Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Own Your Own Flavin
Dan Flavin must have known that he had made his breakthrough with the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) (at left) because he decided that one copy wasn’t enough. He specified that the piece be executed with nine different fluorescent tubes (yellow, daylight, cool white, warm white, soft white, blue, green, pink, and red), each one in an edition of three.
In this way, Flavin starting playing in the emerging minimalist/conceptualist space. Variability of a single attribute—the color of the light—became for him a consideration worthy of exploring. Flavin had originally intended to vary the positioning of the fixture on the wall as well, but he eventually decided to limit that variable to the 45 degree angle of the initial piece.The catalogue says that two pieces from this series of 27 have never been executed and are (theoretically) still available for purchase from the estate. Interested in buying one of these historically important Flavin works? There is one available in warm white and another in soft white.
Of course you could always just buy an eight-foot fixture and the correct bulb from The Home Depot and install it yourself at a 45 degree angle from the floor. But that would be a bootleg, and we could never condone bootlegging art here, could we?
