Word: plazas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Flanked by the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and the U.S. Court of International Trade, Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan is one of the ugliest public spaces in America. Everything, from its coarse buildings -- which look the way institutional disinfectant smells -- to its dry, littered fountain, begs for prolonged shiatsu with a wrecker's ball. But since no one is going to do that, would the next best thing be to put a Major Sculpture by a Major American Artist there...
...sculpture was installed in Federal Plaza. It was certainly major: a curving, unbroken wall of steel plate, twice the height of a tall man and 120 ft. long. The plates leaned inward slightly but emphatically and cut diagonally across the plaza -- a raw, rusty, hulking gesture. Its title was Tilted Arc, its author was Richard Serra, and it was commissioned by the General Services Administration, a branch of the Federal Government, as part of its Art-in-Architecture program. The cost...
...defense of his work, Serra, 45, tends to talk like vintage Ayn Rand. "They don't live there," he says of the workers in Federal Plaza. "It's not a neighborhood. The Government doesn't ask them what chairs they want to sit on. Why should they vote on sculpture?" Through Tilted Arc, he told the March hearing, "the viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza . . . Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes." One would think it was meant to be like the black slab...
...work, Serra insists, is "site-specific," designed for, and in terms of, a given spot. Remove Tilted Arc from Federal Plaza and, according to Serra, it will become the meaningless array of rusty metal that its opponents claim it already...
...moral equivalent of Hitler's book burning, that it would start an iconoclastic stampede against all public sculpture in America and so forth. But the central point is that Tilted Arc was, according to Serra, conceived and contracted between him and the GSA as a permanent installation in Federal Plaza, and that the GSA should not convene a hearing to change the rules four years after the closing whistle. If it wants to avoid such imbroglios it should try / slipping a public-acceptability clause into its future commissions, if it can draft one that holds water. That way a perfect...