Art - When Dan Flavin abandoned paint for fluorescent tubes, he turned galleries into glowing cathedrals
On a dank January day, the concrete walkways of the South Bank seem designed to depress even the hardiest visitor. Inside the Hayward Gallery, however, this gloomy winter world is transformed. Dan Flavin, who came to prominence as a master of minimalism when this uncompromising hulk of concrete was conceived, performs the unlikely feat of turning the brutal edifice into a glowing receptacle for his art.
In 1963, when Flavin began to use commercially available fluorescent lights, he was 30 years old. The New York-born son of an Irish truant officer and a mother descended from German royalty, he had been subjected to a severe Catholic edu-cation at the Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception in Queens. His devout father hoped that young Dan would train for the priesthood. Instead, he enlisted in the US air force. Yet when I met Flavin in 1973, he was still prepared to recall his schoolboy attendance at high funeral Mass, where a potent amalgam of music, incense, vestments, chant and candlelight had a profound impact on his affections. I asked him whether this heady experience might in some way have shaped his art. Flavin, however, deflected my question by cracking a joke about the welcome payments of "15 cents a corpse" he received for serving as an acolyte.
In one sense, nothing could be further removed from his own spare, stripped-down art than the unashamedly rich and embellished atmosphere of the funeral Mass. After all, Flavin did not seek to change or disguise the mundanity of the mass-produced fluorescent fixtures and lamps he worked with until his death in 1996 - a decision that seemed heretical to many who revered Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and the heroically hand-made work of the abstract expressionists. But Flavin was bent on moving beyond painting and sculpture to a radical alternative: glass tubes coated with a phosphorescent compound. When an electric charge is run through fluorescent tubes, it ionises the gases inside, making them emit an ultraviolet light. The phosphors coating these tubes shone out so powerfully that Flavin was able to charge gallery spaces with their sensuous, beguiling presence.
The Hayward exhibition proves that he handled his chosen medium with consummate understanding, rigour and verve. Take the colossal barrier-like form stretching right across the entire length of an immense room in the lower gallery. Here Flavin employed green lamps, but they assail our eyes so fiercely that we see them as brilliant white. Carving into space, this criss-cross structure denies us access to half of the vast area it divides with such drama. Even so, it bathes the surroundings in a gentle green light that introduces a far less aggressive feeling of wonder and delight.
The earliest pieces, dating from Flavin's breakthrough year of 1963, are resolutely modest and often restricted to simple tubes, but their implications already seem limitless. His first purely fluorescent work, a diagonal lamp dedicated to Constantin Brancusi, could not be more limpid. Nor could the trio of vertical white tubes used in an understated work celebrating William of Ockham, the medieval English theologian who challenged Catholicism by arguing in favour of greater abstract simplicity in scholastic thought. Flavin knew precisely how to activate the space around these white tubes, and they succeed in articulating the whole width of their wall with unoppressive authority. They also cast seductive reflections far across the floor, so that the entire room becomes alive with luminosity.
Flavin possessed an uncanny ability to play with awkward spatial elements ignored by most artists before him. The corners of a room had been shunned by painters and sculptors eager to present their work with the maximum amount of prominent panache. But he made glowing bars of light straddle these long-neglected corners and cast extraordinarily complex, multi-hued hazes on the walls behind. The clarity of the lamps contrasts with the hazy, indefinable shimmer beyond them, making us realise just how subtle and inventive Flavin could be as a colourist.
As the show proceeds, we discover an artist fully capable of breaking away from rigid, rectilinear geometry. Without any warning, he allows a cluster of tall tubes to lean against the wall in a laid-back, almost off-hand manner. Such a casual-seeming installation comes as a huge surprise after the calculating exactitude of the earlier pieces, and then Flavin suddenly breaks free of his obsession with right angles as well. Multiple circles ascend from the floor to the top of a free-standing wall, and even project into the empty space above. They are exhilarating to encounter. One particularly grand circular work is dedicated to Flavin's father, whom the artist once tersely described as "ascetic" and "remotely male".
He may well have inherited his respect for purged discipline from Flavin Sr. And yet one can detect no remoteness alongside the undoubted stringency in his work. Upstairs, the intense yellow lights ranged in a vertical piece dedicated to Jan and Ron Greenberg are dazzlingly bright and seem to emanate warmth. Holding up my hands close in front of them, I realised that the heat was illusory, but the lamps' ability to convey a generous welcome remained as convivial as before.
I left the exhibition preoccupied, above all, by its sense of mystery. Fluorescent tubes may have seemed shockingly banal when Flavin first dared to employ them in his work. Against the odds, however, he was able to invest these ready-made fixtures with an aura of outright sublimity. In that respect, the memory of the high funeral Masses he attended as a youthful acolyte may have affected his mature vision decisively. Flavin's art turns the Hayward Gallery into a secular cathedral, filling it with an unforced, open and inexhaustible spirit of redemption.
"Dan Flavin: a retrospective" is at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1 until 2 April. For tickets and further details call 0870 169 1000
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