Chicago: Vanessa Bolt
The Dan Flavin show at the MCA was an enlightening experience. HA! Well, anyway. I have always thought Dan Flavin's work was nice, I liked it, and I liked how it related to other things in contemporary collections. However, seeing a large body of work like this one was really amazing. While viewing it I thought a lot about the readings/videos we watched and how much this work confronts perception. There was one work in particular (which I can't remember the name of!) which involved walking through a corridor with warm white lights one one side and cool white lights on the other. After walking through this you go around a corner where you see a light and the glow of the light around the corner peaks through. From one side the light appears a yellow-green and the glow from the other is a vivid orange but then when you go to the other side that orange is more of a yellow and the green is more of a teal. This piece pushes you to realize how color, and specifically the influence of light, is perceived so differently in different circumstances. The elegance and subtleties of this work result in the creation of a total environment. When in one gallery you see the pastel hues eminating from another gallery and when you go between them those colors change. This is the fundamentals of what we have been talking about in class. The lights themselves are not physically changing, but because of the relationships between colors and light, what we see does.
Minimalism is about the paring down of the object and Dan Flavin does that in multiple ways. When I thought about what I was seeing, the fact that I was
perceiving something was overtly obvious. It is often not always so obvious and so this work's minimalism is really successful in that way (as well as its minimal design). As Flavin said, "And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find."
(quote taken from "Dan Flavin
European Couples, and Others" by Michael Goven)
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