untitled (monument for V. Tatlin)

‘This dramatic decoration has been founded in the young tradition of a plastic revolution which gripped Russian art only forty years ago. My joy is to try to build from that “incomplete” experience as I see fit’
–Dan Flavin


Composed of eight vertical tubes of white fluorescent light arranged in a stepped, rightward sequence of varying lengths, untitled (monument for V. Tatlin) is an early work from Dan Flavin’s seminal series of ‘monuments’ dedicated to the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953). Flavin had made the first of these in 1964, just four years before the present work was conceived; only two examples, from a theoretical edition of five, were fabricated during the artist’s lifetime. The lower case in Flavin’s title – often accompanied by quote marks – indicates the irony at play. Far from monumental, these ‘monuments’ are made from everyday, pre-fabricated components that must periodically be replaced as they burn out. Discussing another from this series, Flavin explained that the work ‘memorializes Vladimir Tatlin, the great revolutionary, who dreamed of art as science. It stands, a vibrantly aspiring order, in lieu of his last glider, which never left the ground’ (D. Flavin, ‘The Artists Say’, art voices, Summer 1965, p. 72). Tatlin’s greatest project, the ‘Monument for the Third International’, was never built; in his final years, he worked on a da Vinci-like flying machine that was similarly unrealised. Rather than making a homage to the grand, utopian, collective ideals of Constructivism, Flavin’s work memorialises the tragic-heroic life of one individual artist. It is an aching ode to unfulfilled potential. The utilitarian, low-tech fluorescent tubes, as much as Flavin might have claimed they were free of expressive resonance, make for a wry commentary on the commercial fate of the Modernist ideal, and their glow also imbues the work with an ephemeral, romantic edge. Flavin, whose unique, complex and uncompromising practice cannot be cleanly defined as ‘Minimalism’ or by any other label, was fascinated by Byzantine icons; Tatlin himself began his career as an icon-painter in Moscow, and his and Malevich’s radical modern art clearly learned from, and even threatened to usurp, the loaded aura of iconic form. Poised between the ironic and the ecstatic, the austere purity of Flavin’s ‘monument’ carries an unavoidable charge of devotional magic. As Elizabeth C. Baker wrote in 1967, ‘Flavin does something for one’s idea of light: it is he who makes its mystical qualities uncompromisingly evident, by the very fact of such stark presentation’ (E. C. Baker, ‘The Light Brigade’, Art News, March 1967, p. 64).