Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery,

University of California,

Los Angeles 1977

 

10 ½  x 10 ½ ft (3,2 x 3,2 m)

8 tons of red bricks, structural epoxy, 15000 pastel sticks of Grumbacher 46F Ultramarine Blue

 

Blue Flame was created by the artist for the M.F.A. show at University of California Los Angeles. It was a structure in the shape of a rectangle (10 feet 6 inches height and length) constructed of eight tons of red common bricks hand colored with blue pastels. It took approximately  one month to install the piece inside the courtyard on the UCLA campus, and just a week to take it down. The sculpture remained at the site for six months (it was supposed to be up for three months, but 10 000 people petitioned that the work at the University remain for three more months). When the installation was dismantled the imprint/ shadow of the blue sculpture  was left on the pink courtyard. It took nine months to dust itself up – “like a flame slowly dying out” - says the Susan Kaiser Vogel. The artist explains how she came across this idea in the following words: 

 

“I kept walking through the courtyard on the UCLA campus, and I realized nobody ever stood there.  In the vacant space I created an outdoor structure of the same exact dimensions as the exhibition space indoors. I called it Blue Flame.  One wall of the Blue Flame was missing in order to allow people to enter the structure.  This missing wall was actually a narrow entrance, and I erected the missing portion inside the exhibition space, thereby blocking the entrance to the duplicate room inside. Hence you were granted entry into the inside room,  and could only go into the structure outside (...) Blue Flame wasn’t just a wall, it was a space, a contained space. With the window to the sky. In which you can have an enclosure, but exposure. It was a room with a view. And there was an intimacy in the middle of this big courtyard… and you'll be intimate within, but the sky would be above you. And 24 hours a day it will change and I would just sit there  or lay on the ground and watch the clouds go through the window.”