In 1963, Dan Flavin made his breakthrough work of fluorescent-light art, and for the rest of his life he stuck with what he knew. Can you blame him? After a few years of messing around with various media, he’d found a golden ticket. His fluorescents massaged the mind but never forgot to delight the eyes. In the same breath, they flattered rival ideas of art: candy-colored Pop, terse Minimalism, conceptual abracadabra. Not everyone loved these works—which, when arranged in their stipulated spaces, he called situations—but most of what his detractors said could be answered with a triumphant “That’s the point!” His cunningly modest definitions of success made conspicuous failure almost impossible. That’s no small thing, even if you happen to agree with me that Flavin’s situations are strong evidence that failure in art is underrated.
He was born in 1933 in Jamaica, Queens, and studied to become a priest. Altars, crosses, and stained glass seem relevant to a career defined by colorful glowing totems, but Flavin could be coy about the Catholic roots of his work, as he was about most labels—like his close friend Donald Judd, he disliked the term “Minimalism,” though the more he struggled the tighter it seemed to stick. Photographs show a round, sturdy-jawed, tough yet cheerful young man, his eyes smiling even when his mouth isn’t. Faces aren’t manifestos, but there’s a little of Flavin’s appearance in his art: the same intimidating rigor found in other avant-gardists of the era, but with more of a twinkle. When the artist Mel Bochner chose a movie star to play Flavin in a hypothetical “Minimal Art–The Movie,” he went with Jackie Gleason.