About This Artwork

Dan Flavin
American, 1933-1996

monument for V. Tatlin [No. 8], 1964

Cool white flourescent light; edition three of five
243.8 x 71.1 x 12.1 cm (96 x 28 x 4 3/4 in.)
Gift of Society for Contemporary Art; Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund, 1978.154

Dan Flavin began creating sculptural objects from commercially available fluorescent-light fixtures in 1963. In the decades that followed, he made systematic arrangements of fluorescent-light tubes in ever-larger environments, exploring ways to activate architectural space through the diffusion of light and color. Rather than titling his works, Flavin often dedicated them to friends and artists he admired. The most famous of these include his Monuments for Tatlin, an ongoing homage to the Russian Constructivist sculptor VladamirTatlin (1885–1953), who dreamed of combining artistry and engineering. Attached to the wall and arranged vertically into a relief sculpture, the seven white fluorescent tubes here evoke Tatlin’s Monument to theThird International (1920), a spiral tower he designed but never realized.