Floor 4: Dan Flavin (exiting Richter)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Dan Flavin Gallery. This gallery is illuminated by two light sculptures. One to your right emits a very bright white light, while the other, positioned in the corner across the room, casts a softer mix of yellow, red, blue, and violet hues.
You've entered from the back left corner of this small square gallery, facing the far, front wall. The gallery has two light sculptures and an artist panel with an audio stop about the artist, which is located on the front left corner of the gallery. To access the audio, use the handheld listening device attached to the panel.
Halfway along the wall on your left is an entrance to the 4th Floor City Gallery, which spans the length of the entire 4th floor.
The exit to the Brice Marden Gallery is in the front left corner of the gallery. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else. . . . One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find."
—Dan Flavin, 1965
Dan Flavin
Born 1933, New York; died 1996, Riverhead, New York
Between 1963 and his death in 1996, Dan Flavin worked exclusively with commercially available fluorescent lights, restricting himself to the ten standard colors (blue, green, pink, red, yellow, ultraviolet, and four types of white) at predetermined lengths (usually two, four, six, or eight feet). From these, he created more than seven hundred unique artworks of widely varied scale and visual complexity. A lapsed Catholic (as a teenager he had studied for the priesthood), Flavin rejected readings of spirituality in his work. But he acknowledged, and was drawn to, the ambiguous nature of fluorescent light: Neither painting nor sculpture, it is both a physical object and an effect that transforms walls, corners, and rooms.
Related Media
Transcript
Narrator: At first, it might not look like there's a lot here. Just this light bulb oddly installed. But stare at this for long enough and you might start to see some interesting effects. Check out how the light dances around the room, the way the colors seem to change. This is Dan Flavin's world. He's known for making sculptures out of lights, specifically fluorescent lights. The domain of dreary office spaces, cheap apartments, and places like Wal-Mart. Why would an artist focus on something so mundane? We asked Tiffany Bell, who worked with Flavin for many years
Bell: The use of light denotes some sort of spiritual presence sometimes in painting. So I think it was the cross between the mundane and the kind of spiritual that attracted him.
Narrator: If you can check it out from different angles, see how the light bounces off the wall and spills onto the floor. Where does this work even begin and end? It does make you feel present in time and space. His work carries in it this kind of temporality. It's there when it's on and then when it's off, it's not there. So here's a question. If someone turns the light switch off, does it stop being art?
Objects
2 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1969
Cool white fluorescent light
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2008
This is one of thirty-nine arrangements of "cool white" fluorescent light fixtures that Flavin created between 1964 and 1990 and dedicated to the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953). Their title and vertical form refer to Tatlin's never-realized project Monument to the Third International (1919–20), a spiraling steel and glass structure that would have dwarfed Paris's Eiffel Tower. Flavin pays homage to Tatlin's quest to merge art and technology, yet ironically undermines his predecessor's utopianism with what he called his "temporary monuments," composed of modest, off-the-shelf lights with a limited lifespan.
Visual Description
A roughly eight-foot-tall arrangement of cool, white-fluorescent lights creates a vertical stepped tower that tapers upward, glowing brightly against a white gallery wall and casting halos of light. It is about the width of—and slightly taller than—a standard interior door.
Several long fluorescent fixtures are set vertically against a wall in parallel, their translucent tubes held in slim, silvery metal housings with visible end caps and brackets. The structure is symmetrical: two tallest tubes rise in the center, flanked by slightly shorter tubes, then lower tiers that step down to each side. At the base, multiple tube ends rest on the gallery floor. The brightest light pools on the floor directly in front, creating a pale reflection and a gradient of illumination across the floor.
Artwork Label Text
1971
Yellow, red, and blue fluorescent light
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1990
With its title and use of red, yellow, and blue lights, this work pays tribute to the US abstract painter Barnett Newman (1905–1970), a longtime supporter of Flavin who used the same palette in a series of paintings playfully titled Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?. A connection to painting is further suggested by the rectangular formation of the light fixtures, which suggests a picture canvas. Flavin’s works, however, occupy real space. The lights block off and visually dissolve the corner—a part of the room that is easily overlooked.
Visual Description
An open and rectangular arrangement of fluorescent lights—about the height of a standard interior door, though slightly wider— are installed at an angle of forty-five degrees to one corner of the gallery, cutting off the corner itself and flooding the surrounding space with red, blue, and yellow lights that mix to form a variety of other perceived hues.
At the top and bottom, two shorter (four-foot) yellow fluorescent lights are set horizontally, extending from wall to wall and with their bright yellow tubes facing outward. They are attached to a set of vertically oriented light fixtures that act as posts on either side. Two eight-foot blue lights face toward the corner so that the backs of their supporting metal fixtures are visible; while the blue tubes cannot be seen directly, their colored glow is reflected by the room’s white walls. Running parallel and flush with the blue light on each side are two stacked red lights of shorter (four-foot) length, which likewise face toward the corner. The blue lights are on the inside, while the red lights are on the outside, flush with the left and right walls of the room. Overall, these horizontal and vertical arrangements frame the corner of the room.
A deep blue dominates the empty center of the work, visually dissolving the line where the two walls meet at the corner. The different color lights blend and modify one another. The red light, altered by the nearby blue light, appears as a pink glow to the left and right. Above and to the sides, the blue and red lights mix to create gradients of violet-blue and lavender on the nearby white walls. The pale wood floor below and in front of the work also reflects the purple wash.