Dan Flavin’s practice asserts itself through the disciplined use of commercially available fluorescent light, a medium that, in his hands, becomes inseparable from questions of space, perception, and context. Rather than disguising its industrial origins, Flavin emphasizes the given nature of the material, turning its apparent neutrality into a vehicle for spatial and phenomenological transformation. His installations not only mark but actively condition the architectural environments they inhabit, exposing the extent to which perception is shaped by preconceptions of both object and light. As the critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe incisively remarked: “A fluorescent tube is already a thing toward which (...) the viewer brings a preconception. So is the light that comes out of it.”
In Flavin’s work, light operates simultaneously as substance and instrument: a medium through which to 'paint' space, and a vehicle for testing the radicality and tension inherent to art. Flavin himself articulated this duality: “I think the first thing you notice is that there is a dramatic quality of placing the lamp and getting a return of the light from where you put it. The next challenge is to do something with it, to assemble systems.” The fluorescent tubes that defined his practice from 1963 to 1996 stand as the “monuments” of the contemporary era and of the postwar American art scene. Despite the passage of time, they continue to be experienced with the same immediacy and intimacy, as though untouched, preserving their original intensity.
The modularity enabled by these tubes within Flavin’s constructions resonates with the plurality of architectures they inhabit. His recurring use of the angle, the corner, finds its roots in the work of Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, both constant points of reference for the artist. As the art historian Michael Govan has noted: “The use of the corner was decisive for Tatlin, who sought to eliminate the frame and project his work into real space. But the corner also carried another significance for him and for his colleague, Kazimir Malevich, animated by a will to transgress. Tatlin’s corner reliefs were first exhibited in 1915, in the same exhibition that included Malevich’s painting Black Square. Installed in corners, these two works claimed the unused margins of the gallery. The chosen placement—the angle formed by two walls—also explicitly referred to the location where, in Russian households, a religious icon was traditionally hung.” This influence manifested itself clearly in Flavin’s 1963 installation at the Green Gallery, Pink out of a corner (to Jasper Johns). By projecting light into the corner of a room, Flavin mitigates the perceptible separation between two adjoining walls, thereby generating an indeterminate spatial configuration, one that is devoid of a proper frame, of delineating lines, and of conventional perspectival elements.
The combinations created by Flavin derive from a deliberately limited chromatic palette and number of tubeformats: ten colors and six formats in total. This constraint rendered all the more remarkable the variations he achieved in each of his works, as could be observed in his first exhibition in the United Kingdom, held in November and December 1973 at the Lisson Gallery. It was in this context that Untitled (to Barbara Lipper), 1973, was presented, composed of three different tubes, blue, red, and pink, each four feet (122 cm) in height. The delicate interplay of these three luminous tones bathed the corner in an atmosphere at once soft, sensual, and sophisticated.
Untitled (to Barbara Lipper), 1973, pays tribute to the then-director of the Leo Castelli Gallery, whose role extended beyond administration to that of confidante, cultural interlocutor, and key presence within New York’s experimental milieu. Flavin’s works do not exist in isolation; even their titles testify to a broader relational field. By dedicating pieces to peers, friends, and patrons, the artist inscribed his constructions into the social and professional networks of the art world.
As a witness to the exhibition, reporting for the Sunday Times, John Russell wrote: “Electric light is one of the distinguishing characteristics of our age, and it is not surprising that so many artists have tried with such varying success to make use of it. [...] Among the artists in question by far the most important, to my eye, is the American Dan Flavin, whose first London show is now on at the Lisson Gallery in Bell Street. Flavin decided just ten years ago to make art with tubes of fluorescent light of many commercially available colour. The result was to function as a valid substitute for drawing, for painting, for sculpture and for stained glass. It was to operate, in other words, as a drawn form, as a three-dimensional form, as a source of colour, and as a generator of secondary effects that would modify their environment, much as stained glass modifies the building in which it is installed. The Lisson show is necessarily small, but it includes two pieces in which Flavin plays warm colour against cool colour – peach-juice against paving-stones, if one had to define the two – and in doing so charts feeling in quite a new way. It also has, downstairs, one of the corner-pieces which set up a formal structure in their own right and go on to modify the whole room by the casting of coloured light, on the one hand, and of disruptive shadow on the other. A major museum show for Flavin is surely long overdue.”