Painting with light

In the large exposition of Dan Flavin’s Minimalist sculpture at the Modern Art Museum here, the work is installed throughout all the galleries on the second floor in every conceivable place except one. Although the sculptures are made from ordinary fluorescent tubes and standard-issue light pans, no different from the ones you’d find at a hardware store, none are on the ceiling.

On the walls: yes. On the floors: yes. In the corners: yes. Beneath soffits: yes. Inside doorways: yes. Interrupting hallways: yes. Out in the middle of the room: yes.

On the ceiling: no. The ceiling is where utility lighting goes.

Putting fluorescent lighting everyplace but there, where functional convention dictates it belongs, is a clear sign that you are in the presence of something else. Inutility is among art’s chief assets. It is no accident that an artist as generally fastidious and conceptually precise as Flavin made inutility essential to sculpture composed from otherwise useful, industrially manufactured objects.

“Dan Flavin: A Retrospective” is the first full survey of the artist’s career. With Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, he was a chief exponent of a New York variant of 1960s Minimalist sculpture, which helped transform art at the end of the 20th century the way Cubism did at the start. The show brings together 57 light works and 57 drawings, studies and diagrams. It was organized by the Dia Art Foundation in association with Washington’s National Gallery of Art, where it was seen last fall. I can’t imagine, however, a more exquisite environment for Flavin’s fluorescent lights than the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

The museum’s acclaimed new building by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, which opened late in 2002, is a poetic essay in contemplative volumes of luminous space, constructed from simple industrial materials in serial arrangements. Since that also describes Flavin’s art, they seem made for each other. I didn’t see the exhibition in Washington, and it travels next summer to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art before heading to Europe, but if you want an unforgettable experience, Fort Worth is a sure bet.

Flavin (1933-96) had one simple idea, which he elaborated for three decades. Light, as both substance and metaphor, has been central to Western painting since at least the Middle Ages, when artists stippled gold leaf on devotional icons to reflect the flickering of candle flames. Flavin went for alternating current. His fluorescent lights continue to captivate and impress.

“The Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi)” was the first of these light works, and it is an elegant thunderclap. An 8-foot-long yellow fluorescent tube in a white enameled light pan is affixed to the wall on a 45-degree angle. No more, no less.

Any cord or electrical socket is hidden within the drywall, so that the sculpture isn’t so much a portable lamp as an environmental feature of the building. Exactly where the art begins and ends is not as clear as one might suppose -- a fact amplified by the illuminating color that bathes whatever happens to be nearby in a warm golden light. Including you.

Light in a time of war

In the sense that Flavin’s sculpture performs with the presence of an audience in mind, it is theatrical. Exactly what that audience might have been thinking in the tumultuous early months of 1963, when the artist made this breakthrough work, is anybody’s guess.

But with the Cold War recently threatening to go nuclear over Cuba, bodies piling up in Vietnam, and racial violence in Birmingham, Ala., it is no stretch to read the distinctively odd title of Flavin’s first fluorescent light piece as a pointed reference to Goya. (The dedication to Brancusi was added later.) “The Diagonal of May 25, 1963” does document the precise date of Flavin’s artistic eureka, but it also recalls “The Third of May, 1808,” Goya’s famously harrowing commemoration of the execution of a group of Madrid citizens by Napoleon’s soldiers.

Goya’s incandescent painting glows from within, illuminated by a mysteriously glowing lamp in the center of the nocturnal picture. Painted by a Spanish genius -- arguably the first truly modern artist -- the composition was later bluntly echoed by Edouard Manet. His 1867 “The Execution of Maximilian,” which places the viewer behind the blazing fusillade of rifle-wielding soldiers as they murder a colonial emperor, was partly painted to demonstrate that Manet could handle the kind of grand historical themes demanded by the French Academy.

Flavin’s work is abstract, of course, although some have speculated on its figurative allusions. As an object the 8-foot bulb, which begins at the junction of the wall and the floor, rises to the height of a standing person. There is a direct bodily connection with a viewer.

Feminist critic Anna C. Chave once remarked on the priapic qualities of the angled, glowing tube -- “literally a hot rod,” she wrote -- and a drawing related to the sculpture bears the suggestive title “the diagonal of personal ecstasy.” The show’s catalog notes the aesthetic link between sexuality and divine revelation in such historical sculptures as Bernini’s stunningly erotic “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa,” in which the nun writhes suggestively as she is about to be pierced by a Cupid-like angel’s golden arrow. (In his youth, Flavin expected he would study for the Catholic priesthood.)

Maybe it’s because this is a retrospective, where room after room of the museum is aglow with almost uniformly lovely examples of Flavin’s art, but without warning I was struck by a disconcerting thought while standing in the afterglow of “The Diagonal of May 25, 1963”: What would happen if the plug were pulled on it? Or the bulb burned out? Or the power went down?

As the light flickered and dimmed, here and throughout the rest of the galleries, would the art, well, “die”?

Flavin’s illuminated sculptures, despite their off-the-shelf, ready-made industrial manufacture, assumed a physical fragility and poignancy that had not been evident before. Suddenly Goya and Manet, with their painted historical chronicles of death, took on renewed urgency. They stood at one end of a modern continuum of human folly, while Vietnam, Birmingham and the threat of nuclear annihilation stood at another.

The electricity will probably stay on in Texas, but the power source is not the only issue. However conventional the electrical apparatuses Flavin employed to make his work since the 1960s, already they are becoming functionally obsolete. Technology moves on.

What will happen to Flavin’s art when the bulbs cannot be replaced by dropping into Home Depot? (With certain colors of fluorescent bulbs, apparently that problem is already happening.) At what point will the white enamel light pans begin to seem as ancient and exotic as Gerard-Jean Galle’s 1818 chandelier in the form of a whimsical hot air balloon, made from crystal and enameled and gilt bronze, which hangs in a period room at Brentwood’s J. Paul Getty Museum?

The Getty’s website explains that Galle tried to sell this chandelier to the French King Louis XVIII in 1820. The artist desperately pleaded that production of such luxury goods caused “the ruin of my factory and family,” but the government rejected his offer. Conscious of popular criticism of governmental excess, the bureaucrats argued that they could not purchase objects that were neither “advantageous nor useful.”

Flavin’s lights, however physically fragile, also exude an institutional toughness I had never recognized before. Like many young artists in New York in the 1950s -- especially self-taught artists like him, who needed to make a living while their work developed to maturity -- Flavin held down jobs as a guard in several of the city’s formidable cultural institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Natural History. A museum’s purpose, of course, is the collection and preservation of objects whose time has receded into history. Perhaps that explains why Flavin’s sculptures virtually demand the enveloping embrace of institutions, to keep the lights on and the art “alive” for the future. They illuminate our institutionalized society.

An institutional aura

Everybody hates fluorescent lights. Why? It isn’t just the cold blankness of their radiance that puts us off. Several of Flavin’s sculptures employ white tubes, which are far more common than the red, green, yellow, pink, blue and black lights he also put to service. But the whites are not uniform; they vary in color -- not just cool and bluish but warm and even daylight white, which approximates the sun.

No, what makes fluorescent lights so off-putting is their institutional quality. You wouldn’t put a light pan with fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling of the living room or, horrors, the bedroom. In the home the only place you might get away with them is the bathroom or the kitchen -- the more clinical in the array of potential domestic environments.

But even there fluorescent lighting has long since fallen out of favor, tucked out of sight under cabinets, replaced by halogen lamps, decorative sconces and even candles. The only safe bet now is in the garage, where it seems an appropriate way to illuminate that other industrial-era staple of daily life, the car.

Fluorescent lights reek of the machine shop, the office park, the hospital corridor and Wal-Mart. They represent regimentation, loss of independence and a social sphere shaped by the demands of work and commerce. Flavin’s fluorescent lights added art museums to the list.

They were among the Minimalist sculptures that acknowledged head-on the degree to which American art had become, for the first time in its history, thoroughly institutionalized by the early 1960s. In the wake of the international success and prestige enjoyed by Abstract Expressionist painting in the prior decade, Flavin gathered together institutional equivalents for iconic illumination, and a major artist was born.

The retrospective begins with several examples of his early attempts at mixing electrical lights with paintings -- rather clumsy hybrids of enameled boxes, hung on the wall, with fixtures and bulbs attached. He titled them “icons.”

Crayon and charcoal drawings from the late 1950s also show him noodling with themes that derive from mergers of art and religion. A copy of a Rembrandt study of a patriarch hangs near works featuring crushed tin cans mounted on Masonite -- one dedicated to Thomas Aquinas, “doctor of canon law,” the other to Francis Picabia, the Dada artist for whom the canon laws of art were toys meant to be smashed on the modern playground.

The fluorescent lights are the show’s most compelling works. Flavin found wonderful ways to “paint” with colored light, which differs from colored pigment, and he often hid tubes of one color behind tubes of another to render color combinations that confound visual expectations.

Occasional missteps do occur. The most frankly figurative piece he made is among the least effective. Blood red tubes on two walls that meet in the corner are bridged by a third to make a triangle, while a fourth tube projects straight out toward a viewer. The melodramatic 1966 configuration can be read as a body laid out on a stretcher or a ceremonial litter and as a fearsome weapon pointed at your head.

More common are breathtaking pieces like a green fluorescent “fence” from 1973 -- the only work in the retrospective not installed on the second floor. It fills instead the central glass-walled pavilion on the ground level, which abuts a large outdoor reflecting pool. Twenty-one modular units, each 4 feet square and determined by the standard commercial size of the light pans and tubes, overlap slightly as they march across the narrow room toward the glass wall and the water beyond.

Inside, at the darker end of the gallery, the green glow is intense, but as the sculpture nears the windows it mixes with the filtered and reflected daylight. The atmosphere assumes a strange reddish hue.

This, like all Flavin’s sculpture, is a machine that produces a condition of acutely self-conscious perception and discernment, and it does so in the neighborly configuration of a backyard fence. That’s an artistic function that will never be obsolete.

Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.