Remember Tilted Arc?

Notes on Art and Its Audiences

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981

What do Nancy Reagan and Richard Serra have in common?  The question requires me to zip back to 1979, the year a panel convened by the Art in Architecture program of the federal government’s General Services Administration invited Serra to propose a sculpture for the plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and the United States Court of International Trade—two dreary buildings that would score somewhere between zero and minus one on a one-to-ten scale of architectural excellence.  Serra graced the plaza with Tilted Arc, a 120-foot-long sculpture that received a perfect ten from those art-world denizens who tried to prevent its removal in 1989, eight years after it was installed.  A grim comedy of misunderstandings, some sincere, some willful, the Tilted Arc story features a large cast of characters talking past one another about civic values, direct democracy, personal feelings, and more. 

Serra had much to say, always on the same subject: the nature of serious sculpture.  If sculpture “has any potential at all,” he once explained, it “has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the spaces and places where it is created … I am interested in work where the artist is the maker of an ‘anti-environment’ which takes its own place or makes its own situation, or divides and declares its own area.”  This is a sophisticated extension of the formalist—that is to say, Greenbergian—idea that a successful painting is autonomous, set off from its place in the world by its focus on the purely pictorial concerns that define it as a painting. 

As Greenberg saw them, successful paintings had no necessary connection to anything outside themselves, not even their audience. Likewise, Serra meant each of his sculptures to inhabit its own “situation,” indifferent to anything or anyone else, including people who, for one reason or another, find themselves in the sculpture’s vicinity.  On their way to work, over ten thousand people walked past Tilted Arc every weekday for nearly a decade.  Many found the sculpture’s presence mildly oppressive.  Some felt it was horrible—an ugly, even creepy intrusion.  No doubt there were others who reacted hardly at all to this big slab of Corten steel.  It is certain, though, that Serra believed that their responses to Tilted Arc were beside the point.

          What point?  The point of significant art as defined by the historical mainstream that Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, began to define in the 1930s, that Greenberg and the Greenbergians elaborated from the 1940s to the 1970s and the October writers extended into the 1980s, modifying it with their endless, magpie borrowings from such European theorists as Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno.  Having said that, I feel obliged to add that the tendentious fatuities of October-style theory should not be blamed on Benjamin or Adorno.  Nor should works of art included in the mainstream be blamed for the reductive tactics used by those who charted that mainstream.  So it is not Cubism’s fault that Greenberg chose to define the style as a matter of tonal contrast, the picture plane, and other formal factors, while ignoring everything else that a Cubist painting might mean.  Yet it is Tilted Arc’s—or Serra’s—fault that this sculpture displayed an absolute indifference toward the world and its audience.  That is what the artist intended it to do.  As he said, site-specific works like Tilted Arc “do not relate to the history of monuments.  They do not memorialize anything.  They relate to sculpture and nothing more.”

Cubism, to stick with that example, had formalism forced upon it.  Tilted Arc, by contrast, was the product of the Minimalist formalism that developed out of the Greenbergian kind and then morphed into the formalism of process and installation art.  The problem with these formalisms is that, for all their complexity and capacity for nuance, they turn art in on itself before we get to any consideration of meaning.  Yes, the Cubists faceted their subjects in ways that unify the picture plane.  So what?  To unify the picture plane is not, in itself, a matter of any significance.  Yet that is how a formalist wants you to see that unification: in itself, disconnected from everything else.  That disconnection is the point.  It guarantees purity.

Serra said that “through its location height, length, horizontality, and lean,” Tilted Arc “grounds one into the physical condition of the place.  The viewer becomes aware of himself and his movement through the plaza.”  Presumably, those who walked through the plaza before the sculpture was installed had at least some dim awareness of themselves and their movements.  No formalist painter or sculptor has ever, so far as I know, suggested that people are unconscious zombies, shuffling through their lives in darkness, until they stumble across an artwork full of brilliant solutions to formal problems, whereupon they snap out of it and become—what?  Aware of certain solutions to certain formal problems?  That doesn’t seem to be enough to sustain human life.  Yet it is all that Serra and other proponents of aesthetic autonomy offer, with their ideal of artworks that address issues of visual form and “nothing more.”  But what does this have to do with Nancy Reagan?

Do you remember her solution to drug abuse?  “Just say no.”  As if the problem were simply that people were willing the wrong thing.  Just will the right thing, you silly old drug addicts.  Problem solved.  As if problems with drugs were not entangled in personal, social, and economic conditions we still don’t know how to untangle, much less improve.  The Nancy Reagan solution showed an astonishing ignorance of—or indifference to—the experience of people caught up in the misery of drug use.  And Serra showed an astonishing ignorance of—or indifference to—the experience of people faced with art they did not like, on first contact, and, on subsequent encounters, did not understand. 

Where Reagan said, “Just say no.” Serra insisted, in effect, that we just say yes—yes to having our physical movements, our sense of our bodies and ourselves, shaped by the formal qualities of Tilted Arc.  How was that supposed to work?  Serra didn’t say and his silence implied an imperative: just do it.  Just get with the formalist program.  If you can’t or don’t want to do that, if adjusting your being to the exemplary forms of Tilted Arc is not your idea of realizing your life’s full potential, well, tough.  You do not belong in the world through which the currents of mainstream art wend their transcendent way.  And your attitude toward Tilted Arc or any other serious work of art does not matter.

Of course, that mainstream has dried up.  For more than three decades, the art world has been a pluralist delta, a network of innumerable currents crisscrossing, separating, and spilling, eventually, into the vast, uneasy ocean of commercial culture.  In this unmappable zone, permissiveness reigns.  There are no imperatives to obey or defy, except for the ones presented by political art.  If a painting offers me a progressive message about race or gender or the depredations of corporate monopolies, I always agree with it.  Why not?  These are messages with which I agree already, before any work of art beams them at me. 

Does a political artwork have any interest apart from its laudable message?  If so, why?  What is it, in other words, that makes the work of art valuable as art?  The difficulty of answering this question is what drove certain art lovers to dogmas about pure art and the autonomy of pictorial and sculptural form.  My hope is to avoid those dogmas while keeping my eye focused on art.  I hope as well that art stays focused on itself, or it might become illustration, either of a political program or some version of a formalist theory.  Illustration’s certainties are useful, on occasion, yet our abiding need is for the uncertainties, the teeming ambiguities, of art.