project for the Menil Collection and a six-building installation at the Chinati Foundation. Together, they reveal him exploring new possibilities of form and expression.

Shortly before Dan Flavin died on Nov. 29, 1996, he signed off on the plans for three permanent installations of fluorescent light.[1] These projects consisted of interior lighting for Santa Maria in Chiesa Rossa, a church built in the 1930s in Milan, Italy; interior and exterior lighting for Richmond Hall, a supermarket converted to an exhibition space for the Menil Collection in Houston, Tex.; and interior lighting for six barrack buildings that are part of a former military base that Donald Judd made into the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Tex. [see p. 116]. Under the direction of Steve Morse, who was Flavin's studio assistant for several years, all three projects have been completed: the church in 1997, Richmond Hall in 1998 and the Chinati buildings in 2000.[2]

Chinati Foundation, Marfa

The Marfa plans had a long gestation. The initial contract for the work to fulfill Judd's conception of a museum of permanently installed work by him, Flavin and John Chamberlain was issued by the Dia Art Foundation in 1979. Flavin traveled to Marfa in the early 1980s, and models of the buildings and meeting notes suggest that he conceived his plans around that time. Nonetheless, he did not disclose his ideas completely until March 1996.[3]

The six buildings are U-shaped structures that have been renovated in the local vernacular architectural style with adobe walls and metal roofs. To accommodate Flavin's installation, all the windows except two at the end of each long wall have been closed over; entrances are on the inside of the U toward the ends of the long sides. Inside, two parallel corridors have been constructed at the bottom of the U, with walls--86 feet on the outside and 44 feet on the shorter courtyard side--that lean left, making a 76-degree angle with the floor.

Passage through the leaning corridors is blocked by eight back-to-back pairs of 8-foot-long fluorescent fixtures that extend from floor to ceiling, parallel to the walls. Gaps the width of the lamps are left between each pair of fixtures, allowing one to see through the color cast by the lamps on the fronts to the different color at the backs.

In three of the buildings, these light barriers are placed at the centers of the corridors' lengths, so that color is largely contained within the leaning walls. In the other three (they alternate from one building to the next), the lights are placed on both ends of the corridors, which allows color to flood into the long arms of the building as well as the inaccessible interiors of the corridors. The first two buildings contain pink and green lamps; in the second two, yellow and blue lamps are similarly placed; and the last two have both a pink/green and a yellow/blue corridor.

The repetition of arrangement and color in the Marfa corridors is characteristic of much of Flavin's art. As in the work of other Minimalists, such as Judd, Carl Andre or Sol LeWitt, an inherent systematic order distinguishes his art from the expressionism of the previous generation and takes on relevance with regard to many issues of the early '60s: handmaking versus industrial production, the nature of individuality, the importance of part to whole, and so on. For Flavin, the projection of a system was particularly important because it provided a kind of framework to work with and against. The repetition and regularity of his elements and his arrangements provided a structure within which he employed a strategy of systematic change.[4]

Although Marfa's tilting corridors were a striking new development for Flavin, the use of diagonals and other aspects of the piece derive from earlier works. Flavin's first solely fluorescent piece to be exhibited employed a diagonal element: the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Robert Rosenblum) was a single 8-foot fixture with a cool-white lamp placed on the wall at a 45-degree angle. The spacing of the parallel lamps at Marfa relates to untitled (to Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein on not seeing anyone in the room), 1968, a work in which a rank of single cool-white lamps is set vertically into a doorway.[5] In that work, the lamps face away from the viewer, illuminating an empty room while blocking passage into it, like the Marfa works that are barricaded at each end. In both cases, the architecture and lights operate in tension with each other. The walls invite passage but the lamps prevent it; the lights shine forth brilliantly only to be contained and framed by the walls. The Marfa works, however, are neither as blunt nor as austere as the 1968 work, with its cool, colorless light. Also in contrast, the exposed backs of the fixtures in the earlier piece suggest prison bars and give a vaguely political character to the work. At Marfa, the double-sided arrangement and the intensity of the paired, contrasting colors fill and complicate both the existing and constructed space. The physical experience of the work becomes dynamic and visually disorienting.