Earlier in the week, my cousin-in-law emailed me some questions he had about the Flavin exhibition. He hit on great points that we’ve heard from a lot of visitors as well, so I asked him if I could turn his questions into a Q&A blog post.  Because he’s very kind, and also a fan of blogging himself, he agreed. So here we go:

1) It seems like his work would depend a lot on the dimensions of the space. Had he planned a show at the Pulitzer before his death? 

He did not have plans for a show at the Pulitzer – in fact, the Pulitzer building was still being conceptualized when he passed away in 1996. But it is true that his work depends on and strongly interacts with the dimensions of the space in which it is installed. Each of the works on view in our galleries existed previously, but in different incarnations. The exhibition’s guest curator, Tiffany Bell, phrased it like this: “Flavin made site-specific works, but I wouldn’t categorize any of his work at the Pulitzer as such. Some of the works can be installed in a variety of spaces so long as the installation follows a few guidelines established by Flavin: they have a kind of object-like integrity. I would call the others, made up of repeated modules, “site-situational”: the dimensions of the installation are a function of the given space.” The diagonal in the Main Gallery is a great example of this. It was installed according to Flavin’s specifications for the artwork, however, due to the size of the wall it’s the longest this work has ever been.

2) Does someone lay these out in the “Flavin-Style”?

Yes. According to Tiffany’s curatorial choices for placing the works in the galleries, Stephen Morse – the Exhibition Coordinator and Conservator for the Flavin Studio – was here throughout the installation process. He made sure the works were installed according to the precedents that Flavin himself set for each work. From Tiffany, “A lot of it is fairly straightforward. There were set standards. The work goes on the floor, it has a set height… We have a lot of drawings and documentation. Of course, questions come up in the process of installation. Then we try to record what we do and why we do it. That’s one reason why this exhibition is really exciting: it is an opportunity to pose questions that have come up, test premises we have worked with, and to draw people into certain possibilities.”

3) These are “mass-produced light fixtures and fluorescent tubes,” so what makes it Flavin and not just me lighting my house? 

Good question! What makes it a Flavin is that each work in the Pulitzer was conceived by the artist, and is installed according to his specifications. To some extent, it’s also a matter of administration. Often Flavin provided with each work a certificate of authenticity, which designated the work as his.