Dan Flavin, Untitled

Light was the primary medium of the Minimalist fluorescent sculptor Dan Flavin (1933-1996). As store-bought objects transformed into “art” by virtue of the artist’s intervention, they can be related to Duchamp’s readymades. Flavin defines interior architectural spaces with tubes of fluorescent lights arranged in geometric patterns or shapes. Light spreads from the tubes and infiltrates the environment, creating an installation within an available space. The technological character of the medium and its impersonal geometry is typical of the Minimalist aesthetic. Sometimes, as in Untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim), the color combinations are unexpected. Flavin’s merging of light and color, dependent as it is on technology and twentieth-century nonrepresentation, nevertheless has a spiritual quality that ironically allies his work with stained-glass windows and the play of light and color inside Gothic cathedrals.^[1]