Dan Flavin

So I needed an art fix; saw this show at LACMA and was not disappointed. It was gorgeous. Flavin has spent his career working with fluorescent lighting tubes, the kind you find at Home Depot. The museum retrospective was chronological, divided up into rooms holding one or two works each. I walked through a garden of light candy, sometimes white, often brilliant color. How can something so artificial make me think of nature? And I’m very picky about lighting, I notice it before anything else in a room.
I liked that the exhibition was only sensual, and easy to experience. The doorway to each room glowed with color and promise, and there were little edges of color, like a Deibenkorn painting.
Also Flavin created one of my all time favorite titles for a blue fluorescent corridor: Untitled (to my dear bitch, Airily) 1981.
Pictured is a “barrier,” Untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection) 1973.