The Richard Serra "Tilted Arc" Controversy

Once upon a time, in our modern world, there was an ugly run-down plaza in New York between two high-rise buildings.  It was bare except for an out-of-use fountain, and offered no welcoming shade or places to sit.  People used the space only to move through it as quickly as possible.

Then, in 1981, a federal program called the General Services Administration commissioned Richard Serra to construct a work of art to fit into the space, and Serra produced the soon to become notorious Tilted Arc.

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, raw steel, 1981, photo credit

photo credit

As I mentioned in my last post on Serra, his sculptures are often site-specific, and Tilted Arc is undeniably so.  With Tilted Arc, (made of the same rusty looking steel that he later used for his Bramme for the Ruhr District) Serra is highlighting certain essences of the space around it.  By cutting through the center of the plaza, Tilted Arc requires people passing through to take a wide detour (perhaps an annoying detour, especially to a hurried New York business person).  Furthermore, the curve of the giant steel wall is so that it makes a visitor uncomfortable as he/she is walking by, as if it is perilously off balance and about to fall.  Due to these features, the sculpture tells a rather sophisticated message about industrial life and the discomfort of urban spaces, a message in fact, about the very plaza it is cutting through.

But at least some of the workers in the surrounding high-rises didn't buy it.  They felt that Serra's sculpture made the plaza even more ugly and uncomfortable than it was before, and that they wanted a sculpture in the plaza that encouraged use for rest and recreation, not one that made you want to hurry past before it fell on you.  Inchoate grumblings eventually turned into an organized protest spectacle, when in 1984, William Diamond, the new administrator of the General Services Administration, took it up as his own personal campaign to get the sculpture removed.  It took four years of highly contested debate, with strong voices both for removing the sculpture and keeping it, before it was dismantled and destroyed (I'm not actually sure how "destroyed" exactly... maybe melted down?) in 1989.  Goodbye Tilted Arc.

Except, not completely goodbye, because the story of Tilted Arc, raises some fascinating questions.  Who was in the right in this debate: Serra and the supporters of his sculpture, or those numerous workers who were not interested in the art-for-art's-sake thing but wanted a sculpture in the plaza which made them feel comfortable?  Do artworks in public spaces have an obligation to make the public using the space feel good, or can they portray some other message?  I'm eager to know what you think.

P.S. Apparently the poor plaza, relieved of Tilted Arc, was fated for ugliness.  It was redesigned, but by all accounts, not very well.  According to the website Project for Public Spaces, the plaza today is "an awesomely bad complex so disjointed it boggles the mind."

Monument to Industrial History

The German city of Essen is situated in a densly populated area of western Germany known as the Ruhr district.  Until the decline of the coal market in the 1960s and 1970s, this region was exceedingly industrial, thick with coal mines and coal processing plants.  (Perhaps you remember from school lessons on the industrial revolution, that processed coal, called coke, was needed in huge amounts to feed the furnaces in order to produce the great metals of industry, iron and steel.)  Today, most of the coal mines and processing plants in the Ruhr are shut down, although some are cleaned up and open to tourists.  Still populating the skyline however, the thin metal smokestacks remind residents and visitors of this regions history.

Also shaping the landscape are large heaps of coal refuse -the impure bits which couldn't be used in the delicate process of steel- and iron-making.  Nothing can grown on these mounds of coal.  They are mountainous monuments to the side-effects of industrialization, powerful and disquietingly barren.

In 1998,  Richard Serra, a great contemporary sculptor of iron and steel, erected a monument on top of one of the coal heaps in Essen.  I visited it last year.

The sculpture cannot be seen without a bit of work.  To even get to the coal heap, I climbed an exhaustingly long staircase, leading out of a rather normal looking picnic area.  But on reaching the top of the staircase, it felt as if I had come out onto the moon.

The ground was dry, black and crumbly.  The green foliage which had moments before surrounded me gave way to emptiness.  I was surrounded by nothing but wind and distance.  Ahead of me, on the top of the mound, was the sculpture Richard Serra had erected.  So far away, its shape mirrored the smokestacks dotting the horizon.  I continued my walk toward it, feeling almost like I was making some sort of a pilgrimage across a wasteland.  

 

 

Richard Serra, Bramme for the Ruhr District, 1998, raw steel

The sculpture is 14.5 meters high, 4.2 meters wide, and 0.13 meters thick.  It is made of rusting steel, with the kind whose surface which could scrape the skin of your muscles.  It felt gigantic when I reached it, although it was standing atop a mound much much more gigantic than it.  The bottom two meters, the part reachable by humans, had been graffitied, and the graffiti struck me as both an ugly desecration of the art, and yet somehow also an appropriate addition to the industrial aesthetic of the sculpture.  

Most of Serra's sculptures are what is called Site-Specific, an important term for contemporary art history, describing an artwork which is designed and planned to fit into a specific space, and would thus, not really work if it were transfered to another space.  I would argue that for a site-specific sculpture like this one, not only the steel making up the pillar, but the entirety of the space around, from the coal-mound underfoot, to the smokestacks on the horizon is part of the sculpture.  Even though Serra himself didn't build either the smokestacks or the coal-mound, by placing his pillar where and how he did, he causes the visitor to think differently about these things.  Serra said about this monument that he wanted to: "hold onto the moment, in which a civilization dies and something new begins".

Without Richard Serra's sculpture, I would have probably have been only appalled by the signs of industrialization which permeate this place.  With the sculpture, I was able to see the wistful beauty of this history.  

Come back tomorrow for another post about Serra, and some controversy with his site-specific sculptures.  

An art-lover's pleasure

For me, art is sometimes just the joy of coming upon a dazzling, dizzying landscape painting ...

and moving closer... 

and closer...

until the two-dimensional landscape has turned into 3-dimensional, abstract brush-strokes of color. Then I back up again and watch the abstract strokes turn back into a landscape. 

I repeat this exercise multiple times, and each time am filled anew with wonder that a painting can have two such distinct identities: one as a vision of a San Francisco landscape, and another as colorful paint in abstract shapes on a canvas.  

The photos in this post are my photos of Wayne Thiebaud's San Francisco, West-Side Ridge, (undated, but around 1990), from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

How Little We Know

When in human history did we start making art?  

We can never know, but probably thousands of years earlier than the earliest artifacts archeologists can dig up.  For an artifact to survive long enough to reach the hands of an archeologist, it must be made out of stone, ivory or some other such permanent material.  I can only imagine that the first experiments in art happened with sticks in mud, or with charred bits of charcoal on faces and hands.

Löwenmensch (Lion Person), found in Hohlenstein-Stadel Germany, carved mammoth ivory 32,000 years old

What does this sculpture, uncovered in 1939 and created 32,000 years ago tell us our human ancestors?   Just think, 32,000 years ago means we're talking about primitive hunter-gatherer cavepeople.  The famous cave paintings of southern France, which you may have heard of, didn't happen for another couple thousand years.  This is SO LONG AGO.  And yet, the maker of this sculpture couldn't have been so different from us.  The artist had an ability for abstract thought so refined that s/he could, from seeing some cave-lions in his/her life, form in his/her mind a generalized symbol representing "cave lion".  S/he had such a firm grasp of this symbol that s/he could carve it into a piece of ivory, for others to recognize as a lion (even others who live 32,000 years in this artist's future, who know nothing about his/her culture).  This would be mind-blowing enough, but the artist didn't just reproduce a lion, but combined ideas to create a lion standing like a human, in other words, an object of fantasy, playfulness and imagination.  (As well as, perhaps, religious significance... we can't know for sure).  

It seems like the maker of the Lion Person was nearly as smart and creative as we are today. 
How little we really know about prehistoric society. 


Let me intrigue you with one more example:
At an archeological site in Turkey called Göbekli-Tepe, archeologists have uncovered the vast remains of a prehistoric temple, perhaps the oldest on Earth (it's 6,000 years older than Stonehenge).  It is made up of walls and megalithic stone pillars, carved with detailed scenes of animals by rivers (the first landscape art!).  Until it's excavation starting in 1994, archeologists had always (quite logically) believed that only with the advent of agriculture, which made searching for food a less full-time job, that early people had enough free time to do things like structure themselves into towns and civilizations, or build large temples.  That all makes a lot of sense... except that the temple at Göbekli-Tepe pre-dates agriculture in the region by a couple hundred years.  This can only mean that, in prehistoric Turkey at least, the complex coordination required to build a temple came first, and perhaps even lead to the invention of agriculture.  With this, our understanding of civilization is turned on its head.

Monolith from Göbekli-Tepe, Turkey, 11,000 years old

If I've intrigued you, read this interesting article about Göbekli-Tepe from the Smithsonian magazine.