Word: serra
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Adventuresome audiences that had made the pilgrimage downtown to Leo Castelli's influential art gallery on West Broadway in SoHo, for example, might encounter minimalist sculpture by Don Judd and Richard Serra or hear Glass's new sounds in concert. Near by, Performance Artist Anderson was playing her violin on a street corner while wearing ice skates atop a melting block of ice. Composer Steve Reich had already experimented with out-of-sync tape loops in pieces like Come Out; Choreographer Childs had created her early works, like Street Dance. "No one organized an official group or issued a manifesto...
...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...
...American public sculpture is in trouble, and it is, the response to Serra's work is not a cause but a symptom. Sculpture has largely lost the commemorative uses it had a century ago. It seems that Government bodies like the GSA think of it as a vague sort of visual fluoride. Its role has also withered as social compacts about the use of public space have been trashed. The aerosol valve has done for eyes in American cities what the suitcase radio has done for ears: civility dies before the corrosive jibber-jabber and the intrusive spray can. Graffiti...
...knew what it was getting in Serra's commission. It saw artist renderings and models. It did not expect a cute bronze of Peter Pan. Serra's massive walls and propped assemblies of steel and lead plate are among the most familiar images in recent American sculpture -- blue-collar minimalism, a pugnacious combination of muteness with extreme manipulations of space. Nobody could call his work accessible, but there is no denying his influence on other artists. To take only one example, the black granite notch of Maya Ying Lin's monument to the Viet Nam dead in Washington...
...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...