Dan Flavin

Exhibited by Paul Coulon

Material Daylight fluorescent light, in 6 parts

Dimensions 182.9 cm (72 in)

Place of Creation USA

Price Price available upon inquiry

Status Vetted

About the Work

On this sheet, I enclose a lovely tempering aphorism which has been with me for a few years. “Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitate.” “Principles (entities) should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” Of course it is “Ockham’s Razor.” If I were you, I would feature it.

-Dan Flavin to Mel Bochner

An edition of Flavin’s the nominal three (to William of Ockham) was first shown at the Green Gallery in New York City in 1964. This exhibition was his first to feature solely his sculptures of fluorescent light tubes. In 1963 Flavin began to use standard, commercially available fluorescent lights to create his minimalist sculptures, which in the Duchampian tradition of the ready-made transformed them from a utilitarian object into artistic materials. By the following year, the artist radically limited his materials to only fluorescent tubes in various colors.

the nominal three (to William of Ockham) is Flavin’s first serial proposition. In this work, the artist subverts the traditional function of a triptych as a symmetrical painting that communicates a hierarchy in subjects by transforming it into numerically progressive spatial form. This rudimentary counting exercise suggests that the work could be extended, potentially without end. Indeed, Flavin conceived the proposition for the continuous icon (1963) the same day as he devised the nominal three (to William of Ockham), which was to be a self-generating structure of vertical lamps that recedes into space ad infinitum; as such, it can never be fabricated. Art historian James Meyer describes the nominal three (to William of Ockham) as “a Pandora’s Box of arbitrariness,” stating that it “not only anticipates its possible extension . . . [but also] it is endlessly variable.”

Flavin dedicated this work to William of Ockham, the fourteenth century Nominalist theorist who initiated the separation of theology from science and philosophy. Flavin often dedicated his works as a means to acknowledge personal or artistic debts or admiration; these people or places would be the only capitalized words in his titles as a further means of respect. Flavin identified with William of Ockham; his role in the end of medieval scholastics and the beginning of secularism would have resonated with the artist, who Rainer Fuchs described as a “religiously raised critic of religion.”5 His use of standard fluorescent lights arranged in a manner that not only recalls a triptych but also the Holy Trinity represents a critical break with the traditional significance of image and light—a break that parallels that of the artist’s with his Catholic upbringing. While this can be said for the total of Flavin’s fluorescent light works, it is particularly import- ant to this work associated with William of Ockham who, as a Franciscan monk, defied doctrine to argue “that reality exists solely in individual things and universals are merely abstract signs,” which as Flavin interpreted it, “led [Ockham] to exclude questions such as the existence of God from intellectual knowledge, referring them to faith alone.”

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Provenance

The Estate of Dan Flavin, New York
Private collection, New York
Private collection (acquired from the above in 2002)

Literature

Guido Ballo, “Un grand collectionneur européen d’art américain: Giuseppe Panza.” XXe Siècle 35, no. 41 (December 1973), p. 125, illustrated (installation photo, another example)
Europa-America: I’Astrazione Determinata, 1969-1976 (Bologna:
Galleria d’Arte Moderna, 1976), illustrated (image reversed, another example)
Johannes Gachnang, Skulptur: Matisse, Giacometti, Judd, Flavin, Andre, Long (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1979), illustrated (another example)
Germano Celant, Das Bild einer Geschichte 1956-1976: Die Sammlung Panza di Biumo (Milan: Electa International, 1980), p. 35, illustrated (installation photo); p. 99, illustrated (another example)
Christel Sauer, Die Sammlung FER/The FER Collection (Cologne: Verlag Gerd de Vries, 1983), cover, illustrated in color (installation photo); p. 82, illustrated (another example)
Howard Singerman, ed., Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 168, illustrated (another example)
Art of the Sixties and Seventies: The Panza Collection (New York:
Rizzoli International, 1987), p. 172, illustrated (another example)
Hendel Teicher, ed., Minimal Art dans la collection Panza di Biumo (Geneva: Musée Rath, 1988), illustrated (another example)
Zdenek Felix, Denkbilder (Munich: Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung and Hirmer Verlag, 1991), p. 23, illustrated (another example)
Pepe Karmel, “Outrageous in the 1960’s but Seeming Serene in the 90’s,” New York Times, September 22, 1995, sec. C, p. 30 (another example)
Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1996), pp. 190-91; p. 291, illustrated in color (another example)
Lux/Lumen (Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miró, 1997), p. 25, illustrated in color (another example)
Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1999), pp. 18-19; pp. 20-21, illustrated in color (another example)
David Anfam, “Berlin: Dan Flavin,” Burlington Magazine 142, no. 1166 (May 2000), p. 326, illustrated (another example)
Marco Magnifico and Lucia Borromeo Dina, eds., Le Guide del FAI: Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza e la Collezione Panza di Biumo (Geneva and Milan: Skira, 2001), p. 67, illustrated (installation photo, another example)
Nancy Spector, ed., Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2001), p.107, illustrated in color (another example)
Götz Adriani, ed., Minimal Art aus den Sammlungen FER, Froehlich und Siegfried Weishaupt (Karlsruhe, Germany: Museum für neue Kunst, 2001), p. 78, illustrated in color (another example)
Corinna Thierolf, Amerikanische Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Pinakothek der Moderne (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2002), p. 39, illustrated (another example)
Götz Adriani, Museum für neue Kunst: ZKM Karlsruhe (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2002), p. 28, illustrated in color (another example)
Michael Govan, “Dan Flavin’s Architecture of Light,” Guggenheim Magazine, Winter 2004, p. 21, illustrated in color (another example)
Ann Goldstein, A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), pp. 198-199, illustrated in color (another example)
Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell, Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights 1961-1996 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 37-40; no. 27, p. 221