The Legacies of Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Tatlin in Dan Flavin's Fluorescent Light Installations of the 1960s
"The historical reception of the two predecessors' art and its critical ramifications for the New York art world in the late 1950s and early 1960s constitute a more specific framework of my investigation. I shed critical light on the New York art scenes in which young artists revisited Duchamp's conceptualist practice and Tatlin's materialist dictum during this period, particularly focusing on how the cultural knowledge about them was mediated to Flavin. Along with the larger socio-cultural context, I also address Flavin's personal motivations and his idiosyncratic personality that shaped his unique literalist materialism and lurking transcendental impulse. By investigating Flavin's complex response to the legacies of Duchamp and Tatlin, I critically examine the ways in which Flavin's art contributed to a recovery of Russian Constructivist art in 1960s American art and expanded the horizon of cultural practice employing the Duchampian readymade. In exploring the contingent light-field or what Flavin called ""situations,"" I critically analyze a unique sense of historical consciousness embodied in the phenomenological field of ambient light."
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign