Description:
flower pot with central bare bulb containing a small metal flower which lights up, comes with extra light bulbs in a box; flower
Label Text:
"It’s important to me that I don’t get my hands dirty. It’s not because I’m instinctively lazy. It’s a declaration: art is thought."
Dan Flavin
Barbara Roses can be read as a lighthearted visual pun and as an example of Dan Flavin’s declaration that “art is thought.” In this playful work, Flavin and his then wife, artist Sonja Flavin, have simply placed an Aerolux Flowerlite light bulb in an ordinary terracotta pot. The pull chain illuminates the tiny flower inside the bulb.
This humorous work was eventually created in four editions. Originally titled Violet Flowers, the first pot was given as a birthday present in 1964 to art critic Barbara Rose (Smith College, class of 1957), for whom the flower pots were retitled. The Museum’s work is the fifth pot created in the first edition of ten.
Mass-produced, fluorescent light tubes would later become Dan Flavin’s signature material in large-scale installations and sculptures.
Tags:
allegory; flowers Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1975.36.4 |
