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Artist or Maker: Dan Flavin (1933-1996)
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Provenance: Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.
Private Collection, New York.
Haunch of Venison, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
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Exhibited: Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporay Art, Temporary Contemporary, "monuments" for V. Tatlin from Dan Flavin, 1964-1983, April-June 1984. This exhibition later traveled to Washington, Corcoran Gallery of Art, September-November 1984; Bordeaux, Musée d'art contemporain, March-April 1985 and Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, November 1985-January 1986.
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Literature: "monuments" for V. Tatlin from Dan Flavin, 1964-1982, exh. cat.,
Chicago, Donald Young Gallery, for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in collaboration with Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1989, pl. 43 (illustrated, unpaged).
M. Govan & T. Bell, Dan Flavin The Complete Lights, 1961-1996, New York 2004, no. 145, p. 262.
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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A SAN FRANCISCO PRIVATE COLLECTOR
This work is accompanied by a certificate with installation instructions signed by the artist.
An early incarnation of Flavin's most celebrated and sustained series, untitled (monument for V. Tatlin) pays homage to the eponymous Russian avant-garde artist. Espousing Tatlin's maxim, 'real materials in real space', Flavin's wall-mounted configurations of white fluorescent light tubes uphold the Russian Productivist's ideals of integrating art with functional design. Yet, such honour is bestowed with a tragic sense of irony, the inherent transience of these light-sculptures an incisive comment on the failure of Tatlin's grandiose dreams of a post-Revolution Utopia.
In an attempt to break down established hierarchies between art and life, Tatlin demanded that artists of the new Soviet era produce work from industrial materials such as iron, glass, wood, tin and plaster displaying such efforts in real space. Flavin's mass-produced, store-bought fluorescent light tubes certainly abide by these tenets in their somewhat futuristic arrangements that befit an engineering mindset; however, they are intrinsically doomed to by their temporal nature, sentenced to finite life spans of 2,100 hours. Thus, untitled ('monument' to V. Tatlin) is ultimately a pseudo-monument, as pointedly suggested by its lower-case titles and wry use of quotations. It is at best a temporary memorial, fully aware of the ill-fated end of Tatlin, who spent the last thirty years of his life in neglect and poverty, building a glider that never left the ground. Aspiring to a higher order, untitled ('monument' to V. Tatlin) stands tall like a rocket poised for flight, sardonic in its sentience of the fact that this could never transpire.
Flavin's 'monuments' are named for the most grandiose of Tatlin's fiascos, 'Monument to the Third International', which lives eternally in art history for its naïve hopefulness at a short-lived moment in history when such blind enthusiasm could be sustained with artists at the vanguard of an improved societal order. Conceived as an iron spiral framework supporting a body comprised of a glass cylinder, a glass cube and a glass cone, this building was meant to soar to twice the height of the Empire State Building - a logistical impossibility with no chance of fruition. The project never got further than the wood-and-wire models that Tatlin built with his assistants; as embodiments of a Utopian future they were enormously ambitious, supremely romantic, and utterly impractical.
Flavin's untitled ('monument' for V. Tatlin) is sympathetic to Tatlin, sharing in his idealism but is cynical in the certain knowledge of its failure. When illuminated, these 'monuments' burn with the fervent optimism of his Russian comrade, soaring as commanding tributes to the fusion of art and technology. However, they are ultimately anti-monumental not only because they may eventually wear out but because they can be turned on and off at will.
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