FROM RELIGIOUS ICONS TO FLUORESCENT ICONS: DAN FLAVIN AND LIGHT AS EXPERIENCE AT MALBA

At some point in art history, gold leaf was used to represent light in an image, to evoke the divine; then came fluorescent tubes. The artist Dan Flavin (New York, United States, 1933–1996), known for his light sculptures, built a foundational body of minimalist work throughout his career. Buenos Aires revisits his trajectory at Malba, which presents Luz, color y espacio (Light, Color and Space), a tribute to his work that also functions as a reflection on the technological shifts of history.

Flavin's Catholic upbringing led him to linger on Gothic imagery. Just as churches intertwined light and architecture, so did the American artist. In the 1960s he broke with the tradition of Abstract Expressionism — the movement then dominant in the United States, which prioritized the artist's emotional expression — and began treating the viewer as a participant in the work. He took an industrial object and built luminous monuments with pink, green, yellow, and orange office lamps that strike against white walls, against skin, against eyes, conquering corners, ceilings, floors. Flavin challenged the limits of what could be considered art. His works dye everything within reach in service of his thesis: color is an experience.

Like many artists of the last century, Flavin turns the viewer into an active element of the work. He modulates light, color, and space — three elements that allow him to play with the audience's perception. Monument 4 for Those Who Have Been Killed in Ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) (1966) is one of the pieces in the exhibition. Through its title and its form, the artist meditates on his time and alludes to the Vietnam War, saturating the space with four blood-red lamps. The viewer, too, is bathed in red, made complicit; the work overflows its boundaries.

The fluorescent tube was, at that time, an industrial and everyday object — accessible, mass-produced, available in nine commercial colors. Flavin took it and turned it into sculpture. Between 1966 and 1971 he produced a series of nine pieces, each dedicated to a European couple, each using one of those nine available colors. Two front-facing tubes, four backlit, a structure installed in a corner that paints it: the hues merge, the direct frontal light cuts against the background, and architecture transforms into artwork. Art shifts with its time, exposing what society experiences, and in the twentieth century it drew closer to the everyday and registered technological change. Those lamps are now discontinued.

Gold leaf made light eternal. Flavin let it escape.

Dan Flavin: Luz, color y espacio is on view through August 17 at Malba, Av. Figueroa Alcorta, Buenos Aires, Argentina.