In a 1966 Artforum article, Robert Smithson described Dan Flavin as making ‘instant monuments’, precisely summarising a dichotomy at the centre of his work and this exhibition.

Following his artistic ‘epiphany’, in placing an 8ft yellow fluorescent light, the diagonal of 25th May 1963, on the wall of his studio; Flavin’s output, until his death in1996, concentrated on pieces constructed through the interplay of these standardised fittings. However, despite their ephemeral and elementary nature, the artist was also concerned with contextual relationships, referring to his work as situational rather than installation art and describing pieces as structural proposals – a position affirmed in his permanent exhibit at Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa.

Entering the first space of the Hayward, all seems immersed by the work. The leaden January light is blasted away in an intense, green luminescence, fading only slightly as the eyes adjust. The single work, untitled (for you Heiner, with admiration and affection), is one of Flavin’s barrier pieces. Overlaid, 4ft by 4ft, modular units obliquely traverse the space, denying movement across it. This feels less a disruption than a re-calibration. The lights capture the glass balustrade of the now inaccessible ramp beyond, their reflections measuring length and angle of inclination. The expressive concrete shuttering of the staircase is thrown into shadowed relief, its rhythms and the diameters of its gridded boltholes appearing to echo the forms and scales, which the work establishes. 

In subsequent spaces however, the pieces converse less with the building. A room devoted to the early Icons, is followed by a sequence of spaces that reassemble elements of seminal exhibitions, and one devoted to Flavin’s most extensive series, “monuments” for V. Tatlin, 1964-1990. The critic Tiffany Bell suggests that although Flavin delegated fabrication to others, he never relinquished control over representation and relationship. The artist’s absence perhaps renders such historical retrospection inevitable.

The works themselves have lost none of their power. Moving from the starkly iconographic “monuments” to the sublimely beautiful effects of pieces such as untitled (to Jamie Lee) 1971, their austerity and the immediately apparent manner of their construction at once engages and is transcended, in delicate colour shifts and complementary transformations.

However, the controlling precision of the artist is occasionally missed. A display of drawings describes Flavin’s concentrated relationship with the architecture he worked within. This graph-paper clarity is not always present here.  Unlike most contemporary galleries, the Hayward offers a strong formal presence in its materiality and in the ever-present structure of its floors and ceilings, which one imagines the artist fully appreciating. Without him, misalignments, relative to these background ‘orderings’ appear. This is particularly apparent in the placement of four crossed walls, from a 1972 exhibition at Rice University, Houston. In itself, this composition establishes sophisticated relationships with and between pieces. However the marginal offset of its symmetry, relative to the rhythms of floor and ceiling, becomes visually intrusive.

If this is an oversight, it nonetheless exposes a curatorial dilemma, between historical exactitude and contextual adjustment. Flavin, perhaps, offers a judgement on this, in the variable heights and lengths of room scale works. Fittingly, the final piece, untitled (in memory of my father D. Nicholas Flavin) 1974, reaffirms these situational characteristics in a series of 1ft diameter circular tubes, which ‘measure’ the gallery wall.

Criticism aside, this is a joyful exhibition, which refutes Flavin’s description of dim monuments of on and off art. Ire-emerged into the daylight bearing residual images on my retina, and a smile on my face.