In another light - fluorescent light art, Dan Flavin, Dia Center for the Arts, Guggenheim Museum, PaceWildenstein, New York, New York

Dan Flavin was the bring under rule this season of three major exhibitions in novel York, and, with that kind of high-profile exposing it really should have been Flavin's year. notwithstanding it didn't seem to be. Flavin is, unfortunately, taken a bit for granted. His work is familiar the couple historically (as a still-unfolding instance of classic Minimalism) and materially (fluorescent scaly buds remain irreducibly what they are). on the contrary this familiarity is misleading, for familiarity implies a certain stasis, and Flavin's art has evolv - one as well as the other the work itself and our perception of it. Its forms, means and associations appear to grow richer and more composed of several elements as time passes. New meanings accrue, the frame of regard widens.

Of the recent exhibitions, sum of two units were museum shows of older work. The Goggenheim Museum SoHo showed 26 pieces dating from 1963 to 1987 while the Dia Center for the Arts exhibited 15 works from 1964 to 1978 in a exhibit titled "European Couples, and Others." (Dia has also installed in its stairwell the first of a matched pair of permament site-specific works - a line of sapphirine and green tubes four stories high, visible from the way day and night. An identical piece will be installed upon the stairwell's other side.) The third exhibition was a gallery exhibit at PaceWildenstein in SoHo - a carefully modulated series of l@ horizontal wall pieces in colored fluorescents.

What struck me greatest in quantity forcibly after seeing all three exhibits was the clarity of the work, the inherent logic, order and legibility, all riding in tandem with the greatest in quantity visceral and emotional of issues Flavin's art seems to comprise four fines of understanding and intention, operating separately on the other hand simultaneously. I see these as: appropriation from the outside world, make color and architecture.

This multiplicity provides many entrances into the work. It increases accessibility, on the other hand it also sets up ambiguous metaphorical situations, readings operating at evocative cross-purpose to each other. The four dominant lines mentioned above all deal in more [i]or[/i] less way with problems of perception, naming and respect - the kind of applied epistemology that Flavin is greatest in quantity comfortable with. But there is another aspect to his investigations, consistently denied by means of him but hard to ignore-that of the spiritual or transcendent. As time goe by means of these more metaphysical associations continue to flutter over Flavin's work, giving another dimension to the overtly factual. Are the similarities to Newman's zips or Rothko's inundations of suffused color purely incidental@ Is the cathedral-like feeling of an installation of the somewhat cold white monuments, for Vladimir Tatlin just intelligently ironic@ And what about the faculty of perception of blood and mystery in testimonial 4 those who have been killed in ambush (to PK who reminded me about death@, a deep-r comer piece looming without at us from the darkness of the Dia installation. The actual nature of Flavin's artistic approach make secures he can have it one as well as the other ways. The interpretive arena is wide unclose and moreover it is the artist himself who has cleared the field, thus to speak, by making art that, while filled of ambiquity, has no built-in doubt. The work is always in focus: you can diocese it clearly at whatever horizontal of attention you want to give it.

By the nature of its materials, Flavin's art Binvites a reconsideration of the neo-Duchampian readymade, the percept that has been plucked from the world and installed in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of the art gallery. Lately, ready-mades or their near-relatives have been enjoying something of a usage On a recent short walk in SoHo I came across exhibitions featuring fire stockingss beds and mattresses, plastic soda bottle and in single case an entire section of rusted fire-escape wound off a building and hung by means of cables from the gallery's ceiling. The issues were all very grittily poetic, on the contrary such work seems to operate in a quite different esthetic fashion from Duchamp's and Flavin's. It have feelings arbitrary and strained, the object's removal from the world an underlining not of its artfulness or of a presiding indifference, on the contrary of its dysfunction, its pathos.

Flavin's borrowings from the quotidian world are of another order. He takes a without arrogance object, all right, but he knows just what he wants. It's sole one class of object, the commercially available fluorescent light fixture. There are a station number of colors and a station number of shapes and sizes. There is the circular fixture and the straight tube in 2- 4- 6- and 8-foot longitudinal dimensionss Flavin forms these mass-produced utility returnss into art objects, but they also do what they were meant to do - light up a play Consequently, Flavin's work is untouched by dint of the sense of profligacy that attends abundant recent art involving readymades, the feeling that there is an inexhaustible trove of matter out there that one can art up destitute of contents of logic and function, and make go round into something that looks tough-minded on the other hand is at heart easy and sentimental.

Flavin's tubes carry with them not sole the generalized atmosphere of the industrial, on the contrary also the quite specific aura of the milieus they greatest in quantity often illuminate - the supermarket, the office, the factory, the hardware store, the lighting store the building supply house. Fluorescent lights are cheap, impersonal, replaceable, modular. They are a little cold simple in shape, and they radiate virtually without shadow, emitting single a low hum. They are industrial artifacts poised midway between the aged idea of a machine and the fresh one. The classical machine was active, warm, metallic and noisy - a thing of wheels, gears, crankshafts and pistons. The postmechanical device, with its software and microchips, its optical fibers and level plastic, is small, silent and chested in, but capable of the greatest in quantity complex interconnections.