"[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.
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