Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions
Texts by Tiffany Bell, Anne Rorimer, Richard Shiff, and Alexandra Whitney. Interview with Dan Graham
Described by fellow artist Mel Bochner as “one of the first artists to make use of a basically progressional procedure,” influential Minimalist artist Dan Flavin was known for his systematic arrangement of color and light. This major monograph was published on the occasion of Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions—the first exhibition of the artist’s work held in 2009 at David Zwirner in New York since the gallery announced its representation of Dan Flavin. Featuring over fifty full-color plates of exemplary works made between 1963 and 1990, in addition to a comprehensive selection of installation views, archival photographs, and documents, this publication carefully examines Flavin’s use of progressions and serial structures, ideas that were central to his practice throughout his career. It also describes how his manipulations of color and light were aspects of his work that not only led to it being characterized as Minimal art but came to define and influence Conceptual artistic practices.
Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions includes new scholarship by noted Flavin scholar and curator Tiffany Bell (author of the artist’s catalogue raisonne´), Anne Rorimer, Richard Shiff, and Alexandra Whitney; an interview with Dan Graham; and a facsimile of the original catalogue from Flavin’s 1967–1968 exhibition alternating pink and ‘gold,’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Additional context is provided by a detailed illustrated chronology, which documents historical exhibitions of Flavin’s work.
Publisher: David Zwirner / Steidl
Artists: Dan Flavin
Contributors: Tiffany Bell, Dan Graham, Anne Rorimer, Richard Shiff, Alexandra Whitney
Designer: Simon Johnston Design
Printer: Steidl, Göttingen, Germany
Publication Date: 2010
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 9 1/2 x 12 in (24.1 x 30.5 cm)
Pages: 156
Reproductions: 94 color, 20 b&w
ISBN: 9783869301464
Retail: $65 US & Canada | £40 | €54
Status: Not Available
Dan Flavin
From 1963, when he conceived the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), a single gold, fluorescent lamp that is installed on a diagonal on the wall—a work which marks the artist’s first use of fluorescent light alone, until his death in 1996, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially-available fluorescent lamps to create installations, or “situations” as he preferred to call them, of light and color. Through the construction of light, Flavin was able to literally establish and redefine space.
Tiffany Bell
Tiffany Bell is an independent art curator and writer. She is currently working as the editor of the Agnes Martin Catalogue Raisonné and has just completed the first volume, a digital publication, which includes Martin’s paintings, constructions, and film (2017). She continues work on the second volume that will include Martin’s unique works on paper. She was recently co-curator of the 2015–2017 traveling retrospective of Agnes Martin’s art that visited the Tate Modern in London, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Previously, she was the director of the Dan Flavin Catalogue Raisonné project, which resulted in the publication of Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights, 1961–1996 (2004), and served as curator for several museum and gallery exhibitions of Flavin’s lights, including Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions held at David Zwirner in 2009. Bell has taught in the art department at Pratt Institute and has worked for many years as a freelance curator and art critic with articles appearing in Art in America, Arts Magazine, and Artforum, among other publications.
Dan Graham
Artist, writer, curator, and art and music critic Dan Graham was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1942. He lives and works in New York, and is a key figure of Conceptual Art. In 2010, he was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.
Anne Rorimer
Anne Rorimer is a freelance curator and independent scholar specializing in American and European art after 1965. She was formerly a curator of modern and contemporary art at The Art Institute of Chicago. She has published in various art journals, including Artforum and October, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. She is the author of New Art in the Sixties and Seventies: Redefining Reality (2001) and, more recently, Michael Asher: Kunsthalle Bern 1992 (2012).
Richard Shiff
A scholar and critical theorist, Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas at Austin. His interests range broadly across the field of modern and contemporary art. His publications include Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (coauthored, 2004), Doubt (2008), Between Sense and de Kooning (2011), Ellsworth Kelly: New York Drawings 1954–1962 (2014), Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969–2019 (2020), and Sensuous Thoughts: Essays on the Work of Donald Judd (2020). He is currently completing a comprehensive study of the art of Jack Whitten.
Alexandra Whitney
Alexandra Whitney is the Director of Research & Exhibitions at David Zwirner.