For 30 years—from the mid-1960s until his premature death in 1996—Dan Flavin made art with fluorescent tubes, the kind that you can buy in any DIY store. You will have seen his work, because most museums have got a Flavin somewhere. He used different coloured neon—white, blue, red and yellow—and made different arrangements of them. The lights might be positioned in a corner, vertically or diagonally, or set at different intervals along the length of a wall. There might be a combination of colours, or just one. The work is raw, its meaning opaque: at first sight, a radical non-art statement. Occasionally, Flavin created site-specific installations, in which the structure and spatial rhythms of buildings were outlined by arrangements of his lights. The nearest one to Britain is Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof museum, whose classical exterior is lit up by Flavin's neon tubes. It is difficult to imagine anything more calculated to enrage those with traditional tastes in art.
Yet while Flavin was one of the most radical of modern artists, he was also one of the most old-fashioned. By the late 1960s, he was already recognised as a leading minimalist. At one point in 1970, he had five exhibitions running at the same time in New York—including a retrospective. On the one hand, the conservative critic Hilton Kramer sneered that: "He seems to me no artist at all; he has simply been given space in an art gallery." But, on the other, left-leaning critics such as Lucy Lippard and Rosalind Krauss worried that Flavin's work was "attractively theatrical," or "too pictorial."
Now, after the recent decade of pop-art work from people like Damien Hirst and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which has its roots in conceptualism and minimalism, Flavin is ripe for art-world beatification. His transformation of art from an object into a luminous environment—or as he liked to put it, a "situation"—prefigures the latest French theory. In L'Art ? L'état Gazeux, Yves Michaud predicts that art is becoming an ambience around us. Neon is a gas. Neat.
Flavin fits into the great game of the late 20th-century avant garde—but he also shamelessly recycled the old-fashioned ploys of early 20th-century surrealism, abstraction and even 19th-century romanticism. His first neon work was a two-metre tube, positioned diagonally across a wall and entitled "Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy." For his second, he positioned another diagonal tube on a wall, but this time with the base touching the floor, and dedicated this to Brancusi. Brancusi's "endless column" from 1938 counts as the world's first minimalist sculpture—it is a slim, tall piece, based on a simple repeating geometric form. Flavin later arranged vertical neons in cathedral-like formations and named them after the Russian constructivist Tatlin. Flavin was using his neon tubes to mimic many of the major gambits of 20th-century art.
Minimalism set itself against the spiritual claims that had been made by and on behalf of artists since romanticism, but critics often rhapsodise about Flavin's work in the same way as they do about Rothko, Kandinsky or Caspar David Friedrich—praising it for its purity and religion. They meditate on Flavin's neons like Buddhists focus on candles. Minimalism also claimed to eliminate illusionism in art, but critics marvel at the illusionistic effects of Flavin's neon tubes, whose brightness sometimes blows out the edges of the museum room, creating a giddying expansion of space. This kind of praise reminds me of Vasari's enthusiasm for the perspectival illusions of Piero Della Francesca, or Ruskin's admiration for Turner's impressionistic light effects. Some things never change.
Flavin will soon be the subject of a major American retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas, and then at MCA in Chicago. In London you can see a small selection of his early works at the Haunch of Venison gallery until mid-March, the first British outing for Flavin since a show at the Serpentine in 2001. Does he deserve the acclaim?
Flavin took as his subject something which was normally used to illuminate other things—making his work seem doubly basic. By using lights, he could claim to be being simpler than other minimalists, since light is what the eye technically sees. But what I admire about Flavin is the bravura of his performance. Imagine the strength of character it must have taken not to stray from the path! What discipline it must have required not to diversify into halogen spots, up-lighters or angle-poises. He was like the sadhu, who wanders across India with only a loincloth around his waist. Flavin passed through the international exhibition spaces of the world with only a box of neon lights. Armed with this extremely modest vocabulary, he has re-enacted many of the strategies of the classic "isms." This makes him both an atheist minimalist and an old transcendence-seeking romantic. He is not alone, just an extreme case. Try as they might, no late 20th-century artist managed to escape from the myth of the artist as seer, nor from the market economy of art products, nor from the craft of making. Dan Flavin's work presents us with the starkest expression of the inescapable contradictions of late 20th-century art practice. That is brilliant of him.
