January 2009

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All his friends laughed at him, Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo remembers, when he first began buying works by Dan Flavin: ‘Because I was buying expensive works of art which were made from objects it was possible to buy from the electrical shop on the corner.’ But they are not laughing now. Flavin’s works – consisting of neon lighting tubes and the light they emit – cost $300 or $400 when Count Panza began collecting them forty years ago. In 2003 one was sold for $735,000. They now fill the Hayward Gallery, London (until 2 April), the latest destination on a lengthy international exhibition itinerary.

Flavin (1933-96) may be approaching the kind of mass audience appeal already exerted by his slightly older pop artist contemporaries Warhol and Lichtenstein. His art was the most immediately accessible and emotionally uplifting produced by the minimalists – a description most of them detested – who also included Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre. It is also a striking example of a miracle that almost all art performs in one way or another: the transmutation of base matter into something, well, a great deal more valuable.

Few works of art are prized because of the intrinsic cost of their materials. A Rembrandt consists of some very elderly cloth plus dried up minerals and liquids: market price, a few pence if you could find a buyer. Works that are made of expensive ingredients – such as Cellini’s gold and enamel salt cellar in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum – are celebrated for other reasons (and may suffer the misfortune of being stolen, as the salt cellar has been, and even melted down for much, much less than their value as art). But Flavin made ordinary objects into art in the unusually direct – even shocking – way he just bought lighting tubes, arranged them and switched them on.

It was a strategy that may have had its origin in his upbringing. As a teenager, Flavin was forced by his father, a religious bigot, to serve as an altar boy and attend a seminary in Brooklyn. Later he became violently antagonistic to the faith. But his working procedure was a sort of parallel or parody of transubstantiation – that fundamental doctrine by which the bread and wine at the mass are transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ. Similarly, following Flavin’s act of will, off-the-shelf neon was metamorphosed into art.

A comparable philosophical point is made by a brilliant piece by Michael Craig-Martin entitled An Oak Tree (1973). This consists of a glass filled with water placed on a shelf, with an accompanying text in which Craig-Martin explains that he has transformed these items into a full-grown oak. Not, he points out, using a distinction that goes back to Aristotle, its ‘accidents’ – that is, its colour, shape and so forth – but its true substance, or essence, what it really is. In the same way, Flavin’s works continue to look like light fittings, but the artist has changed their substance – into art (but only, of course, when they are switched on: it is the light that is the art).

Flavin too was alive to subtle theological points. He dedicated a work to St Thomas Aquinas, and an important early piece to the fourteenth-century English thinker William of Ockham, inventor of the intellectual maxim Ockham’s Razor – which advises against the needless multiplication of entities. In other words, if it isn’t necessary, leave it out. Or, as Mies van der Rohe famously put it, ‘less is more’.

Just as the regular miracle of the mass generates paradoxes – hence, for example, the careful process of disposal of those portions of bread or wine not consumed by the congregation – so too does the transubstantiation of art. In the case of Flavin, among the questions is, what happens when the light tubes – as eventually happens to all physical things – wear out? It is not so straightforward as might appear.

Evidently, Flavin himself intended the works – originally at least – to be thrown away. He began to work with neon tubes in 1963 and the artist Dan Graham – a friend and exact contemporary of Flavin – recalls the neon going back to the hardware shop after exhibitions in the mid 60s (at one of which someone trod on a floor-mounted example). Flavin even went as far as printing the certificates of authenticity which make a Flavin a Flavin on cheap, non-lasting paper to emphasis that everything passes. These certificates, by the way, underline another theoretical point: it is the artist’s decision that makes the work art. If you’ve got the lighting fittings, but not the certificate – no dice, you don’t own a Flavin.

This posed an awkward question when the artist died. During his lifetime he conceived and sold some 750 works. At his death in 1996, there were a further 1700 which he had invented, but not sold. Therefore they had not been fabricated and no certificate was issued. The question then was, were these authentic works or not? After some thought, the artist’s son Stephen decided that they were not.

So the answer to the other question about the old light fittings seems clear. The work does not consist of hardware, but of the artist’s idea plus his act of will demonstrated by the certificate. But collectors instinctively cling to actual objects. Some, apparently, switch off their Flavins unless there are visitors. Spots of rust and so forth are carefully eliminated. But even such steps are not enough: nothing, even the design of cheap light fittings, is eternal.

Flavin began by taking as his visual repertoire the nine colours and five shapes – one circular, and four of differing lengths – in which neon was produced. But mass-market items vary through time. In the 80s, the manufacturer stopped making green, so Flavin stockpiled that hue (Fig. 2). But the difficulties didn’t cease there.1 The specification changed, so that tubes of the dimensions that fit early Flavins are no longer made, and it is actually no longer lawful to make Flavin’s red (Fig. 1), which involves the use of arsenic and other toxic substances. The works, for example, on display in the Panza collection at Varese, Italy, are now replaced by new ones carefully, and expensively, fabricated by arrangement with the Flavin estate.2

These ironies are not new, nor perhaps are they different in principle from the amazing efforts made to keep oil paintings going (the public would be shocked to see most Old Masters minus restorations). But there is an extra level of absurdity in the case of art made from everyday items. The Duchamp Fountain attacked with a hammer last month at the Dada exhibition in Paris was not the original pissoir, but a hand-crafted facsimile. Fountain was slung out after its original exhibition in 1919, and reconstituted when the artist’s reputation rose in the 1960s.3

The one thing that can’t be preserved is the original casual, throw-away feel of such things. One can imagine a future date at which neon will be utterly obsolete, and meticulously conserved Flavins will seem as archaic as Romanesque candelabra. That is the final theological twist. Art, like everything, is mortal. But – especially when it becomes pricey – we strive mightily to render it eternal.

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