Dan Flavin's 'monument' 1 for V. Tatlin" (left) is the first of thirty–nine "monuments" to the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) that Flavin created between 1964 and 1990. The stepped arrangement of white fluorescent tubes is meant to evoke Tatlin’s colossal-but-unrealized Monument to the Third International (1920) [Right].
While "evocative" of the Monument (perhaps only in that the title of the series references it), the Tatlin-inspired works aren't quite homages. Flavin, who described his sculptures as "anti-monuments," expresses his ambivalence toward Tatlin's utopian ideals while creating his own equally radical work.
As Maurice Tuchman put it in his essay "The Russian Avant-Garde and the Contemporary Artist," which was included in the catalog for LACMA's groundbreaking 1980 exhibition The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930, "In Minimalism, the Russians' socially conscious endeavor is startlingly inverted: in place of the revolutionary artists' desire to change the world, the Americans of the 1960s appeared to want to torture the middle class."
Still, the crushed barricades comprising Bettina Bousttchi's own homage to the Monument to the Third Internationale are a nice touch:
Bettina Pousttchi, Double Monument (for Flavin and Tatlin)
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