#35

Notes on Dan Flavin (reading Anne's essay "Flavin's Limited Light")
















"[T]o pose silent electric light ... in the box that is the room."

Re: some light, first solo ex: "They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light."

"I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition. For example, if you press an eight foot fluorescent lamp into the vertical climb of a corner, you can destroy that corner by glare and doubled shadow. A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall; that is, side to floor, for instance."

Destruction of the "actual space of the room" -- but of a "barren room," one that does not, and is not designed to, contain things in permanent, symbiotic fashion, as with the bourgeois interior. I sense that the acts of destruction Flavin sought to undertake -- destruction of an illusory, electrified sort -- are not in any way anathema to the rooms he has in mind (the gallery room). Destruction of these walls is what they were built for: immaterialization, the imagining-away of the room's corporeality. Electricity is itself an annihilating angel, since it proves that what simultaneously contains the space of the room, limning its walls and infrastructure, and what articulates the functionality of the otherwise "barren" space is of a categorically different order of materiality than the stuff the room is made of.

"to beset to abuse the complete room" -- rooms built to be abused, and which abuse in turn

Anne: no place for the viewer

Flavin's problem is that he wants simultaneously to destroy architecture, which had taken up the task of articulating figural space from painting, and to reassert the pictorial function of line and light (lines of light) affixed to the wall. He wants to do both things using the same gesture, in other words -- to abuse the room and the light fixtures at the same time, thereby returning the gallery space to a sort of zero degree of pictoriality (i.e. the gallery before Le Corbusier). But just as the objectness of the light fixture renders his work not fully pictorial, always residually literal in Fried's sense of the term, so too does the function of the wall as the light's frame and foil keep intact architecture's power of formal and spatial articulation. Maybe the real success of Flavin's work is simply its bringing-into-view of the poverty of 20th-century architecture, its functionlessness, even its hostility. Architecture in the 20th century is not for human inhabitants; it is for light. God help us if we need more than light to make do.

#34

Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red
1908

Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie
Winter 1911-12, Paris

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning
May 1912

Fernand Léger, Contrasts of Forms
Paris, 1913

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
1913

Louis Feuillade, Les Vampires
1915

Henri Matisse, Windshield (Road to Villacoubray)
Paris, 1917

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
1919

Fernand Léger, La Ville
Paris, 1919

Kurt Schwitters, Mai 191
1919

El Lissitzky, Story of Two Squares
1922

Le Corbusier, Contemporary City of 5 Million Inhabitants / Plan Voisin for Paris
1922 / 1927

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye
1929

Ernst Cassirer, “Mythic, Aesthetic, and Theoretical Space”
1931

Le Corbusier, Pavillon Suisse
1930-32

Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art
1935-7

Pablo Picasso, Guernica
1937

Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli
1950

Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?
1956

Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless
1959

Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations
1962

Robert Morris
Exhibition at the Green Gallery, 1964

Donald Judd
Exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1966

Jean-Luc Godard, Week End
1967

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
1978-80

Agnes Varda, Vagabond
1985

#33

From Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia:

“Absorb that multiplicity, reconcile the improbable through the certainty of the plan, offset organic and disorganic qualities by accentuating their interrelationship, demonstrate that the maximum level of productivity coincides with the maximum level of the productivity of the spirit: these are the objectives delineated by Le Corbusier with a lucidity that has no comparison in progressive European culture.”

“If architecture is now synonymous with the organization of production, it is also true that, beyond production itself, distribution and consumption are the determining factors of the cycle. The architect is an organizer, not a designer of objects. This assertion of Le Corbusier’s is not a slogan but an obligatory directive that connects intellectual initiative and the civilisation machiniste. As a member of the vanguard of that civilization, in pointing the way and determining its plans (even if only in a partial area) the architect must proceed in several different ways. What he offers directly is the appel aux industriels and the building types. The search for an authority capable of mediating the planning of building production and urbanism with programs of civil reorganization is pursued on the political level with the institution of the CIAM. The maximum articulation of form is the means of rendering the public an active and participant consumer of the architectural product.”

“…for Le Corbusier it is the whole anthropogeographic landscape that becomes the subject on which the reorganization of the cycle of building production must insist.”

“At Algiers the old Casbah, the hills of Fort-l’Empereur, and the indentation of the coastline are taken up as material to be reutilized, actual ready-made objects on a gigantic scale. … The fact is that the industrial object does not presuppose any single given location in the space of the city. Serial production here basically implies a radical overcoming of any spatial hierarchy. The technological universe is impervious to the here and the there. Rather, the natural place for its operations is the entire human environment—a pure topological field, as Cubism, Futurism, and Elementarism well understood. Thus in the reorganization of the city it is the entire three-dimensional space that must become available.”

“… Le Corbusier even foresees the possibility of inserting eccentric and eclectic elements into the network of fixed structures [in the Obus plan]. The liberty allowed the public must be pushed to the point of permitting the public—the proletariat in the case of the serpentine that winds along the seaside, and the upper middle class on the hills of Fort-l’Empereur—to express its own bad taste. Architecture thus becomes a pedagogical act and a means of collective integration.”