Author: greg

And it is good. Just got back from the newly opened Dan Flavin retrospective at the National Gallery this morning, and it’s pretty wonderful. Some of the galleries are oddly cramped–anyone realize how unfriendly I.M. Pei’s actual galleries are to art?–especially if you’re used to seeing Flavins in dedicated spaces like Dia:Beacon, Dia:Bridgehampton, or Judd’s Spring St. loft.
But every time I start to write how there are too many Tatlin pieces in this gallery, or how that gallery would be better with just three pieces, not four, I remember the single-room Tatlin installation at the Menil. Or how I didn’t mind the ground floor of Dia:Chelsea being crammed with his work right after he died. Now that I think about it, it’s really only because the utter perfection of the all-white Flavin show at Paula Cooper’s cathedral-like gallery a couple of years ago still burns like phosphenes on my retinas.
Flavin’s great success, like his kindred artistic spirit Donald Judd, arises from the complex spatial awareness he creates with such industrial, apparently unartistic means. His flourescent sculptures activate the spaces they inhabit; their light seems to hang in the air, outclassing and setting itself off against the “normal” light we otherwise ignore.
Although ads and posters feature the most visually complicated Flavin grid, to me the most wonderful work is the single horizontal flourescent tube spanning a corner. There was a two-toned white one at Paula Cooper, but the example in this show is blue, magically backlit with red, green, and yellow. It positively floats on air. [ModernArtNotes has a reproduction and excerpts of Tylers review for Bloomberg.]
At 10AM the galleries were empty, except for still-unconvinced guards and a pair of bitter old southern queens who repeatedly unloaded their pent-up hostilities on Flavin’s work (“What’re we supposed to see? They’re all untitled!” “Nothing, this was YOUR idea.” “The kids at the day care could do that.” “I’d hope so.”)
Of course, the untitles couldn’t be more loaded with meaning and reference, as even the quickest glance at the works list would show. untitled (to Barnett Newman to commemorate his simple problem, red, yellow and blue) is only one rich example. There’s a Work List in the drawings gallery at the end of the show from the early 60’s, on which serious, momentous-sounding titles are divided into “In Process” and “To Be Completed.” Only two are checked off, but we know now how it turned out. It’s useful to look back through the other end of the telescope and remember that these ephemeral, experiential works of off-the-shelf materials grew from their untitles.
It reminded me of a statement curator Laura Hoptman made about her inspirations for the about-to-open Carnegie International:

I have been thinking about all the artists making work immediately after the Second World War both in Europe and in the United States. Those artists had hubris. Barnett Newman felt that he could sum up the world in a single vertical zip! It might seem ridiculous, but there’s something very potent about the notion that with this kind of abstract gesture you could take on a subject like monotheism.

And no one had more hubris than Flavin and Judd (although Flavin may have grown out of it; the last piece he completed before he died was for the Christmas windows of the newly opened Calvin Klein boutique on Madison Ave.) Perhaps the greatest thing about the exhibition catalogue is the appendix, which features a chipper first-person timeline/biography, written by an obviously younger Flavin, and a 1965 interview, republished from Artforum, where his powerful artistic hubris shines through.
Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, at the National Gallery of Art through Jan. 9, 2005
Buy the exhibition catalogue, or better yet, pre-order Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights, 1961-1996, which includes the catalogue plus all the rest of the artist’s sculptural work.
Related: In Search of The Ultimate [Laura Hoptman with Roberta Fallon on Artnet]

In the last two days, I’ve heard two curators from MoMA talk extensively about what the new building and the reinstallation of the art in it will be like. To use the phrase of the evening, I’ve gotten mixed signals.
Terry Riley discussed Yoshio Taniguchi’s building as the next major datapoint in the generations-long experiment of how architecture should address modern and contemporary art. In contrast to the Guggenheims, which engage art with their own influential, expressive intent, MoMA’s buildings–almost since its founding–has served as a “machine in the service of art,” emphasizing flexibility and utility.
After the powerful statement of Bilbao, Taniguchi’s MoMA, Riley said, “restabilizes” and reinvigorates this debate. And it does it with “logic” and “tradition,” some of the same principles contemporary artists worked against when making their art.
Nevertheless, Riley predicted people “will be shocked” by the vitality and dynamism these allegedly “conservative” principles bring.
On the art front, Ann Temkin, a curator from Painting & Sculpture, revealed that “Art History 101,” MoMA’s longstanding, authoritative chronological approach to displaying its renowned collection would return in November, albeit in expanded form. The thematic experiments of the MoMA2000 shows and the Tate Modern’s idea-driven installations seem to have reinforced the curators’ belief that MoMA’s uniquely deep and broad collection come with the unique responsibility to attempt to show this history. They’re doing it because they’re almost literally the only ones who can.
The “core historical collection” as taken in another generation, and art from the last 30+ years–which is still in process and historical flux–will be shown in consecutive 9-month views. Beyond these accretions and intentional change, the space, the vistas, the juxtapositions and potential paths generated by the new building are probably the greatest difference.
I’ve been in the almost completed building, and it is literally jaw-dropping. The atrium and the contemporary galleries are massive, and even the upper, historical galleries feel huge. MoMA’s got an unparalleled collection, sure, but I have to think that the building’s–the institution’s–new monumentality may end up overwhelming and subsuming many of the works we remember quite intimately. Some may even find it shocking.
Barely related: Not that anyone cares, but there’s some satisfaction in knowing that Charlie Finch got it almost 100% wrong.