Journey into Light:
Dan Flavin's Sober Icons
Seven years ago, the exhibition Dan Flavin: Architecture of Light
illuminated the
Deutsche Guggenheim. The show presented key works by the American
Minimalist from the collection of the Guggenheim Foundation in New York.
Now, the biggest retrospective to date of the artist, who died in 1996,
can be seen at the Pinakothek in Munich. Achim Drucks paid a visit.
"Dan Flavin: Architecture of light",
exhibition view Deutsche Guggenheim 1999,
Photo: Mathias Schorman, Courtesy Deutsche Guggenheim
The four light bulbs are blinking somewhat garishly from the four corners of
the yellow-painted wooden box. Their flicker evokes associations of street
fair booths or neon signs blinking outside the seedy bars of old
Technicolor films. In any case, this object does not seem like an icon at
first glance. Yet it actually is an icon – to be more precise,
Dan Flavin's icon VIII (the dead niggers icon) (to Blind Lemon
Jefferson), made in 1963. "dead nigger" – that sounds pretty bitter.
icon VIII (the dead niggers icon)
(to Blind Lemon Jefferson), 1963, Private Collection,
Photo: Bill Jacobson. Courtesy Dia Art Foundaion
And indeed, Flavin's reduced construction isn't only a distilled homage to
Blind Lemon Jefferson, the black singer and guitarist of the '20s, but
also to the feeling of the Blues and the racism of the American South.
Jefferson's emotional singing often filled Flavin's studio in New York as
he worked on his icons. In 1929, the musician died in destitution under
circumstances that were never fully resolved. What's left is the sound of
the word "lemon", Flavin's sober, lemon-yellow box with flattened corners,
and the naked light bulbs that could also be right out of a
Vaudeville theater.
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Dan Flavin at the Dwan Gallery, New York,
1967,
Courtesy Stephen Flavin
"They are dumb – anonymous and inglorious. They're as mute and undistinguished
as the run of our architecture", as Flavin wrote about his objects in
1962. "My icons do not raise up the blessed savior in elaborate
cathedrals, they are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms.
They bring a limited light." To visitors experiencing the complete series
of these wall objects for the first time in the magnificent Dan Flavin
retrospective at the
Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Flavin's remarks might indeed seem like
an understatement. Because it's precisely in their reduction and
factuality that the American artist's works convey a surprisingly sublime
feeling.
icon VII (via crucis), 19664, Dia Art Foundation,
Photo: Bill Jacobson, Courtesy Dia Art Foundation
The light shines pure and white from the fluorescent tubes that Flavin
attached to the top of a box covered in white
Formica – another secular icon titled the pure land that he
dedicated to his twin brother, David John Flavin. David died of polio
while Dan was working on this piece. The pure land is without
emotion, a square box reminiscent of
Malevich's White Square on a White Ground from 1919 – an "unframed
icon" of the Russian avant-garde and trademark of the Modernist
revolution. White is the Buddhist color for grief, the pure land a station
along the spiritual journey to
Nirvana. White as freshly fallen snow, the icon for Flavin's dead twin is
also as banal as something from a hardware store.
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