Dan Flavin, Posthumously

Art in America, Oct, 2000 by Tiffany Bell

Santa Maria in Chiesa Rossa, Milan

The invitation to light Santa Maria in Chiesa Rossa, a building by Giovanni Muzio (a prominent figure in Milan's Novecento group, a Fascist-era movement dedicated to reconciling classical tradition with modernism), came in 1996 from the parish priest, Father Giulio Greco. Having seen Flavin's installations in Count Panza di Biumo's villa in the nearby town of Varese, Father Greco asked Flavin to light the church as part of an overall renovation. By restoring the church, he also sought to revitalize the surrounding neighborhood, which lies on the outskirts of Milan and accommodates a range of socioeconomic groups. His plan was realized with assistance from the Dia Center for the Arts and the Fondazione Prada.

Given Flavin's sometimes adamant denial of spirituality in his art in interviews and published letters and his rejection of the Roman Catholic Church in a well-known autobiographical essay, it is surprising that he took on the commission.[11] Nonetheless, as pointed out by Michael Govan, Flavin maintained a constant "dialogue with the profound aspirations of art and religion."[12] He called his earliest works that used light "icons"--in lowercase letters and in quotation marks. They are square, boxlike monochrome constructions with attached incandescent lights--both ordinary and candle-flame bulbs, sometimes colored or blinking--or occasionally fluorescent. Their titles ironically refer to the sacred presence invoked by religious artifacts while their material presence maintains their status as secular objects. Similarly, Flavin's seminal Minimalist light work the nominal three (to William of Ockham), 1963, alludes to Catholic theology. William of Ockham's Nominalism insisted that reality lies in the experience of real things and that abstract notions, such as God, depend completely on faith. Flavin thus introduces religious thought in a way that prioritizes concrete experience over spirituality.

Flavin at least paid heed to religion when he memorialized a church in a room adjoining a permanent installation of his lights. Commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation to restore and renovate a building in Bridgehampton, N.Y., that had formerly been a Baptist church (and a firehouse before that), Flavin retained a stained-glass window, a lectern and a metal cross lit by blue neon. He collected photographs of the congregation and presented all these mementos in a room adjacent to his fluorescent lights. Though primarily an homage to the building and the people who had once used it, the gesture nevertheless denotes a respect for the earlier sacred function of the building, and the presence of the neon cross and the stained-glass window seems to allude ironically to the pairing of light and spirituality, topics regularly raised in discussions of Flavin's work.[13]

The Milan project, then, offered a particular, perhaps quintessential, challenge to the artist. According to Morse and another assistant, Prudence Fairweather, Flavin took the commission because he was impressed by the passion and conviction of Father Greco's written request; he was also interested in Muzio's building.[14]