Dan Flavin: in daylight or cool white

"Exhibited in March 1964 at the Green Gallery in New York, the nominal three (to William of Ockham) is at the crux of Flavin’s emerging practice. The vertically oriented single fixture in white, known as one, must have been considered a reduction to the simplest of formulations. Yet Flavin’s final resolution involved three sets of lights, a series rather than a consolidated whole, which realized the possibilities inherent in the first diagonal—that it could be extended endlessly. In a declarative voice, Flavin recorded in his notes: ‘With the nominal three I will exult primary figures and their dimensions. Here will be the basic counting marks (primitive abstractions) restated long in the daylight glow of common fluorescent tubes. Such an elemental system becomes possible (ironic) from the context of my previous work.’ . . . the nominal three was not a fixed composition, but rather a concept—whose premise had enormous implications for a form of art that could be drawn out from an idea." —Michael Govan, “Irony and Light,” published in the catalogue for Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, 2004