468
PARTISAN REVIEW
Flavin. The. architects, he maintained, wished to transform the physically
and aesthetically discrete work of two separate artists into a synthesis of the
architects' own making. That synthesis, in violation of the meaning of the
sculptures , was to express ideas of the architects about which Flavin was per–
fectly well informed . For these architects-Venturi and Rauch-were intent
on "learning from Las Vegas" (the title of a book they published on the
subject in 1972).
The lessons of
Las
Vegas were everywhere at the Whitney. They began
with the pop-up
Greek Slave
over the canopy and extended to the plastic
mega-sign in the lobby through which the underwriters of the show (gov–
ernment and commercial) were given a place in the electric sun. (" Las Vegas
as a Communication System: Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Free Aspirin
-Ask Us Anything,
Vaca~cy,
Gas"
-Learning from Las Vegas.)
The lessons continued into the upper floors in the photomural that sur–
rounded the David Smiths like a vast billboard; and in the way that most of
the sculpture was lit. (' 'The gambling room is always very dark ... Space
is enclosed but limitless, because its edges are dark. Light sources, chande–
liers, and the glowing, jukeboxlike gambling machines themselves are inde–
pendent of walls and ceilings. The lighting is antiarchitectural. Illuminated
baldacchini,
more than in all Rome, hover over tables in the limitless shad–
owy restaurant at the Sahara Hotel"
-Learning from Las Vegas.)
In the
Whitney's galleries, the general level of illumination was a perpetual dusk
from which the sculpture was picked out by means of spotlights. Inasmuch
as sculpture is a three-dimensional art , often involving subtle changes of
level wrought by careful modeling and resulting in internal complexities of
depth, there could not be a more injurious technique for lighting it than the
use of spots, which flatten the works to silhouettes, which create, within
those contours, intensely devisive and raucously cast shadows.
And, on the top floor there was the lesson that Flavin was learning and
that Carl Andre was to learn the following day. In Andre's case it was not a
question of placing his work in cacophonous juxtaposition with another
sculpture, but fouling it with architectural distractions. Venturi had as–
signed to Andre's highly reflective, copper floor-sculpture a place directly
below both the glowing red sign of an exit door and the eccentrically shaped
opening ofMarcel Breuer's window. Like Flavin, Andre simply withdrew his
sculpture from the exhibition.
As curators, we stood by helplessly watching it all happen, for the archi–
tects had been given total control. The fact that we had selected the con–
tents of the exhibition, had written about the works, and were therefore in
possession of some kind of information about how they should be seen, did
not seem to make much difference. Tom Armstrong, the director of the
