Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today

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Dan Flavin
American, 1933-1996
untitled (to Don Judd, colorist), 1-5
1987

Dan Flavin. untitled (to Don Judd, colorist), 1-5. 1987

American, 1933-1996 pink, red, yellow, blue and green fluorescent light. Five parts, each: 48 x 48 x 6" (121.9 x 121.9 x 15.2 cm). Exhibition copy, courtesy of Stephen Flavin. © 2008 Dan Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS). Audio courtesy of Acoustiguide

Curator, Ann Temkin: Beginning in the early '60s, Dan Flavin identified as his medium the fluorescent lamp that you would find in a hardware store. He used these fluorescent lamps as they came from the store, in any of ten industry standard colors.

In the subtitle to this piece, **To Don Judd, Colorist, Flavin pays tribute to his lifelong friend and fellow sculptor, Donald Judd, whose work you see outside the exhibition galleries. // Dan Flavin thought that it was necessary to make art with the materials of one's own time. The ordinariness of a fluorescent bulb was as important to him as its aesthetic potential/ He mentioned that once somebody talked about how his sculptures remind him of an experience in a church. And he joked that it seemed much more like the experience in a subway. People often mistakenly call Flavin's works made of neon, rather than fluorescent bulbs. This always irritated him very much, because neon is custom made, whereas fluorescents are ready-made.

This sculpture is one of the great ways by which one can disprove the stereotype of Minimal Art or Conceptual Art, as something that was spartan or sterile or merely cerebral. In fact, the sensual aspect of it, the chromatic dazzle of it, and even the mystical quality of works such as this one prove that even the most mundane, everyday, ordinary materials can yield experiences that are magical.