untitled (for Charlotte and Jim Brooks) 7

"[…] Flavin’s astonishingly familiar-yet-unfamiliar objects—mass-produced cylinders of artificial light—at first seemed to have everything to do with the tabula rasa of Minimalism and little to do with anything else. At home with the rock-bottom geometries portentously unveiled by other artists of his generation—Andre, Stella, Robert Morris, Judd—and, when lit, ethereally defiant of gravity and corporeal presence, his early work appeared to inhabit a pristine world of disembodied intellect, reexamining elementary principles of mensuration or, as in a primary picture, 1964, rediscovering, via a hardware store’s fluorescent spectrum, the three primary colors once sanctified by Piet Mondrian (and reinvented in the 1960s by Newman and Roy Lichtenstein). Moreover, the tonic cerebration that allied Flavin to Minimalism was further underlined by a growing awareness of his connection to Marcel Duchamp […]"(R. Rosenblum, “Passages: Dan Flavin,” Artforum, March 1997).