Dan Flavin: New Light
In making light his primary medium, Dan Flavin (1933–1996) established himself as one of the most innovative and significant artists of the minimalist movement. A new generation encountered Flavin’s work through the critically acclaimed exhibition Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, which opened in October 2004 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Dan Flavin: New Light includes essays that respond to this exhibition and to the renewed interest in Flavin’s work and its place in 20th-century art. In this volume, six leading scholars of contemporary art consider the ambiguities and multiple resonances of Flavin’s light works. Each addresses the ontological complexity of the work––object-based, yet “situational,” and painterly in its deployment of colored light––within the insistently sculptural world of minimalism. The book’s contributors interpret this tension by exploring Flavin’s early assemblages, the relationship of drawing to his installation practice, the specificity of his materials and their operation in actual space, and the openly ambivalent place of Flavin’s work within the history of late modernism.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Artists: Dan Flavin
Contributors: Briony Fer, Hal Foster, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Alex Potts, Anne Wagner, Jeffrey Weiss
Designer: BW&A Books, Inc.
Printer: Thomson-Shore, Inc., Dexter, Michigan
Publication Date: 2006
Binding: Softcover
Dimensions: 7 x 10 in (17.8 x 25.4 cm)
Pages: 176
Reproductions: 50 b&w
ISBN: 9780300114096
Retail: $45
Status: Out Of Print
Dan Flavin
From 1963, when he conceived the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), a single gold, fluorescent lamp that is installed on a diagonal on the wall—a work which marks the artist’s first use of fluorescent light alone, until his death in 1996, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially-available fluorescent lamps to create installations, or “situations” as he preferred to call them, of light and color. Through the construction of light, Flavin was able to literally establish and redefine space.