Dan Flavin: A Retrospective
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
July 2 — Oct. 30
by Aemilia Scott

See the light. The city of lights. Throw some light on the subject. She lit up the room. "You Light Up My Life." Since Plato's Cave allegory, light has carried metaphorical and spiritual meaning far beyond its most literal purpose. Humans must exit the darkness of the cave and see the light. "To be enlightened" is to see, but enlightenment involves the type of light and the type of seeing that have more to do with God than with photons.

Visual art has reflected this romantic metaphor since the beginning. Stained glass uses the sun to illuminate images of God and other biblical figures, making real the imagined presence of the Holy Spirit as a spiritual light. El Greco famously, and everyone else in the Renaissance less famously, used the baby Jesus as the source of light for his paintings, creating an impossible world of light and shadow where Christ was metaphorically and literally the light in the people's lives. Secular paintings of the Renaissance used light and shadow to convey all sorts of implicit theatrical meaning. Impressionists revolutionized color theory and created massively boring paintings full of beautiful light.

Then in 1961 Dan Flavin put some fluorescent tube lighting on the wall of an art gallery. What the hell? Any art historian will tell you that Flavin's fluorescent lights fit into the canon of Minimalism, an artistic trend that was in reaction to the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. In the Ab-Exers' work, abstraction was used to plumb the depths of the human condition, and the grotesque and scatological look of the paint on the canvas put the artist's gesture in making the painting at the forefront of its meaning. Art theorists say that Minimalism removed the artist from the work, and using industrial materials in incredibly spare constructions stripped off the thick layer of romance that covered the artwork of movements past.

This is all partly true. Flavin's work is minimalistic, and does represent a radical reversal of Ab-Ex philosophy. But as much as it seems to be a rejection of both the principles and aesthetics of Western art, it is actually their fulfillment and perfection. It's just a new century, and new centuries call for new ways of seeing.

When you walk up the stairs of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art to the Dan Flavin Retrospective, you are immediately bathed in light. The T-shaped forms of fluorescent tubing light up the first room with yellow and red light, but no sooner do your eyes adjust to the light than you are enticed by the mysterious glows of other rooms — green, amber, purple. You walk into the next room — a huge atrium with a 50-foot long barricade of green neon in front of the window. You have to squint because of the light. You are mesmerized by the bright green light for a while, but then you notice that through the large window that spans the length of the piece, the outside world is shaded magenta. You tell yourself that this is a just a massive retinal freak-out and is not reflective of some sort of nuclear summer, but your understanding does not shake your sense of the uncanny as you look beyond Flavin's piece to your familiar city landscape shaded a deep red.

And that is the beauty of Flavin's minimalism with light. Rather than being an obstruction to the work, the space around the piece is exactly the area where it is appreciated most fully. All of his pieces are on white walls; many are in corners or near the ground. All of this allows them to reflect off the wall, and especially reflect off the shiny black floor, creating phantom images and funky auras. Some of his pieces, including the large, crosshatch grids set in corners, have lights of a certain color facing forward, and lights of a contrasting color facing the wall. Thus the wall itself becomes the canvas and the forward-facing lights sit vibrantly on their contrasting background.

Like the green barrier and like the contrasting grid, many of Flavin's works capitalize on how the eye sees light to create pleasurable retinal freak-outs. This is about as rooted in Western Art as one can be. Flavins's use of contrasting colors is based on a scientific understanding of the way the eye mixes light that was pioneered by the Impressionists in the mid 19th century. And although it might seem absurd to compare an austere industrial fluorescent light with Monet's stupefyingly pretty light-bathed haystacks, they both allow the viewer to take pleasure from light. Even the least art-savvy viewer can enjoy running from Flavin's entirely amber-lit room to his entirely green-lit room and back, and enjoy the disorienting effect that bright light has on the way we see daylight.

And yet that least art-savvy viewer who trips out for a short while on the magenta-colored Chicago cityscape actually has a better understanding of Flavin than the art critic who wants to put Flavin on the wall somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Op-Art. This is because Flavin is as much of a celebration of the Western Canon as he is a rejection of it. He gets light, man.

Monks who saw stained glass thought they were having a genuine religious experience. El Greco's work is still considered by both artists and religious devotees to be an ingenius depiction of spiritual light. The Dutch Renaissance painter Johannes Vermeer's skill in rendering light shining in a window and onto the face of a girl, or onto a piece of fruit, or onto a dead bird, was a major mark of his genius. Impressionist paintings are still some of the most visually pleasing for many viewers.

All this art uses light in both the real and metaphorical sense. So does Dan Flavin. He just uses electricity to do it. That is not any less meaningful, but it is much more right-now. The fact is, the modern person's experience with light is radically different than it was in the year 1200, or 1600, or 1900 for that matter. Rather than experiencing the natural light of the sun and the darkness of the sunless night, we are now flooded with artificial light 24 hours a day. Anyone who has walked through Times Square knows that it isn't all that different between day and night. Electric light in general, and fluorescent light in specific, is the kind of illumination that the modern subject uses most during his or her day. We go to Starbucks in the morning, an office building during the day and the grocery store at night. The Currency Exchange and PayDay Loan Center five blocks west of the MCA in Chicago is a clear glass box illuminated all night with the brightest of fluorescent light, making it an eye-straining beacon of modern convenience.

One might argue that Flavin has stripped light of its original replete meaning, but actually he used his art to reflect the new meaning that light has today. Light is now something blinding, something that tells us when to stop and when to go, something that is shaped into the words "Coca-Cola" and "Currency Exchange" so we can read its messages all night; hell, apparently light can now even whiten your teeth. Smile, Baby Jesus.

Flavin's works are not simply minimalist testaments to fluorescent tubing. They have a metaphorical meaning — but even that meaning has changed in the modern world. The viewer's first encounter with the Flavin restrospective is reminiscent of coming up from the subway into Times Square. The dizzying rainbow of color from multiple rooms reminds you of a walk through the city. Looking into the next room bathed in a ghostly light is like turning a city corner and seeing the light from a sign that will never be looked at, but that makes the air around it glow. Pieces displayed close to the ground reflect an image onto its waxed surface, like the reflection of a sign in a puddle on the pavement. A series of all-white fluorescent pieces, all self-titled "monuments" to Bolshevik architecture, evoke the dramatically lit spires of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State building.

Like the fluorescent sign in Times Square, all of these works are chock full o' meaning. But they are also impenetrably slick, like currency exchanges, and grocery store frozen food aisles and bus-stop ads for Coca Cola. His work equalizes the meaning of light, showing us that on the most basic level, the Chrysler Building's famous spire and the Pay Day Tile Loan Center are made of the same stuff. And that is modern light. The urban person never slows his pace to consider the endless parade of fluorescent signs around him, but that is exactly what Flavin asks the viewer to do in his work. Flavin's understanding of light is a logical departure from the historical understanding that has been bathed in sentimentality and regret over time.

Flavin may not have treated light as philosophically as Plato. But he did give light just as much import. His work is more reflective than it is retrospective. Flavin understood that today Plato's cave no longer exists. If it ever did, we've already filled it with track lighting.

E-mail Aemilia Scott at aemilia at gmail dot com.