Art history is a tale about light. From Plato’s flame-lit cave to chiaroscuro paintings by Caravaggio, the camera obscura to smartphone lenses and VR, humanity’s relationship with light as a form of expression has evolved immensely over millennia. The early 20th century is often cited as the moment when what we consider to be “light art” began in earnest. It marked the arrival of kinetics, which focused on movement and change. Artists like Hungarian painter-photographer László Moholy-Nagy and American sculptor Alexander Calder started incorporating motion into their practices, along with transparent and reflective materials. The famed Light and Space movement emerged in the 1960s, with its epicentre in California; artists like Doug Wheeler, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, Mary Corse and Robert Irwin took a conceptual approach to sculpture. They experimented with the perceptual effects of colours, playing with and manipulating viewers’ sensory experiences. Turrell’s blue, pink and orange Skyspaces are perhaps the best-known examples from this period.
Fast forward to the 2010s, and we saw paintings morph into massive immersive rooms, with technology being used to reanimate works by the likes of Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo. They brought legends back to life. Dedicated exhibitions and festivals have since become commonplace: the annual Noor Riyadh is considered the world’s largest, displaying massive outdoor installations, sculptures and more from Saudi and international artists. There’s also the Berlin Festival of Lights, Vivid Sydney and Lyon’s Fête des Lumières.
These contemporary shows might not ever have been possible without the rise of one of light art’s foremost luminaries: Dan Flavin (1933-1996). In 1963, the American artist attached a single, industrial fluorescent light tube at a 45- degree angle to the wall of his studio – and called it art. This precise moment, according to Kunstmuseum Basel, which is mounting a major retrospective of Flavin’s works this summer, was a “radical act.” Here was a mundane object with practical and commercial use. It was a mass-produced and relatively inexpensive item, and it challenged assumptions of what was “acceptable” to be shown in such a context. The move extended a tradition of audacity tracing back to precursors like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), a detached urinal and legendary example of found art. The light tube, however, wasn’t just an ordinary item – it had the power to influence its surroundings. Flavin prompted two revisions of our ways of seeing: what objects we consider as art, and how they can change the space they occupy in profound, surprising ways.
Flavin was, initially, set to become a priest. Born in Jamaica, New York, in 1933, he attended the Immaculate Conception Preparatory Seminary in Brooklyn from age 14, before leaving to join his twin brother in the US Air Force after five years. He trained as an air weather meteorological technician, learning about art at the same time in Korea. After returning to the USA, Flavin continued his ventures into painting and drawing. This experience – of complex technicalities coupled with a creative mind – poised him to pioneer work powerful enough to dent the steel bends of global art history. It helped that he was American, white and male, supported by his proximity to the upper echelons of culture. He started making sketches for electric light sculptures in the summer of 1961 whilst working at the American Museum of Natural History. Prior to that, he had been a mailroom clerk at the Guggenheim, then a guard and elevator operator at the Museum of Modern Art, where he had met the likes of critic Lucy Lippard, painter Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt. He made himself an expert at being the “tinkerer at the top”; it was a fine observation point. These jobs required patience, attentiveness and heightened sensitivity. He spent a lot of time watching over a room, becoming familiar with the rows and rows of light tubes above his white cube of a workspace.
Flavin’s sketches from that summer came to life in his early experimental icons (1961-1964) series, which comprised eight coloured constructions formed like shallow boxes, made from different materials like formica, masonite and wood. He had the help of his then-wife Sonja Severdija, and together they fitted each cube with fluorescent tubes or other bulbs. “We worked around the clock during the week before the opening,” she reflected in 2008. “Since Dan always declared his own ‘inability’ with all things mechanical, and, since I was ‘always’ handy with tools (but never in a union), I wired all the pieces … Dan was quite certain about how individual pieces were to be installed. He made small drawings, which indicated placement of each work in relation to the architecture of the gallery space, and he thought a great deal about how the colours of different works would interact.”
It’s important to recognise Severdija’s pivotal role in bringing these pieces to life; as with many creative women in the mid-20th century, she’s often written out of the canon. Flavin and Severdija’s work began a sensation in the art world. It fuelled Minimalism – despite Flavin refuting his involvement in the movement – but it wasn’t free from its critics. Seeing his use of industrial items and the simplicity of design, they “accused him of being too focused on technique and process, and not enough on the emotional and intellectual content.”
But this wasn’t entirely true. One of the icons was dedicated to his twin, David; he died from polio in 1962. Grief, like light, is mutable. It shifts, changes shape, gathers up shadows. There’s the idea that one sees a brightness before they die, and we burn candles for those we have lost. Perhaps for Flavin, having grown up as a young priest in the making, and taught to worship a “light” of a kind, it seemed a fitting vessel. Pop artist James Rosenquist reflected: “Dan had been a man of the cloth, but gave it up for the wild world of art. I loved his work. It seemed to be an ethereal feeling transferred from his spiritual upbringing. It was special, colourful and illuminating, but, like life, could be turned off with a light switch.” The medium continues to be harnessed as a means of conveying increasingly potent and serious messages. Kapwani Kiwanga’s light-bathed rooms speak to and critique oppressive systems of power and control, whilst Iván Navarro creates politically relevant installations with mirrors and glass tubes.
It’s this aspect of Flavin’s practice that interested Kunstmuseum Basel’s curators Josef Helfenstein, Elena Degen and Olga Osadtschy. Dedications in Lights is devoted to other artists, times and places – even his beloved golden retriever, Airily. untitled (in memory of Urs Graf), for example, suffuses the museum’s inner courtyard in colourful light every evening. Most of Flavin’s works were untitled, with a specific reference towards a person or a historical event given in brackets. Some pieces referred to wartime tragedy or police violence. He acknowledged and worked through all the branches of his life: incidents, memories, people, relationships. There are works in protest of the Vietnam War (1965-1975), as well as a memoriam to John Heartfield (1891–1968), whose politically charged works were banned in Germany by the Nazi regime. Other creative figures honoured are Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Henri Matisse, Josef Albers and Sonja Severdija. Flavin was aware of the symbolism wrapped up in his practice. “I can take the ordinary lamp out of use and into a magic that touches ancient mysteries,” he wrote in a 1962 journal entry. “And yet it is still a lamp that burns to death like any other of its kind. In time the whole electrical system will pass into inactive history. My lamps will no longer be operative; but it must be remembered that they once gave light.”
Before his death in 1996, Flavin had been working on a design for a site-specific work at Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, Milan, a 1930s church designed by Italian architect Giovanni Muzio. The piece was completed a mere two days before Flavin’s passing on 29 November – a strange full circle moment. Dia Art Foundation and Fondazione Prada supported the install of the work, which took place a year later. Green and blue fluorescent lights continue, to this day, to illuminate the church’s nave; red bathes the transept; and a golden yellow fills the apse. The effect, even when viewed on-screen via Google, is serene, calming and spiritual.
Flavin passed away when the internet was still in its infancy. Social media platforms did not yet exist; the first is cited as Six Degrees, which launched in 1997. Today, with Instagram and TikTok, light art is more popular than ever before. Dedicated “Selfie Museums” have popped up all over the world, like Color Factory in the USA, allowing visitors to pose in front of luminous installations, some not dissimilar to Flavin’s, with the sole purpose of taking pictures to share online. Kunstmuseum Basel offers an interesting opportunity to think about pre-digital art in the digital age, selfie culture and the proliferation of immersive experiences at tourist spots and historic sites across the world. The question in 2024 is: have displays lost their lustre, given their ubiquity?
It may be hard to imagine that a fluorescent light on the wall could elicit anything close to spiritual these days. Now, new bars and high-end coffee shops are replete with wall lights spelling “inspirational” quotes. Many who visit Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, one of the most popular contemporary light works on display, grab a pretty Instagram post without glancing at the wall text outlining her motivations. But is this wrong? People are seeing that art and culture is fun, beautiful and worth enjoying. There is value in that. Kusama is more famous than ever before, in part thanks to social media. Yet, in the case of Flavin, Navarro and Kiwanga, there’s a problematic edge: are we commodifying something originally designed to raise big, uncomfortable questions?
It’s true that someone might walk into Dedications in Lights for an Instagram snap. At first, they might scoff at the arrangement of tube lights on the wall and floor – what Flavin would have called a “situation” – thinking “anyone could do this,” and that contemporary art is ultimately inert and useless. But, after taking a picture and standing still for a minute, with colours glowing and buzzing, melting into each other, they might feel something like peace. They may even remember a friend, emotion rising in their chest. This show reminds us of how important light is to the human story. After all, it’s part of what determines our circadian rhythm – the internal clock telling us when to sleep and wake. Dedications in Light is about what the body feels when it stops to remember.
Dedications in Lights Kunstmuseum Basel | Until 18 August
Words: Vamika Sinha
Image credits:
1. Dan Flavin, untitled (to Barnett Newman) one, (1971). © Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. Collection Carré d’Art- Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes. Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery.
2. Dan Flavin, pink out of a corner (to Jasper Johns), (1963). © Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Philip Johnson. Image: Florian Holzherr.
3. Dan Flavin, monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to PK who reminded me about death), (1966). © Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. The Dan Flavin Estate, courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.
4. Dan Flavin, untitled (to Don Judd, colorist) 1-5, (1987). © Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. Panza Collection, Mendrisio. Image: Florian Holzherr.
5. Dan Flavin, untitled (for John Heartfield) 3c, (1990). © Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. The Dan Flavin Estate, courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.
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