Fluorescent Light Sculpture

Now this is an interesting one to me because I admittedly find these a bit perplexing. But I've seen Dan Flavin installations in nearly every modern art museum I've ever been to.

They usually look something like this, and I thought I was missing something the first time I saw one in the corner of a museum:


This one is here in Houston in an old warehouse (actually an old grocery store), the design of which was completed by Flavin just 2 days before his death. There is something kind of cool about the intensity of the colors. (Jay lasted about 5 minutes when he went):


But like the paper and glass sculpture, what's impressive to me about this is the creative use of something common that we all know...Flavin "limited his materials to commercially available fluorescent tubing in standard sizes, shapes, and colors, extracting banal hardware from its utilitarian context and inserting it into the world of high art."