Neon lights are beautiful. That’s true of all artificial light, but neon is special. Even for elements of a cityscape, there’s something unnatural about them. It never occurred to me that you could make art from them, though now that I know of Dan Flavin the idea seems shockingly obvious. Of course, Flavin’s sculptures themselves are actually made out of fluorescent lights, but I wasn’t aware of this when I first saw photos of some of his works. (They do look similar, and I didn’t even realise there was a difference until I looked him up.)
I can’t help but admire somebody whose sculptures were composed of pure light. Well, not pure light. Light contained within tubes, I suppose. (I’m not sure how this works.) It’s nearly as impressive as a tower made out of soup. Flavin isn’t the only artist to have done this (there’s also Anthony McCall and Olafur Eliasson) but he does seem to have been one of the earliest, having been born in 1933 and beginning his light sculptures in the early sixties. There’s almost a sort of zeerust quality to some of them, turning art galleries into the interiors of spaceships, like something out of the William Gibson short story The Gernsback Continuum. Most of them have more in common with Gibson’s other works, though, because of how modern they are. And this is one of the aspects of his art that interests me the most.
This one reminds me of a pair of lips.
If I could only use one word to describe Dan Flavin’s art, modern would do perfectly. While a little bit futuristic, there’s also something quite contemporary about them. They’re clean and slick, but not trendily soulless, and not bogged down by the grime of the past. Flavin’s minimalist style helps a lot, keeping everything clear and simple. It’s surprising how many moods can be captured by placing fluorescent lights together in certain orders and positions.
