Flavin’s deep regard for Newman is evident in several of his works, such as untitled (to Barnett Newman to commemorate his simple problem, red, yellow, and blue) whose title directly references some of Newman's final paintings. ![]() The thin, rigid lines of Flavin’s fluorescent tubes that articulate an otherwise blank gallery wall also relate to the paintings of Barnett Newman, in which a narrow band of pigment-a "zip"-cuts vertically across a flat field of contrasting color. These painters were of enormous significance for Flavin for example, there is a parallel between Rothko’s luminous paintings with their glowing, hovering forms and the radiating colored lights of Flavin’s work. Other abstract painters of this period, including Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, painted large color fields that are often described in spiritual terms. ![]() Not all abstract, post-war painting favored the loose brushwork of gestural abstraction. The abstract expressionists, including such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Clyfford Still, produced nonobjective works that have a painterly quality to them: brushstrokes are visible, paint is allowed to drip and pool, and the artists’ energy and movement are manifest, sometimes aggressively so. In the 1950s, abstraction became the dominant mode of artistic expression, especially in New York, which was quickly establishing itself as an international art capital. In so doing, Duchamp deemed an object to be art by virtue of selection alone.įlavin’s fluorescent lights grew out of the traditions of post–World War II American art. The critique follows in the philosophical footsteps of Marcel Duchamp, whose "readymades" of the early twentieth century consisted of ordinary, utilitarian objects (such as a bicycle wheel, bottle drying rack, or urinal) that Duchamp isolated from their functional context and placed within the environment of a work of art. There was literally no need to compose this system definitively it seemed to sustain itself directly, dynamically, dramatically in my workroom wall-a buoyant and insistent gaseous image which, through brilliance, somewhat betrayed its physical presence into approximate invisibility.īy declaring that a fluorescent light tube could stand on its own as a work of art, Flavin boldly yet simply challenged the history of art, in particular the discipline’s theoretical separation of art and everyday life. The radiant tube and the shadow cast by its supporting pan seemed ironic enough to hold alone. Struck by the result, Flavin declared the "gold" tube his "diagonal of personal ecstasy." He went on to describe that, In this seminal work-the artist’s first to use fluorescent light alone-Flavin eliminated the square box of the icons, and instead positioned a single, unadorned yellow fluorescent light at a 45-degree angle against a gallery wall. But the term “icon” is used ironically, and hints at the artist’s ambivalence toward his Catholic upbringing icon V lacks the reverence of a sacred object, and instead projects a kitschlike quality, not only in the use of the cheap incandescent bulbs, but also in the reference to the gaudy lights of Broadway.įlavin’s breakthrough with fluorescent light was the diagonal of (to Constantin Brancusi). By using the term "icon" to describe these early light constructions, Flavin evokes the gold-ground religious icons of Byzantine art. ![]() icon V (Coran’s Broadway Flesh) is one of the largest and brightest of the icons, with twenty-eight incandescent "candle" bulbs lining the perimeter of the central square. That same year he began work on his icons series, in which incandescent and fluorescent bulbs are attached to shallow, boxlike square constructions made from various materials such as wood, Formica, or Masonite. The first hint of Flavin's interest in fluorescent light is found in his 1961 poem that reads:
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