CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/30/2013

Dan Flavin: Lights

"It all seems so simple: off-the-shelf fluorescent tubes in usually empty rooms—familiar objects, straightforward situations. And yet," Juliane Rebentisch writes in Hatje Cantz's excellent new monograph on Dan Flavin, the artist's work "raises a series of questions that lead to the heart of how we understand art in general: how do we have to conceive the relationships between art and design, between the aesthetic and the everyday, between subject and objects, between work and situation, between seriality and site-specificity, between the sublime and the banal? And finally, through and past all these questions: however immediately evident our impression of Flavin's works may be, how can we define their presence more closely?" Featured image, "Untitled (to the real Dan Hill) 1B" (1978), is reproduced from Dan Flavin: Lights, published to accompany the late artist's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, which closes this weekend before traveling to Switzerland in March.