I fancied a bit of a change from staying in all Sunday so I thought I'd go and get a bit of culture. The Hayward Gallery recently opened an exhibition by minimalist artist Dan Flavin, who is noted for doing pieces involving neon tubing. I quite like light displays although they're usually in a concert or clubbing environment so I thought I'd see what could be done with them in a static environment. Beats looking at oil on canvas, anyway.
His earlier pieces were crap to be honest, consisting of single bulbs, mostly neon strip lights but he even had the cheek to mount a single normal lightbulb on a box and call it art. That sort of crap I don't get, call me a philistine! His most famous piece called "diagonal" is the one above, a yellow light positioned at an angle. Not very good at all.
As his vision grew though he started to incorporate bulbs of various lengths and colours together and this is much better. There are some nice pieces that come out really well when mounted against the plain white walls or in the corner of the rooms.
Towards the end of his career he got bolder incorporating his pieces into corridors and making walls of his lights too rather than just placing them against walls as he'd done earlier.
It killed a couple of hours, and some of it worked on a Malcolm wavelength, not all of it did however.
Quite eerily however, whilst I was taking in the art myy iPod, which was on random, played "Neon Lights" from the latest Kraftwerk album - I kid you not!
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