Exceptional Works: Dan Flavin

“Dan Flavin introduced a simple, fluorescent tube of light. Almost ethereal in its brilliance, … it was a profound choice that combined the industrial, the phenomenological, … even the spiritual.”

—Michael Auping, “Radiant Bones: The Church of the Phenomenal,” in Dan Flavin: Corners, Barriers and Corridors, 2016

Dan Flavin

untitled, 1974

pink fluorescent light

modular units, each made of two 4-foot (122 cm) vertical fixtures and three 4-foot (122 cm) horizontal fixtures; at least 62 ft. (19 m) long

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Originally created for Dan Flavin’s solo exhibition at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1975, untitled is a large-scale “barrier” dating from 1974. A unique, modular, and serial structure, untitled is among the artist’s most significant works, demonstrating Flavin’s centrality to minimal and conceptual art movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This work is featured on the occasion of the gallery's presentation at Art Basel, 2021.

Dan Flavin (1933–1996) produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially available fluorescent lamps to create installations (or “situations,” as he preferred to call them) of light and color. These light constructions enabled the artist to literally establish and redefine space. The present work dramatically bathes the surrounding space in pink light, cutting across the length of the room and disrupting viewers’ authority to interact with the surrounding architecture.

Dan Flavin, April 30, 1966. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/MUUS Collection via Getty Images

“I think I’m one of those people who, for better or worse, really believes in some of the simplest materials as being the best ones to think through.… I think that art that doesn’t separate itself, that is integrated or can even be taken for granted to a certain extent, is the most interesting now to me.… You don’t need museum labels or plaques. If people perceive that they have an enhanced circumstance, as opposed to what they had before, that’s all right with me.”

—Dan Flavin, interview by Tiffany Bell (1982), in Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights, 1961–1996, 2004

Dan Flavin, a structure diagram in perspective for a pair of modular units for the barrier, dedicated “(to Flavin Starbuck Judd)” of 1968, 1972.

Flavin’s barrier works, the first of which was executed in 1966, each consist of a series of freestanding light fixtures that extend from one side of a given room to the other, acting like a fence by physically barring the viewer from a segment of the exhibition space. Flavin continued experimenting with these barriers by creating works of different heights, structures, and colors.

Themselves a form of “readymade” constructed from commercial light fixtures, Flavin’s barriers are reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s seminal installation Sixteen Miles of String (1942)—in which a web of string thwarted viewers in the exhibition space—which is often cited as one of the earliest examples of installation art.

Dan Flavin, greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), 1966. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection

Dan Flavin, greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), 1966. Stedeliik van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Dan Flavin, the continuous icon, 1963 (detail)

Marcel Duchamp, Sixteen Miles of String, 1942, as installed in First Papers of Surrealism, Council of French Relief Societies, New York, 1942

“From its inception, Flavin’s art was especially sensitive to arrangement and context, … an idea that radically altered the course of art-making in the 1960s.”

—Michael Govan, “Irony and Light,” in Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights, 1961–1996, 2004

Dan Flavin installing his solo exhibition fluorescent light, etc. from Dan Flavin, at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1969

“Now the entire interior spatial container and its parts—wall, floor and ceiling, could support this strip of light but would not restrict its act of light except to enfold it. Regard the light and you are fascinated—inhibited from grasping its limits at each end.”

—Dan Flavin, “‘… in daylight or cool white.’ an autobiographical sketch,” Artforum, 1965

Dan Flavin, an artificial barrier of blue, red and blue fluorescent light (to Flavin Starbuck Judd), 1968. Installation view, Dan Flavin, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, 1996

Flavin’s barrier works make use of exhibition spaces’ architectural angles, focusing on the spatial points of intersection, such as the edge of an entryway, as the starting point for the work’s structure. These works extend the notion of potentially endless repeatability through the serial placement of modular units of light in space. Through the relationship between light, color, and space, Flavin’s barriers literally transform and redefine the surrounding architecture by limiting viewers’ experience and perception of the entire room.

The barriers are “site-situational” (a term coined by the artist to describe the adaptability of his work to the surrounding architecture). The works can be installed in a variety of sites as long as the installation follows Flavin’s established guidelines: the full dimensions of the installation are a function of the dimensions of a given space.

Dan Flavin, untitled (to Sonja), 1969. Installation view, Dan Flavin: Corners, Barriers and Corridors, David Zwirner, New York, 2015

One of the early barrier works, untitled (to Sonja) (1969), was featured in SPACES, an important 1969 group exhibition curated by Jennifer Licht at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“For Dan Flavin,” Licht wrote in the accompanying publication, “fluorescent light functions as both material and medium.… The special propensity of fluorescent light to project aura, however, gave it the implication of infinite space; it was then natural and inevitable for Flavin to exploit this quality, … first to alter our perception of a particular area in discrete works, then to distribute light systematically in formations that conditioned entire areas through light-color.”

Installation view, SPACES, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1969

Installation view, Dan Flavin, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1975

The present work is one of four related barriers that are structurally identical but created in different colors (blue, pink, yellow, and green) that were exhibited in Europe in 1975. Completed the year before, these four related works mark the culmination of the series, and are the last barriers the artist created.

Untitled was produced for the artist’s solo exhibition at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in 1975, which also included the yellow and green barriers. The blue barrier (now in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution) was shown at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1975.

Installation view, untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with respect and affection), 1974. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, 2012

Installation view, Dan Flavin, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1975

“Immanuel Kant explained in his ‘Critique of Judgment’ that ‘… the Sublime is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it, or by occasion of it, boundlessness is represented.’”

—Dan Flavin, “‘… in daylight or cool white.’ an autobiographical sketch,” 1965

Dan Flavin, untitled, 1970, permanently installed at 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, New York. Photo Alex Marks © Judd Foundation. Dan Flavin Art © Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Flavin met Donald Judd in 1962. The two artists became firm friends, and in 1970, Flavin created a site-specific barrier work for Judd at 101 Spring Street in New York.

“The lit tubes are intense and very definite,” Judd wrote in 1969. “They are very much a particular visible state, a phenomenon.”

Untitled (1970) is included in the collections of Judd Foundation and the Dia Art Foundation, New York. Other barriers are included in the collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Smithsonian/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.

Donald Judd and Dan Flavin Outside the Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton, New York, 1983

“Flavin is the most magical and emblematic of the Minimalists.”

—Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 2018

You can see this work in person at Art Basel, September 24–26, 2021

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