Word: serra
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When, later that year, the Stammers moved to a farm in Serra Negra, 100 miles north of Sao Paulo, their lodger went along, taking a room in their new home. One day, about two years after Pedro joined the household, a visitor left a newspaper in the house that featured a picture of Dr. Josef Mengele as he looked at Auschwitz. Despite the 20-year interval, said Stammer, she recognized in the picture the gap between Pedro's top front teeth, and the bent head with which he gave his one-sided smile. Later that day, she said, she showed...
Considering the impression that many people form when they first see the sculpture -- that they have somehow wandered onto an unsightly construction project -- the controversy over Richard Serra's Tilted Arc was understandable. Commissioned by the General Services Administration at a cost of more than $175,000, the unbroken 12-ft.-high wall of rust-patinaed steel stretches 120 ft. across Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, forcing thousands of pedestrians to hike around it. Since the installation of Tilted Arc in 1981, more than 7,000 office workers have signed petitions demanding the work's removal. During a series...
...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...
...frescoes and tombs that have not died from being moved. As the Great Structuralist in the Sky would put it, loss of context means enrichment by recontextualization, and site-specific is as site-specific does. What it does here is serve as a mere scrim for the question of Serra's rights as an artist who, much as his opponents may now resent it, can be argued to have had a binding deal with the Government...
...hearing brought scores of pundits opining that the "censoring" of the sculpture would be the 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...