Dan Flavin's the alternate diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd), an 8-foot-long diagonal beam of light set at a 45-degree angle, is a colorful sculpture of light that is visually arresting, even from across the room. As one approaches the work, it is difficult not to become almost blinded by the intensity of the light and the vivacity of the colors. Though it may strike one as garish on first glance, a more lengthy perusal reveals a delicate interplay between the red and yellow beams, giving the work a visual richness. Alternate diagonals was made by Flavin in response to one of his own previous works, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi). His first piece composed solely of light, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 was also an 8-foot-long fluorescent light sculpture (though Flavin never liked to call them sculptures – he referred to them as "situations") hung at a 45-degree angle, and also included a yellow fluorescent light tube. Alternate diagonals seems almost more of an evolution of the former work than a response to it, but regardless of the exact nature of the intended interplay between the two, it is important to frame alternate diagonals as a companion work. Alternate diagonals is a kind of ready-made, entirely made of fluorescent lights that anyone could find in any hardware store and construct as Flavin has. This is precisely what is so intriguing about the work – it toys with the boundaries of what we can define as a ready-made in contemporary art and, perhaps, within the field of art production itself. It forces a spectrum to be employed instead of a black-and-white categorization of the ready-made – a spectrum stretching between the "pure" ready-made (any work that essentially could be transferred straight from anyone's garage to a gallery, such as Duchamp's Bottle Rack), all the way to a contemporary two-dimensional work where the artist's canvas and paints were purchased from an art supply store in an infinitely more manipulated but still semi-"readymade" fashion. Flavin's piece, it seems, is situated somewhere in the center of such a spectrum, and raises the question of where the "ready" ends and the "made" begins.