Allen, Greg. “The Dark Side of Success.” The New York Times. January 2, 2005. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/arts/design/the-dark-side-of-success.html
- Rejected handmade virtuosity of abstract expressionism
- Chose mass-produced, off-the-shelf hardware specifically for its anonymity and industrial aesthetic; could be easily replaced: unsentimental
- Chose fluorescents because of their ephemerality
- 1982 (locate): “I believe in temporary art wholeheartedly.”
- Called his works “propositions” (did not consider his work sculpture)
- Flavin: “It is what it is, and it ain’t nothing else.”
- In the late 1980’s, for example, Sylvania stopped making green bulbs. Flavin instructed Alec Drummond, who was then his assistant, to scour distributors’ warehouses and buy up all the remaining stock. Drummond managed to amass a stockpile of more than 600 spare bulbs, which were carefully stored for judicious future use. Those particular bulbs eventually went back into production, but others became obsolete.
- To ensure the work’s continuity, the Flavin estate contracted a custom fabricator to make hand-crafted copies of the bulbs, piecing together available components and matching the chemical composition of the phosphorescent film that gives each its color. Likewise, new fixtures are made to order using vintage templates rescued from the original factory.
- The preservation of Flavin’s once-radical industrial approach to art now relies to no small degree on the hand-crafted artisanal traditions he rebelled against.
- Flavin, of course, knew his work could be unplugged. It was part of his attack on grandiosity. “I always use ‘monuments’ to emphasize the ironic humor of temporary monuments,” he said in a 1984 interview. But when collectors pull the plug, they’re not savoring the irony. They are resting their eyes — and protecting their investment.
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Art made from obviously impermanent materials that is being painstakingly preserved; art made to stay shiny and new that is being treasured for its age; art challenging the notion of originality that is being scrutinized for that quality; once-standard, off-the-shelf materials that are now hard to find; collectors who cling to a piece of paper that proves their dated light fixture is worthy of a museum, not a recycling bin; and caretakers of a reputation who make decisions that they readily admit run counter to the artist’s original intentions.
Such is the strange afterlife of work that produces beauty from the banal, an object lesson in how the legacy of a strong-willed radical can be brought to heel by an even stronger force, the market.
“and Flavin did just that by rejecting the previous generation’s reliance on the lyrical paint splatter, Abstract Expressionism’s “personalized mark-making,” to use a term from Tiffany Bell’s catalog essay in “The Complete Lights.”” That’s totally Gluckman’s wife!
“To ensure the work’s continuity, the Flavin estate contracted a custom fabricator to make hand-crafted copies of the bulbs, piecing together available components and matching the chemical composition of the phosphorescent film that gives each its color. Likewise, new fixtures are made to order using vintage templates rescued from the original factory.” Whoa this could be interesting… in a dissertation
But that’s less of a problem than it might be, since he almost never actually plugs them in. When visitors from the recent Art Basel Miami Beach show, for example, came to see Mr. Margulies’s collection, he turned the pieces on. And when the company left, he turned them off again. “We use the light sparingly,” he explained. A lot of other collectors do, too.
- “To use an analogy, it’s a lot like the vintage furniture market,” said the lawyer whose purchase Mr. Morse vetted. “Have you ever been in a shop full of over-restored antiques? There are certainly people who like that kind of thing, but it’s not a sophisticated taste.”
- “This is the influence of the marketplace,” Tiffany Bell acknowledged. Or as Mr. Morse put it, it’s “one of Flavin’s myriad contradictions.”
- On one crucial point, Flavin had left no instructions in his will: the status of more than 1,700 “available” works, unsold — indeed unmade — pieces that would complete the artist’s planned editions. At 1997 prices, they had a hypothetical market value of nearly $70 million. In practical terms, it meant Stephen Flavin could continue producing his father’s designs without him, or he could forever close out the line. Depending on his decision, the vintage lights and fixtures in Flavin’s workshop were either of minimal value, as hardware, or worth millions, as future works of art.
- Stephen Flavin did not respond to repeated requests to comment for this article. But as Ms. Bell writes, “The Flavin estate elected not to issue any work not certified during the artist’s lifetime.” By “issue,” the estate meant it would make no new works available for sale. It also granted itself one example of each piece, again for exhibition purposes but not for sale. This decision dramatically limited Stephen Flavin’s inheritance tax liability. It also put a cap on the number of Flavins available.
- That’s not just because of the complicated logistics that govern such shows. It’s because 15 of the sculptures — including the multihued light grid on the cover of the catalog, “Untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3” — were fabricated specifically for the show.
Assured of Flavin’s intentions, curators asked Mr. Morse to assemble exhibition copies of existing works. It wasn’t a philosophical decision; in most cases it was just a matter of convenience. One example, Ms. Bell says, is “The Wheeling Peachblow Piece,” which Flavin dedicated to a glass blower he admired. The piece “is part of MoMA’s collection,” she said, “and they couldn’t ship it back from Berlin in time, so they remade it for Washington.”
With what Mr. Govan called “the definitive concentration” — the guaranteed largest repository of artwork, the firsthand expertise of many who knew him, and license from the estate to fabricate pieces as needed –the Diaties have carved out a home for Flavin in the pantheon.
- Permanence and temporality, off-the-shelf and handmade, original and reproduction. “One of the things that makes his work complex,” Jeffrey Weiss, curator and head of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery, said of Flavin, “is that it wrestles with a lot of these contradictions. And these contradictions turn out to be rich things.”
So do collectors’ investments in those contradictions. For those willing to pay three-quarters of a million dollars or so, Flavin’s work has a very rewarding afterglow. Reflecting on the rewiring and added bracing his Flavin received, the New York lawyer with the bargain-price new piece is sanguine. “I think you have to live with the paradox,” he said. “‘Gee, what they do now is inconsistent with what they do in his lifetime.’ I mean, he’s dead, now you’ve got some dedicated acolytes” working to preserve what he left behind. “The interesting thing is,” he continued, “the saving grace, if you will, is that once they’re on, the light’s so dazzling, you can’t see the restoration.”