Dan Flavin: singing the art electric: from tentative drawings to commanding fluorescent installations, the art of Dan Flavin is presented in an expertly staged retrospective—the first career survey for this Minimalist master in more than three decades

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

The art historian Leo Steinberg began a long-ago lecture in Rome with a question that seemed designed to both quell and incite expectations in the eager audience: what is left to be said, he asked with approximated bafflement, about the art of Leonardo da Vinci? I recalled Steinberg's sly challenge during the ride to Washington to view the National Gallery of Art's retrospective of the well-studied Dan Flavin. Sure, Flavin was no polymath, no Renaissance man, though he did share with Leonardo an empiricist's preoccupation with light and its effect on perception. Yet there is a certain art-historical congruence--instructive, if limited--between the founding cohort of Minimalism (Judd, Andre, Morris, Flavin) and their High Renaissance counterparts (Raphael, Bramante, Leonardo, Michelangelo). These were the helmsmen of movements so coherent and authoritative as to seen epochal in their day, visionary movements that nevertheless congealed into coercive academic dicta and engendered successors--Mannerism and Post-Minimalism--which were commensurately disobedient, unstable, plural and playful. And with all these artists, voluminous bibliographies notwithstanding, the case never seems closed. (1)

The organizers of the Flavin exhibition may have had something akin to Steinberg's question in mind, though their imperative seems to have been pinpointing what is left to be seen about the art of Flavin. Their conclusion, embodied in a spirited and persuasive installation, is quite a lot. Four experts brought to the enterprise an array of qualifications so essential and mutually complementary as to make them X-Men of installation teams. There are the show's curators, Tiffany Bell, project director of the Dan Flavin catalogue raisonne and the artist's curator and archivist during the 1980s, and Michael Govan, president and director of Dia Art Foundation. (2) Also participating were Steve Morse, Flavin's shop manager from 1991 and currently director of the Flavin studio, and Jeffrey Weiss, curator and head of the modern and contemporary art department at the National Gallery. Pooling comprehensive archival information, first-hand knowledge of Flavin's imperatives regarding fabrication and presentation, practical experience with fluorescent light's mechanics and behavior, and a familiarity with the eccentricities and possibilities of the two-storied space into which the exhibition has been inserted, the quartet crafted a smartly paced exhibition that brings the work's generosity, wit and occasional sublimity to the fore.

Flavin's four-decade career was almost wholly given over to working with fluorescent lights. In 1957, a high-school graduate back home in New York after a stint in the Air Force, he began to experiment with drawing and fashioning hybrid collages and assemblages, mostly made with found materials. Four years later, he built the first of eight "icons," boxy, monochrome-painted constructions outfitted with incandescent bulbs and short fluorescent tubes, wall-hung objects that are neither painting nor sculpture and that represent his first use of lights. From a single tube mounted on his studio wall in 1963, Flavin proceeded to work entirely with fluorescents, designing simple and complex objects and installations, eventually working on the scale of architecture. With fidelity perhaps unmatched since Mondrian arrived at the principles of Neoplasticism, Flavin confined his practice almost exclusively to the arrangement of standard-length (2, 4, 6 and 8 feet) fixtures and lamps in 10 commercially available colors, including UV filtered and a range of whites. (3)

To his credit, the international response to the early lights earned Flavin a touring museum survey by 1969. (4) To our detriment, there were no subsequent traveling retrospectives until the present one. Although the complete catalogue of light works includes 775 entries, Flavin's sturdy reputation has rested on a fraction of that output, an assortment of frequently shown, widely reproduced, mostly early works, plus a handful of later, well-documented permanent installations that are even more likely to be familiar to viewers through photographs alone. (5) In short, though many of Flavin's works are known, even more are not. Still, the artist himself believed that his oeuvre wouldn't lend itself to the standard narrative of artistic evolution that underpins most survey exhibitions. "I know now," he wrote in 1966, "that I can reiterate any part of my fluorescent light system as adequate. Elements of parts of that system simply alter in situation installations. They lack the look of a history." He continued, with premature rue, "It is curious to feel self-denied of a progressive development." (6)

Of course, Flavin's art does evince physical and conceptual development. Circular fluorescent: tubes enter the work in 1972. Intensified back lighting--turning the lamps away from the viewer--and the introduction of short, bracketlike projecting fixtures further complicate the compositions. Increasingly ambitious and sophisticated designs became possible with commissions for permanent works, from installations at the St. Louis home of Emily and Joseph Pulitzer (1976) and in the stable wing of the villa in Varese then owned by Giuseppe Panza di Biumo (1977) to the posthumously executed projects for Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa in Milan (1997) and the Chinati Foundation in Mafia, Tex. (2000) [see A.i.A., Oct. '00].