Dan Flavin Exhibition

This evening I went to see the Dan Flavin Retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. An entire gallery full of fluorescent light tube art works.

Visitors aren’t allowed to take photographs but luckily for you I already possess a similar work of art, currently on display on my kitchen ceiling.

But is it art?

More to the point, were the works on display art, either? They were simply fluorescent light tubes of different lengths and colours in basic arrangements. For all I know they may not have even been the original tubes. I can’t imagine the bulbs would have lasted 30 years or so since they were first assembled.

I didn’t find the exhibit at all moving. It didn’t seem to have any meaning, either. The exhibits were mostly labelled “Untitled”, which didn’t help. The colours were nice and some of the works did seem to draw my attention but I kept coming back to the thought “Did I really pay money to see light bulbs?”