I finally get it. It’s amazing when something becomes so clear after I had thought that I had it all figured out.  I have never been a fan of Dan Flavin’s work. Despise would have been an accurate description of my feeling towards the work.  At least until this show.  To me it was always fluorescent light art. Who cares about fluorescent lights propped up in a corner, or colored lights hanging on the wall. He used commercially-available fluorescent lamps, which to me had little artistic merit. You see those lights everywhere, and growing up, the quality of light they gave was a poor attempt at lighting, given the terrible hue they emitted in libraries, office buildings, and shopping malls. They always made one look deathly ill. It has never been flattering.

But the recent show at David Zwirner Gallery opened my eyes to a whole new Flavin. The Flavin I see now, is not a sculptor but an installation artist.  His work is not about the object, it’s about the environment.  It isn’t about the lighting fixture, or the bulb. It’s about the light. How it bounces off the wall, or what happens when two colors comingle and combine into another, brighter light.

To those who haven’t studied color the way we do as artists and designers, here’s a crash course. When combining colors in pigment (i.e., paint), the colors change in ways that we expect. Red and blue turn purple, yellow and blue turn green.  The more colors you add, the darker, and muddier the colors become. Eventually, if you add enough pigments, you end up with black. But things work very differently with light. It works almost in the opposite way. As more colored light is added, they combine to make white.

This is especially apparent if you are a print designer. For a little more than 2 decades, designers have been doing their work on computer screens. Because the final output is print, the colors you see on screen are almost never the colors that end up in print. Print designers have had to rely on colored paper swatches to ensure they get the colors they are expecting.  It’s worse than designing in the dark, because in the dark you only have your imagination. Instead, your ideas are competing with what you see on screen. You have to learn that what you see is not what you get.

Technically the color gamuts of light vs pigment are not the same. They are like a Venn diagram—two overlapping shapes where there are areas which do not intersect. You can get much richer, more nuanced hues in light. It’s a wider color gamut. In print, especially 4-color CMYK process, the color gamut is small, and not very nuanced. The mixed pigments get muddy very quickly. It’s almost impossible to get a rich, bright orange in print, for instance, by combining inks.

To some, probably to many, who have seen Dan Flavin’s work have thought of it in the way that I used to see it. Ugly fixtures that have bad associations. But the art isn’t about the fixture, it’s about the space. The way the show was installed—very large rooms, empty except for the light—made the difference. The fixtures shrank, and sometimes almost dropped away. The glow of the rooms from the street, or the glow peering around the corner from one room, while experiencing the glow from another, made the experience poetic.

The contrast between the uncolored light installation and those that were multicolored, forced one to think about the information that the eye is receiving. One of the reasons why my impression of Dan Flavin’s work changed is due to how much technology has changed in the past few decades. Fluorescent lights come in so many different shades now. There is daylight fluorescent, bright white, cool white. The unpleasant associations that once existed—studying for hours with your head buzzing from the flicker, or trying to shop for clothing, but looking in the mirror and seeing a jaundiced figure staring back—they could not be easily dismissed. Today’s lights are so accurately developed, the colors so nuanced, and the fixtures in the public arena has been replaced with more appropriate daylight bulbs, so I can finally see past the functional use of fluorescents, and I think of the medium as emotionally neutral. Minimal.

Monolithic. Topographic. Singular. The show is very impressive.

This is definitely a blue chip show, at a blue chip gallery, from a blue chip artist.

The reason that I bring this up is because, initially this show immediately overwhelms the senses, in its scale, and its poetry. It is representative of what Maya Lin is known for best. Landscape architecture.

But the difficulty that I have with the work, is that it lacks depth and layer of concept.

For those of us who went to school to challenge ourselves on an intellectual and creative level, the works reminds us of that first assignment in architecture school. “Take a single object and create a larger, conceptual work”. So this references topographical maps. The earth, created by a larger force.

Architects and builders have been doing that for ages. Just look around Manhattan, and see monolithic edifices of glass, or brick, or steel clad. They don’t seem to reference anything natural. But then if you look at Manhattan from the sky, or sea, you see that topography again. Awe inspiring.

So, I think that the work is poetic, and is clearly appropriate given the artists earlier works. But I don’t see much development. (And the 3rd work, done with wire could use some more wires. It seems like an effort incomplete in its execution by comparison.)

There are a number of aspects to this piece that makes the work so successful. Firstly, it is light, literally. Intensive spotlights are pointed at a square piece of cardboard mounted with found objects: a gun, Bambi, the Statue of Liberty, Barbie, a palm tree, a sailboat, a helicopter, a Tyrannosaurus rex, a Mexican rooster, and other familiar chachkas. The cardboard rotates on a turntable. The light acts like a lens, and the intensity of the light, and the small distance between the objects creates an interesting depth-of-field effect in shadows on the scrim covered wall.

Secondly, the cheapness, and sense of spontaneity given the choice of construction materials. Found objects, slapped-together tables and lighting fixures gives the impression that the work was built with little thought, an artist savant.

And finally the tension between the light, the rotating objects, and the shadows that makes one wonder what exactly makes the work complete? The sign warning “Hot Lampshades Don’t Touch”. Is it really finished or a work in progress? Junk left on the table unnecessarily: empty glasses, rubber band, discarded backing for double sided tape, work gloves, wood, foam. Yet there is formality, proportion of the room, the length of the table, the no-man’s land between the table and the scrim.

Finally an interesting installation in New York City. Phew! I was thinking that sculpture was dead. Where are the Ann Hamilton’s and Robert Gober’s of this decade?  Black Acid Co-op at Deitch Projects in New York is one of the best shows that I’ve seen in New York in a while.

It is completely self indulgent, visually, olfactorily, acoustically, physically. They just needed to offer some sour candy to hit all the senses.

It’s obviously not for everyone, as most people with whom I’ve spoken really don’t like it. I went with a friend who is a private dealer and collector and he thought that it was a big waste of time. But his taste is generally more traditional in the forms of art he likes—painting, prints, photos, sculptures. If there isn’t something to buy, he ain’t interested.

Speaking with the gallery attendant, it was interesting to hearing the details surrounding the artwork creation.

Apparently there are 14 rooms in total. The work started off with about three RV mobile homes which were set aflame upstate. They were trucked down, and create much of the infrastructure for the many rooms. Because of the recession, many professionals donated their time to the piece, including architects, designers and artists, 10 full time staff working for a month, and about 40 volunteers.

The only indication of how the Deitch Projects space normally looks is when peering through the scrim in the hippy commune, and seeing the bits of lights piercing the exoskeletal structure. (See video, part 2.)

As typical with a down economy, the art scene moves from product-based work, to more experiential art. Of course much of what Jeffrey Deitch shows can be said to be experiential. I’m hoping that we will find this to be the case more often in the next few years, while collectors take a break and reassess. I always think about Rirkrit Tiravanja when I see these types of shows, those that don’t seem to be selling anything.  I have unfortunately never attending one of his openings (shame on me) but I’ve heard him speak and worked with him a couple of times years ago. I don’t know what his commodity is, per se, but think that the work is about social intercourse.

Some of my favorite parts of the show, is the burned out bathroom with glimpses of the retro laminate on the walls, pink sink and tub, with drop ceiling. I also love the t-shirts in the back of the Chinese Herb room, with airbrushed illustration of self-fisting woman, bestiality, and lesbian sex done is bright florescent colors in a florescent lit room.

So what the hell is it all about. Darned if I know. It is definitely about creating a challenging, yet safe, visceral experience. It actually seemed incredibly familiar to me. I have been looking at townhouses in Harlem with my partner for the past year. And it is amazing how similar the experience is.

We have walked into rotten shells of homes, which were built at the turn of the century as luxury homes. Generally 4-5 floors, at times with rain dripping all the way to the ground floor through rotten joists. In every room, you get bits and pieces of what used to be the original home, and more often, you get to see the house as it was broken up more recently into single room occupancy (SRO). Generally during th SRO period, the home was heavily used, worn and abused.

Harlem Townhouse: Burned Out Bathroom

Harlem Townhouse: Burned Out Kitchen

Juxtaposing the Harlem townhouse pix with the installation photos of Black Acid Co-op, it is quite amazing the lengths that Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe went to get an authentic feel to their work.

As for the social commentary, its hidden in the layers upon layers of crap strewn about. There is one room that looks like it could be a crack den. At the end of video documentation part 1, you leave the crack den room, it becomes apparent that the color and execution makes it look like abstracted American flag.