Highlights from Marfa: Dan Flavin

Hey look, it's Dan Flavin again! Unlike with Chamberlain, my appreciation of this guy goes up every time I see him. And his stuff really shines when it's site-specific; one small piece on a gallery wall does not begin to give you a sense of how cerebral he was in his experiments with light and color.

Here, Judd gave him free rein over six separate U-shaped barracks. Flavin created two long corridors at the bottom of each "U," filling them with parallelograms of light that were one color on one side, and the complementary color on the other (pink/green and blue/yellow). The funny -- and amazing -- thing is that, in each case, it's not obvious how the colors will affect each other, even though you think it'll be.