Untitled

Dan Flavin, 1969 · Gallery 413 · Floor 4

Two fluorescent lights. One yellow tube. One pink. You could get these at any hardware store. Four lengths, ten colors. That's what Dan Flavin used. It starts in '63. One plain eight-foot yellow light, on a wall, at a forty-five-degree angle. He calls it the "diagonal of personal ecstasy." Personal ecstasy. Straight off the shelf. Thirty-three years of tubes after that. Light itself as the thing. This one's from '69. Two tubes in a corner, where nobody hangs art. The yellow one faces you. The pink one's turned around. You're looking at the back of the fixture. The screw holes. So the pink never hits you directly. It hits the wall, and comes off the wall. Yellow light, pink light, and where they overlap, kinda orange-ish. Which isn't one of his ten. Flavin wouldn't call these sculptures. He called them situations. The tubes, the walls, the corner. What happens when you put them together. And some people find it almost holy. Two lights from the hardware store, and suddenly a corner feels like a chapel. He'd spent five years in a seminary as a kid, training to be a priest, and left. Now he's making a glowing cross in a corner. But his answer: "It is what it is, and it ain't nothing else." So... let's take him at his word. It's just hardware. He designed more than seven hundred and fifty of these light works. Kept a record of them on index cards. Tubes burn out. He knew that. So when you bought one, you got a certificate. A diagram, the title, his signature. You could bring back the broken fixture, and he'd replace it. You had to hang on to the paper, though.

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