Dan Flavin
A luminous world filled with colours, only to brighten it up with fluorescent lights.
Artists have long carried on the tradition of light art, with some leaving a profound impact on the art world. Dan Flavin, an American minimalist artist, gained fame for creating sculptural objects and installations using commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.
In 1959, while studying drawing and painting at Columbia University, he began creating assemblages and collages alongside his paintings, reflecting his early fascination with Abstract Expressionism. By 1961, he held his first solo exhibition of collages and watercolours at the Judson Gallery in New York.
That summer, while working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History, Flavin started sketching sculptures incorporating electric lights. Later that year, he brought these sketches to life as assemblages he called “icons,” combining lights with monochromatic canvases.
By 1963, he had abandoned the canvas entirely, focusing on his distinctive fluorescent tubes. By 1968, his light sculptures had evolved into immersive, room-sized installations. That same year, he transformed an entire gallery with ultraviolet light at Documenta 4 in Kassel.
Dan Flavin referred to his fluorescent light installations as “icons”, with some of his early works titled Icon I, II, III, etc. This reference suggested a connection between light and intelligence.
When a cartoon character gets an idea, a glowing lightbulb appears over their head. This lightbulb symbolises intelligence, illuminating its surroundings and shedding light on the matter. Like intelligence, it remains invisible unless it has something to reflect on. Unlike a sudden flash of inspiration, Flavin’s constantly lit installations suggest a more enduring and passive form of wakeful intelligence—consciousness.
1962 Flavin said, “My icons do not raise the Blessed Saviour in elaborate cathedrals. They are constricted concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.”
“Limited light” refers to artificial light, which offers only a portion of the natural spectrum, unlike sunlight. This type of light selectively emphasises specific colours, highlighting some information while obscuring others. This display mirrors human intelligence, which filters through continuous sensory input—visual, auditory, and tactile—to focus on specific objects and situations.
The association of electric light with intelligence (the “subject”) and illuminated objects (the “object”) is usually straightforward. However, when a Flavin piece solely lights a gallery space, the presence of a viewer—a second “subject” or intelligence—complicates this dynamic. It suggests that Flavin’s works might serve as “icons” not just in a semiotic sense but also in a religious one.
Flavin wrote: “I use the word ‘icon’ as descriptive, not of a strictly religious object, but of one that is based on a hierarchical relationship of electric light over, under, against and with a square-fronted structure full of paint ‘light”‘ (italics mine). By itself, a light in a room can suggest an individual presence. However, an electric light that lights both a room and an individual in that room becomes more like a religious icon. The radiant light becomes the very means by which all the visual information (knowledge) about the room and its individual is revealed. By making the space and the viewer visible, the light, in a sense, “creates” them. It is the source of all their apparent colour and form. It is a condition which precipitates their evident existence, a numinal presence that can even be a direct metaphor for divinity: “I am the light of the world.”
The essential aspect of a Flavin piece is not its discrete arrangement of forms and colours, as in traditional paintings or sculptures, but its ability to light up a room. This concept explains Flavin’s indifference to formal issues, which is evident in his statement: “All my systems, even the oldest, seem applicable again and continuously. It is as though the system synonymises its past, present, and future states without losing relevance.”
Flavin often improvises his pieces to suit specific spaces or adjusts the spacing of elements in works like The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham) (1963-64) based on the wall length. This focus on natural light clarifies why critics frequently misinterpret his work when classifying it as painting or sculpture. As Sol LeWitt once remarked, “I like everything about Dan’s work except the lights.”
This misunderstanding may stem from our habit of viewing art through photographs. Flavin’s works resist capture in photographs, symbolising how they defy categorisation as painting or sculpture.
One cannot separate Flavin’s piece from its surrounding space. A photographer can either set the stop to capture the light from the fluorescent bulbs, rendering the surrounding walls black, or adjust for the light on the walls, causing the bulbs to overexpose and appear white. Either approach only conveys part of the experience.
