Dan Flavin

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist and inscribed “fabricated for the Donald Young Gallery under the artist’s supervision Chicago, 1988."

Flavin’s Untitled (monument for V. Tatlin) is from the artist’s most important series of works, dedicated to the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, who, along with other Russian artists, sought to express radical political and social views through pure abstraction.  Camilla Gray’s book titled The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922, was a source of great inspiration for Flavin, and in 1964, Flavin began sketching cool white wall-mounted fluorescent lights that he called “monuments” to Tatlin.  With his use of fluorescent lights, Flavin drew on Tatlin’s interest in real materials in three dimensional spaces.  There is a distinct clarity and a radical simplicity in Flavin’s choice of medium and restriction to white, which in this series emphasized the extraordinary variability in composition of the multiple lights.  In the present work, Flavin grounded the three central lights, the central most light serving as the line of symmetry for the entire work.  In the first "monument", the seven lights were all grounded to the floor.  Flavin was interested in the sequencing and inversion of the lights in this series, and continued to explore different variations until 1990. 

In these works, Flavin referenced Tatlin’s failure to bring his work Monument to the Third International to fruition, stating “I always use ‘monuments’ in quotes to emphasize the iconic humor of temporary monuments.  These ‘monuments’ only survive as long as the light system is useful (2,100 hours).” (Michael Govan & Tiffany Bell, Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights 1961-1996, New Haven & New London, 2004, p.45)  The use of different arrangements within the theme of this series combined with the impermanent nature of Flavin’s medium demonstrate his radical intentions and point to the emerging ideas of the minimalist and conceptual artists.