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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 26.3 (2004) 35-44



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Dan Flavin's Corner Square

Before and after the Mast

To begin with an omission: that of Dan Flavin's comments to Bruce Glaser during a 1964 radio interview entitled "New Nihilism or New Art?" A participant along with Frank Stella and Donald Judd, Flavin rarely intervened, later requesting that even these infrequent comments be excised from the published manuscript.1 Usually seen as an act of deference to his polemical and more articulate peers,2 might this recusal alternatively be read as a determined refusal of the reductivist rendition of modernism proffered if not in practice than in theory by Stella and Judd? Certainly, the shifts Flavin undergoes from the earliest light pieces (produced one year before the Glaser interview) to his later, trademark 1974 corner pieces, testify to this; further, it would appear that Flavin's proposed alternative circles around, precisely, the notion of omission.

I

If the notion of omission was always lodged within the narrative of modernism in the form of a kind of ever-receding horizon, the impossible situation that art found itself in the 60s was that this horizon was arrived at in the guise of the monochrome and blank canvas. By 1962, Clement Greenberg declared, "a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one."3 This shift in strategy—from positing art as an internally motivated formal progression towards flatness to a far more idiosyncratic assessment of success or failure—not only bespeaks a breach, perhaps irreparable, in the hitherto rigorous separation of the aesthetic from the everyday (a breach that modernism's reductivist impulse had, paradoxically and with seeming inevitability, heralded), but its stopgap, taste.4 And this turn towards taste begets a parallel turn, from art as a creative act to an act of judgment; that is, theoretically and ideally, into the purview of the general public, members of which are now compelled for individual reasons to grant an object the status of Art, but, practically and realistically, into the purview of the curator or critic, vested as he is with institutional authority to state unequivocally, "This is Art."5 [End Page 35]

Into this backswell of modernist abstraction an alternative tradition partially culled from the readymade can be folded Stella and especially Judd, who reputedly stated, "If someone says it's art than it's art."6 Similarly interpreting Greenberg's call for medium specificity as the concurrence between pictorial surface and physical support, as the total identification of depicted and literal flatness, their work surpassed even the monochrome, inadvertently veering away from painting and toward three-dimensional objects. Here, rather than consolidating art's disciplinary boundaries—an ongoing project of modernism—by shoring up the institutional power of exhibition, pinning it under the aegis of judgment and its corollary, intention—"this is art because I say it is so"—a work of art is structured by an inviolate system. No longer wedded to the medium of painting—the shape of the stretcher, the taut weave of the flat canvas—the serial organization manifest in Stella's 1958-63 striped canvases congeals into a predetermined program deployed to cohere an object: "The thing about my work," Judd succinctly declares, "is that it is given."7 Indeed, even as Judd's 1965-66 Progression pieces are endless, "one thing after another," they remain rigorously empirical, based on, say, the Fibonacci Sequence.8

Thus just as the process of art-making was disjoined from the studio-bound creative subject, it was retethered to a subject culled from a prescient if limited reading of the readymade (of the artist-as-pasticheur, of the curator-as-artist); and just as seriality was cast adrift from the specificity of painting, it was reanchored, through a limited misreading of Greenbergian modernism (in the logic of the series or in algorithms).9 That curatorial choice was not dissimilar to the creative act, that logical deduction was...

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