Las Vegas is a city whose garishness numbs perception, but the surrounding desert manifests the most subtle visual qualities. Claes Oldenburg’s recently erected The Flashlight both reflects and comments on these contrasts.
Set in a plaza between Artemus Ham Concert Hall and Judy Bayley Theatre at the University of Nevada campus, the 38-foot-high sculpture consists of 24 ^^3/4^^ inch-thick Cor-Ten fins welded vertically around a circular tube. In a well at the base of the upside-down flashlight are 24 fluorescent lightbulbs, which create a carefully contained dim glow—a contrast to the omnidirectional blitz of city light. Indeed, when Oldenburg turned on the lights in a night ceremony on March 12, the event was singularly undramatic.
Most Nevada artists choose not to live in Las Vegas, and its few artist inhabitants eschew urban imagery in their work; the city is just too overwhelming. Oldenburg’s Flashlight, however, does not have to compete with city lights in this location, so his satire on the obliterating effects of light and huge scale is not itself obliterated.
And while Flashlight both suggests and comments on American values, it also celebrates Las Vegas’ desert environment; the radiating cross sections suggest a cactus, while their sharp black silhouettes echo the flattened profiles of the mountains in dark shadows or harsh sunlight. And Oldenburg has prevented the base lights from shining upward, so that at night the body of the sculpture is hardly present except for its outlines, like those of the disembodied mountains. Even the light switch of Flashlight is made to echo the mountains: it is patterned after the twin peaks of Sunrise and Frenchman mountains at the eastern border of the Las Vegas valley.
In an interview in 1968, Herbert Marcuse said that if one of Oldenburg’s sculptures were erected in a public location, “it would indeed be subversive. . . . There is a way in which this kind of satire or humor can indeed kill. I think it would be one of the most bloodless means to achieve radical change.” But public reaction to Flashlight has been muted, perhaps because the $130,000 needed to forge the sculpture (at Lippincott Industries in New Haven) came from private patrons, the NEA, and Oldenburg. Most city residents view the sculpture with incomprehension; despite its size Flashlight still seems too utilitarian an object to be a work of art. Yet the Chamber of Commerce and the local newspapers have touted Flashlight because they expect it to put Las Vegas on the “high-cultural” map.
Thus, if Marcuse is wrong about the possibilities of Oldenburg’s sculpture as a vehicle for radical change, at least Flashlight supports his idea that one-dimensional technological societies soon incorporate opposing ideas. The Chamber of Commerce notwithstanding, Flashlight is destined to become a lie about the existence of a visual-arts culture in Las Vegas.
—Mark Levy
