Juli Carson’s “1989” brings up the irony of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, his goals for the piece, and his defense of it both before and after its removal from the Federal Plaza in New York City. Carson notes that in Serra’s testimony concerning his sculpture, the artist explains, “site-specific works address their context, entering into dialogue with their surroundings” (338). Furthermore, “site-specific sculpture is one conceived and created in relation to the particular conditions of a specific site, and only to those conditions. To remove Tilted Arc, therefore, is to destroy it” (331). Carson points out that despite, and because of, these Formalist motives behind the sculpture, Tilted Arc was still “bound up with the rhetoric from which it was conceived (late modernist, phenomenological notions of site-specificity)” (332). With this in mind, Tilted Arc is not and was not just a wall interacting with the space it inhabited, but also a statement in a larger discourse of art history, outside the plaza.
Also, unfortunately for Serra, if “dialogue” is the artist’s goal for a public sculpture, they must be ready to accept anything that happens to or is said about the object to be part of the overall piece. Serra placed his sculpture in a public plaza, which the government and people had the power to change. In this way, the “122 people [who] spoke in favor of retaining Tilted Arc and 58 [who] spoke against it” were all part of that dialogue, and thus part of the piece (339). It could be taken as consolation to the artist or as a refutation to his claims, but the removal of Tilted Arc is actually a part of the piece. This is not to say that the removal finished the piece. Rather the piece goes on as long as the dialogue does, in forms such as these essays and articles.
Juli Carson. “1989.” Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 331-343.
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If all aspects of the site it inhabits (political/rhetorical) or reactions to a site-specific work are part of a piece, why do you say that that its removal is not a part of it?
ReplyDeleteYou are right when you say site-specific works are not entirely divorced from the world outside of their location, because no ideas are completely independent or original from the thoughts presented around them or even from the thought process they have been forged in (the same thought processes everyone in a specific culture is taught). No specific site is an island, but rather is a sand bank connected to others just below the water.
That being said, do you feel that there is any way for a piece to be completely independent from the world around it, to be so wrapped up in the location it resides in that it harkens to nothing in the formation of its identity, or would this scenario present a piece that literally means nothing (as no definition can exist without connections to others)?
Or maybe that is the entire point. The piece cannot truly exist until the discourse is created. We compare "Tilted Arc" to popular philosophy and modernist discourse, and in doing so we change it from a simple wall of metal to a piece of art. It is dialogue that elevated its status, and, as you have said, dialogue that allows it to continue existence after removal.