Dan Flavin is easily ridiculed, but that’s why I remember him.
The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York introduced me to Flavin in the 1990s. I stepped into one of the museum’s white-walled galleries and saw a simple glass tube of colored light leaning into a corner. Magically, the tube was one color and the light it shed was another.
Flavin made modern art installations, or what he called “situations,” using commercially available fluorescent lights—what any one of us could buy at Home Depot. It’s the type of art that people who buy fluorescent bulbs for over the basement workbench or in the laundry room might laugh at and call a racket.
But Flavin was serious. Like most artists of his era, he didn’t see any limits on his expression, tools, or materials. He grew up in Queens, tried the military (Korea), tried the priesthood, and then tried drawing and painting at Columbia University.
He painted some abstract work, and built some mixed media sculpture, and even used found garbage. Then he constructed a series of industrial sculptures or canvases—boxes really—with wood and paint and electric lights.
At the end of May 1963, continuing to play around with these materials, Flavin “took a standard 8ft-long yellow fluorescent lighting unit and fixed it to the wall of his studio at a 45-degree angle.” It would become one of his most famous works of minimalist sculpture, Diagonal of May 25, 1963, because it was the first.
Limiting himself to the different shades of standard white light and colored tubes in yellow, green, blue, red, pink, and the occasional ultraviolet, and their unmodified commercial fixtures, Flavin played with hardware store fluorescence and electricity for the next three decades, which made up the rest of his life.
Moving through a show of his works is like walking through a rainbow to study where one color ends and another begins. There are fences and ladders of a single color and then grids of every color that, like I said, look blue but shed pink or look yellow but yield green.
His work is a reminder that you can take one crayon out of the Crayola box and stay busy to the end of time if you have the imagination. The deeper we focus on one object—or subject—the more far-reaching our study becomes. What’s the difference between playing with paint on a white canvas and playing with colored light on a white surface?
Flavin’s work was traditional, and pedestrian, and out-of-this-world new.
As important as anything he taught the world about art and light is the lesson he teaches about human will. Flavin is my go-to example of the “Seriously?” school. You can roll your eyes at the idea of quitting your responsible job and playing with electrical fixtures, but you can’t spend an afternoon with Flavin’s work and leave uninspired.
(That’s an interesting thought; that we roll our eyes because we’re afraid to look straight at something.)
Most human methods and creations depended at one time on an individual or a group that persevered until the rest of the world said, “Oh wait, you’re serious about this.”
That first yellow tube was Flavin’s acceptance of his own death. Like any of us, he only had a few more good decades. And you can’t do everything in life. So why not fluorescence and electricity?
Why not spend your best years playing with light?