Flashlight (Claes Oldenburg, UNLV)

Why does the best-known sculpture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas point its beam at the ground? Campus lore blamed flight paths into the nearby airport. UNLV's own history says otherwise. Flashlight, by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, was installed in 1981 in the plaza between the Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall and the Judy Bayley Theatre. UNLV says it was commissioned in February 1978 and that Oldenburg chose a flashlight because ushers use one to guide patrons to their seats; he later told the Los Angeles Times that Las Vegas seen from a plane looked like “a small patch of light in a vast desert darkness”. The first design aimed the beam at the sky. UNLV states that van Bruggen thought a light shining upward was “clichéd and reminiscent of authoritarian spectacle”, and that this, not air traffic, led to the inverted version approved in 1980. The form is made of 24 black-painted steel fins, with a modest concealed fluorescent ring at the base. Published sizes vary: UNLV's performing arts page gives 38 feet 6 inches high and 10 feet 6 inches across, its history page gives 38 feet and 10 feet, and a 2019 UNLV article gives 36 feet 8 inches and 37 tons. Clark County's public-art page says it was fabricated at Lippincott in Connecticut and trucked to Nevada in March 1981. UNLV's 2013 history puts the cost above $70,000, the county about $130,000. The county adds that early reactions were mixed and that the sculpture became a campus meeting point.