"Tilted Arc"

Richard Serra's Tilted Arc is considered a site specificity piece of art due to the fact that if it were located anywhere else, it would lose all meaning the artist is trying to convey. After much deliberation, Serra's art was removed due to the controversial issue of it being bulky and difficult to manuveur around due to its location in the Plaza. As Julie Carson states in the article "1989", ' Tilted Arc was removed, or, in Serra's own words, "destroyed"' (Kocur, and Leung 331). During the midnight removal by officers, it was torned down to a raw state of materials. By tearing down this site-specific piece of art without Serra's approval, was his authorship denied?

I believe authorship was fully denied due to the fact it was considered a site-specific piece of art. Removing a site-specific piece of art from the original location results in the piece of art losing all meaning and ultimately the artist losing all authorship. Serra wanted to make people become aware of themselves and realize a different percpetion of the environment that surrounded them. After they tore it down to raw materials, they removed it from the site. As they were taking it off site, they took away the artist and the concept of Tilted Arc as a whole. In the article "1989", Julie Carson concludes that "...for what was reduced to fragmented and discarded parts, shipped off-site, and locked away was not just the presence of a work of art, but the logic of Serra's authorship itself" (Kocur, and Leung 339).

Kocur, Zoya, and Simon Leung. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 331 & 339. Print.