ABOVE: detail from Dan Flavin’s untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, (1977). Flavin’s works, which were mostly executed with fluorescent lights now discontinued by their manufacturers, are presenting a problem for collectors and curators as the bulbs start to burn out.

Pop quiz: Let us imagine, for a moment, that you are an art collector of surpassing wealth who has just acquired a significant work by American artist Dan Flavin at considerable expense. You have paid a particular premium for the sculpture because Flavin is—posthumously, of course—enjoying a large retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and record auction prices. Having installed the new piece, a composition of fluorescent light tubes in several colours, in your expansive home, you discover that one of the bulbs is dead. Do you:

a) drive to Home Depot, purchase a $5.99 fluorescent tube, and replace it?
b) leave the dead bulb in place, to preserve the work in its original state?
c) contact the Flavin estate and arrange the purchase of long-discontinued bulbs in bulk?
d) scream into a throw pillow, stick the piece in storage until you die, and let your inheritants deal with it?

According to this article from The Art Newspaper, only option “a” is verboten, as it would render the work unoriginal according to Flavin’s rather baroque system of notation and certification of his pieces. Despite the artist’s early protestations that the works were to last only as long as the bulbs he built them with, he also established a regime of sealed and signed authentication certificates for each work, and at one time purchased 600 of the last lot of a particular type of green fluorescent bulb manufactured by Sylvania, in order to maintain the material integrity of his limited-edition designs.

The problems of maintaing ephemeral art like Flavin’s is bizarre but fascinating, and gets more and more abstract and philosophical the more we contemplate it. The Guggenheim, for instance, keeps a stockpile of extra bulbs around to maintain its Flavin collection; are the bulbs “art” before they are actually installed, given that that is their sole purpose, or does the act of plugging them in bestow the artist’s touch on them? Are the spent bulbs being collected, and will they ever be themselves displayed? Given that the art is technically worthless without the authentication certificate, will the certificates ever be displayed?

LINK: The Art Newspaper > What happens when Flavin’s lights go out?