In another light - fluorescent light art, Dan Flavin, Dia Center for the Arts, Guggenheim Museum, PaceWildenstein, New York, New York

Art in America, June, 1996 by Richard Kalina

Dan Flavin was the subject this season of three major exhibitions in New York, and, with that kind of high-profile exposure, it really should have been Flavin's year. Yet it didn't seem to be. Flavin is, unfortunately, taken a bit for granted. His work is familiar both historically (as a still-unfolding instance of classic Minimalism) and materially (fluorescent bulbs remain irreducibly what they are). But this familiarity is misleading, for familiarity implies a certain stasis, and Flavin's art has evolved - both the work itself and our perception of it. Its forms, means and associations seem to grow richer and more complex as time passes. New meanings accrue, the frame of reference widens.

Of the recent exhibitions, two were museum shows of older work. The Goggenheim Museum SoHo showed 26 pieces dating from 1963 to 1987, while the Dia Center for the Arts exhibited 15 works from 1964 to 1978 in a show titled "European Couples, and Others." (Dia has also installed in its stairwell the first of a matched pair of permament site-specific works - a line of blue and green tubes four stories high, visible from the street day and night. An identical piece will be installed on the stairwell's other side.) The third exhibition was a gallery show at PaceWildenstein in SoHo - a carefully modulated series of l@ horizontal wall pieces in colored fluorescents.

What struck me most forcibly after seeing all three shows was the clarity of the work, the inherent logic, order and legibility, all riding in tandem with the most visceral and emotional of effects. Flavin's art seems to comprise four fines of understanding and intention, operating separately but simultaneously. I see these as: appropriation from the outside world, structure, color and architecture.

This multiplicity provides many entrances into the work. It increases accessibility, but it also sets up ambiguous metaphorical situations, readings operating at evocative cross-purposes to each other. The four dominant lines mentioned above all deal in some way with problems of perception, naming and reference - the kind of applied epistemology that Flavin is most comfortable with. But there is another aspect to his investigations, consistently denied by him but hard to ignore-that of the spiritual or transcendent. As time goes by, these more metaphysical associations continue to hover over Flavin's work, giving another dimension to the overtly factual. Are the similarities to Newman's zips or Rothko's floods of suffused color purely incidental@ Is the cathedral-like feeling of an installation of the cool white monuments, for Vladimir Tatlin just intelligently ironic@ And what about the sense of blood and mystery in monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K who reminded me about death@, a deep-red comer piece looming out at us from the darkness of the Dia installation. The very nature of Flavin's artistic approach ensures he can have it both ways. The interpretive arena is wide open, and moreover it is the artist himself who has cleared the field, so to speak, by making art that, while full of ambiquity, has no built-in doubt. The work is always in focus: you can see it clearly at whatever level of attention you want to give it.

By the nature of its materials, Flavin's art Binvites a reconsideration of the neo-Duchampian readymade, the object that has been plucked from the world and installed in the context of the art gallery. Lately, ready-mades or their near-relatives have been enjoying something of a vogue. On a recent short walk in SoHo I came across exhibitions featuring fire hoses, beds and mattresses, plastic soda bottles, and in one case an entire section of rusted fire-escape cut off a building and hung by cables from the gallery's ceiling. The effects were all very grittily poetic, but such work seems to operate in a quite different esthetic mode from Duchamp's and Flavin's. It feels arbitrary and strained, the object's removal from the world an underlining not of its artfulness or of a presiding indifference, but of its dysfunction, its pathos.

Flavin's borrowings from the quotidian world are of another order. He takes a humble object, all right, but he knows just what he wants. It's only one class of object, the commercially available fluorescent light fixture. There are a set number of colors and a set number of shapes and sizes. There is the circular fixture and the straight tube in 2-, 4-, 6- and 8-foot lengths. Flavin forms these mass-produced utility products into art objects, but they also do what they were meant to do - light up a room. Consequently, Flavin's work is untouched by the sense of profligacy that attends much recent art involving readymades, the feeling that there is an inexhaustible trove of stuff out there that one can art up, empty of logic and function, and turn into something that looks tough-minded but is at heart easy and sentimental.

Flavin's tubes carry with them not only the generalized atmosphere of the industrial, but also the quite specific aura of the milieus they most often illuminate - the supermarket, the office, the factory, the hardware store, the lighting shop, the building supply house. Fluorescent lights are cheap, impersonal, replaceable, modular. They are cool, simple in shape, and they radiate virtually without shadow, emitting only a low hum. They are industrial artifacts poised midway between the old idea of a machine and the new one. The classical machine was active, warm, metallic and noisy - a thing of wheels, gears, crankshafts and pistons. The postmechanical device, with its software and microchips, its optical fibers and smooth plastic, is small, silent and boxed in, but capable of the most complex interconnections.