Rosalind Krauss
LAS VEGAS COMES TO THE WHITNEY
Outside the Whitney the riggers were moving the twenty-nine–
foot billboard of Hiram Powers's
Greek Slave
into place. Inside the museum
things were not much better. Dan Flavin was sitting in the office of one of
the curators, slightly flushed and very angry. He had come that morning
with an assistant to install the work he was to contribute to
200 Years of
American Sculpture,
the Whitney'Sambitious attempt to survey and docu–
ment this country's sculptural achievements. Flavin's work,
untitled (to the
"innovator" ofWheeling Peachblow) ,
is an eight-foot square frame made
of four fluorescent fixtures: two double lights facing in towards the wall, and
two single flXtUres facing the viewer. Intended for the corner of a room, the
work is a meditation on the way aesthetic space replaces and transposes
"real" space, for the effect of its luminous frame is to erode away the archi–
tectural certainties ofwall and floor.
Flavin had gone to the corner designated for the installation of his
work. There he had stopped, turned on his heel, and gone in search of the
curator in charge. She was in her office , where I was also, since I was guest
curator for another section of
200 Years ofAmerican Sculpture.
Flavin sat
down and said very quietly, " I want to withdraw my work from the exhibi–
tion." There was a reason of course; the best of reasons. Flavin felt that to
show his work in the place that had been provided for it was going to parody
and destroy its meaning, because the corner it was to occupy gave directly
onto another work that was already in place; and that work, by Lucas Sam–
aras, was sheathed by a wall of mirrors.
"You thought it would be very amusing," Flavin said. "You thought
that with some colored lights and a facing wall of mirrors you could create a
corridor which would produce a little miniature of the
Las
Vegas Strip.
Didn' t you?"
Flavin's question was addressed to the architect in charge of the general
exhibition, who had been called in to the curator's office. What followed
then were repeated denials by the architect to repeated accusations by
