The Dan Flavin Art Institute Essay

Essay by Tiffany Bell

In 1979 Dia Art Foundation purchased the former First Baptist Church of Bridgehampton to create a gallery for changing exhibitions and a long-term exhibition space for the art of Dan Flavin, a resident of nearby Wainscott. Originally built as a firehouse in 1908, the building operated as a church from 1924 to the mid-1970s. Under the direction of Flavin and the architect Richard Gluckman, Dia restored and renovated the building to acknowledge both of these former functions. Changes to the exterior and painting the newel post in the entrance hall fire-engine red referenced the building's first use. Similarly, the original church doors were moved to the entrance of a small exhibition space on the second floor, which contains memorabilia, including a neon cross, collected from and about the church during the renovation. While the building has been made into an art gallery, it still holds these traces of its former functional and spiritual uses. This conversion parallels Flavin's transformation of light and fluorescent fixtures from spiritual associations or mundane service to contemporary "icons" depleted of religious or utilitarian significance.

Flavin's early use of fluorescent light is represented in this exhibition by untitled (1962), the final working drawing for icon IV (the pure land) (to David John Flavin [1933-1962]). This drawing documents one of a group of "electric light 'icons'" that Flavin made in the early 1960s. These icons, made from boxes that hang on the wall with attached electric lights, mark his rejection of an earlier gestural style in order to develop an art—now considered a cornerstone of Minimalism—that uses standard fluorescent lights in simple, matter-of-fact presentations.

This drawing also alludes to a less commonly recognized aspect of Flavin's lights: their presentation as memorials, monuments, or tributes to various individuals.1 Although Flavin abandoned the personal as connoted by expressionistic means, most of his artworks were dedicated to friends, relatives, curators, or historical personages. An autobiographical record was thereby incorporated into his work in its commemorations. But these personal tributes neither monumentalize individualism nor particular individuals; they are ordinary objects that lack the permanence of conventional monuments. While turned on, they have a magical presence, turned off, they don't exist.

In 1963 Flavin began to use only standard fluorescent fixtures and tubes mounted directly on walls. Marcel Duchamp's invention of the ready-made and Jasper Johns's use of everyday objects in an artistic context—most notably in his bronze light bulbs—were certainly precedents for Flavin's use of fluorescent lights. Nonetheless, as a medium for an ongoing body of work, fluorescent light was new. To provide context and to give it formal structure, Flavin used elements from painting, sculpture, and architecture. The six works in the second-floor exhibition offer a brief survey of Flavin's development of this chosen medium.

red out of a corner (to Annina), 1963, a single eight-foot-long red lamp forming a vertical line enveloped by a corner, recalls the vertical "zips" in fields of color in Barnett Newman's paintings. Like Newman, Flavin used simple, straightforward composition and large scale to convey an immediate nonillusionistic presence. A more general (and humorous) reference to painting is made by untitled (to Katharina and Cristoph), 1971, an eight-foot-square construction placed symmetrically across a corner. The structure provides a kind of picture frame for the green light illuminating the real space in back and front of it.2 The constructed hallways of untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), 1972-73, and untitled (to Robert, Joe, and Michael), 1975-81, blocked halfway through by barriers of light, similarly function as frames or containers of light. By using corner spaces, as with four works exhibited here, Flavin integrated his light constructions directly with the architecture. This device, borrowed from Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, activates the walls into structural elements to work with or against. In red out of a corner, the dramatic red column is enclosed by the walls of a corner; in the later untitled (to Katharina and Cristoph), 1971, the architectural scale of the lamps and the intensity of light transform the cornered space into a wash of green. The exhibition space's fabricated corridors do not offer passage but, rather, support the fixtures and provide surfaces for the reflection of colored light.

Whereas pictorial conventions and architectural structures offered Flavin a framework in which to consider his medium, he worked without precedents in dealing with the light and color specific to fluorescent tubes. The red, for example, in red out of a corner was originally intended to pull out space, like red paint on canvas, but in making the piece, Flavin discovered that red fluorescent light does not radiate much from the tube. Fluorescent light is produced by the transfer of invisible ultraviolet light, created by burning gas, to visible light by a variety of phosphors, which coat the inside of the tube.3 These phosphors radiate at different wavelengths within the visible color spectrum, producing different colors with different levels of illumination. Green is the most luminous. No mixture of phosphors make a true red, so red light is made by tinting the inside of the glass tube, thereby inhibiting the amount of light cast by the lamp. Red is thus subdued, as in red out of a corner, while green is so bright, especially when multiple lamps are used, that it fatigues the eye and appears white. This phenomenon becomes evident in viewing untitled (to Katharina and Cristoph) and the back side of untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg). As the green becomes white, the daylight through the windows looks pink. Colored light does not mix like pigment: the primary colors are red, blue, and green. Green mixed with red makes yellow light, and all the primaries mixed together make white. These effects are perhaps most apparent in untitled (1976), an eight-foot pink lamp backed by green and blue lamps, which lean into the corner. The pink light forms a line highlighted by an intense blue and green pyramid of color on the wall. As blue mixes with pink light, it forms a purple band, and green with pink makes a yellow area. untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977, is Flavin's fullest use of color in this exhibition. In an eight-foot gridded construction across the corner, pink, blue, green, and yellow lights mix in pastel squares on the wall, but the overall ambient light is white.

In 1972 Flavin added circular fluorescent lights, which produce varying qualities of white light, to his inventory of materials. untitled (to Jim Schaeufele) 1, 2, and 3 (1972) in three different colors-cool white, daylight, and warm-accommodates the existing architecture by providing necessary illumination in the stairwell.

Open to the public each summer since 1983, this small exhibition offers a mini- retrospective of Flavin's work with fluorescent light. In viewing all the lights and the architecture as a single, continuous installation, one can most appreciate the extent to which the artist has developed his medium. By manipulating the formal, phenomenal, and referential characteristics of light, Flavin has provided an experience built of provocative contrasts-between colors, intensities of light, structure and formlessness, the obvious and the curious, the serious and the humorous.

Tiffany Bell

Notes

1. icon IV was dedicated to the artist's twin brother who died while working in construction. Its all over whiteness was chosen as a reference to the white used in Chinese funerals, an Oriental influence reinforced by the scroll-like presentation and calligraphic white marking in the drawing exhibited here. See Brydon Smith, Dan Flavin: fluorescent light, etc. (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada for the Queen's Printer, 1969), p. 142.

2. As is often the case in Flavin's work, the references might have multiple meanings. Here, the use of the square format associates the artist's work with that of his Minimalist colleagues. But in creating a framelike structure, Flavin was also commenting in a characteristically ironic way on the distinctions being made at the time in the critical dialogue between pictorial space inside a frame and the real space of Minimalist sculpture.

3. See Smith, fluorescent light, etc. from Dan Flavin, p. 208.