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

Flavin presents the industrial in a low-keyed, appreciative way, as a condition of modem existence. Fluoreseent light fixtures, like International Style skyscrapers, are made of metal and glass. They are opaque and transparent, strong yet fragile. Flavin's approach to material is straightforward in an essentially Miesian manner. Form follows function. Material embellishments are strictly excluded from Flavin's artistic vocabulary. no customizing, no special bending, no timers, no dimmers, no gestural drawing in space, no mixed media, no text.

The second fine of Flavin's practice is the structural. Despite the seemingly limited nature of his materials, he has produced art works in a remarkable number of formal permutations. Flavin's work can be freestanding or wall-based. It can bridge corners or nestle into them, be hung from the ceiling or laid out on the floor. The tubes can face forwards or backwards. They can be oriented horizontally, vertically or diagonally, in a grid or not. There can be single tubes or multiple tubes arrayed in varying symmetries or asymmetries. The tubes can also be placed parallel and next to each other to form solid color fields. In addition, Flavin uses color not just perceptually but as a structural variant, a differentiator.

Some of Flavin's pieces have the planar, graphic clarity of a drawing on gridded paper. For example, untitled (to a man George McGovern), from is a triangular, wall-hung work made with cool-white, circular tubes. Ten fixtures an up the wall, abutting a comer, and 10 ran perpendicularly to the first set, along the same wall and abutting the floor. From each of these two baselines another eight gradually diminishing rows are generated (the second row getting nine fixtures, the third eight and so on) so as to form a right isosceles triangle. The perceptual results, of course, are not at all straightforward, but the structure is. On the other hand, greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green) is a freestanding piece of great architectural complexity (and spooky emotional effect). A green post-and-intel unit is reiterated to form two bridgelike structures, one made of small tubes in square translucent sheathing and the other of bigger ones, that cross each other at an angle, carving up the room's space in ways hard to quantify.

"Hard to quantify, does not, however, mean impossible. Look at any Flavin for a while and the plan starts to unfold. His work, like that of many other Minimalists or Conceptualists - Judd, Andre, Stella, Bochner or Smithson - employs simple counting, measuring and distributing strategies. The monument, for V. Tatlin" series, for example, begun in the mid-'60s, parallels Frank Stella's various pinstripe series of the same decade. The fluorescent tubes and the stripes function similarly, and the symmetrical external shape is configured by the outcome of a set of logical placement decisions. Flavin's comprehensibility is helped by the modular quality of his materials. Quantities of two, four, six and eight have sets of potentially complicated, but always graspable relationships.