Description
The fluorescent light is an icon of the every-day. Despite their association with the banality of office cubicles and employee lunchrooms, Dan Flavin brought them into a new contextoff ceilings and onto the walls and floors of fine art galleries. One of Minimalisms mosr important artists, he explored the artistic potential of fluorescent lighting for over three decades to create his own icons for the art world. Flavins embrace of the common lighting fixture exemplifies the Minimalist dogma; he created an immense body of work out of a mass-produced material. Begun in the 1960s, Minimalism is often characterized visually by what it physically lacks. Stark geometric forms, uniform planes of color, and limited materials were used to reject subjectivity in art, as a reaction against dramatic Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Though it was never a self-proclaimed movement (and its artists often fiercely rejected being labeled), Minimalism focused on the essentials of geometric abstraction and its self-referential forms, stripped of emotion and distraction. Flavin utilized a small selection of basic forms: two-, four-, six-, and eight-foot straight tubes, and in 1972, circles. Minimalist art was mainly comprised of industrial or building materials, such as steel, fiberglass, and plywood, and were often commercially fabricated according to the artists specifications. For example, Robert Morris untitled large-scale polyhedron forms were constructed from two-by-fours and gray-painted plywood. The use of color in Minimalist art may have been restrictive, but such limitations often created bold, striking visuals. Flavin used only ten colors of lights during his career: red, blue, green, pink, yellow, ultraviolet, and four different whites. The colors of the lights bounce and blend on the walls surrounding his pieces, interacting to create unusual and surprising combinations. Also on the MIT campus, in the atrium space between MITs new Green Center (Building 6C) and the Institutes older Buildings 4, 6, and 8, Sol LeWitts Bars of Colors Within Squares, 2007 is another eye-catching example of a Minimalist color sensibility. Flavins fluorescent assemblages follow in the footsteps of the work of Marcel Duchamp, the revolutionary artist whose readymades challenged the art world as never before. His most notorious, Fountain, 1917, was a porcelain urinal turned on its side, signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt and placed on a pedestal at the New York Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York in 1917. Though it was quickly taken down, and the original was lost or destroyed soon after, it had a powerful effect on the art world as it forced viewers to ask, What is art? It challenged the historical notions of what defines art: that it must use traditional materials like marble, wood, metal, charcoal on paper, or paint on canvas, that it be unique, and that it must involve a sufficient amount of craft on the artists part. Untitled (for Conor Cruise OBrien) 5c, 1990 defies the same perceptions, and lets the standard, commercially sold, fluorescent tube stand on its own as high art through its new context in an art environment. *Note - this artwork is accessible to the public by appointment only.
Details
- Work Date:
- 1990
- Location:
- Room No. 1
- Dimensions:
- 96 in. x 15 in. x 24 in. (243.84 cm x 38.1 cm x 60.96 cm)
- Medium:
- Green, red, blue and yellow fluorescent light construction
- Credit Line:
- Gift of Dorothy and Roy Lavine