... Richard Serra died yesterday....
It continues:
All these decades later, a wide swath of the public today continues to be baffled and occasionally galled by [Jackson] Pollock, just as it didn’t get Serra for years. “Tilted Arc,” the giant steel sculpture by Serra, was still a fresh wound when we visited the Met [in 1995]. Public officials had removed it from a plaza outside the courthouses in Lower Manhattan in 1989. Fellow artists objected to the removal, but office workers who ate their lunches in the plaza implored City Hall. They saw it as an intrusion, an ugly wall, dividing their precious open space. Serra still wore his fury like a badge of honor.
The man just died, so I'll keep this brief. I have been tired for decades of this version of the story — the grand artist against the office deplorables. Imagine the workers, wanting to enjoy "their precious open space." I worked in one of those courthouses for a year during the period when the sculpture bisected the space, and I know how it felt to people who spent their working hours in its vicinity.
Here's what I wrote about Serra in 2004 (the first year of this blog), in a post titled "Ugly art, ugly politics":
How interesting it is to see that the artist behind the Nation ad that shows Bush devouring a child is Richard Serra (link via Drudge), the artist who imposed that egotistic expression of hostility, "Tilted Arc," on Manhattan office workers in the early 1980s. It especially interests me not just because I've been critical of the ugly images being used by Bush opponents, but because I've been interested in "Tilted Arc" for a long time and even mentioned it in two posts this week.
First, I was praising the colorful carpeting installed in Grand Central as a good public art installation by contrasting it to "Tilted Arc"--"a curving wall of [rusting] raw steel, 120 feet long and 12 feet high, that carve[d] the space of the Federal Plaza in half." The art imposed on people by forcing them to encounter its unconventional aesthetic and by requiring them to take a long walk around it every time they crossed the Plaza. They could then spend their lunch break thinking about how much they detested the artist who forced them to engage with his hostile vision or, alternatively, to curse the federal government, which purchased the thing with their tax money under a federal program that required 0.5 percent of a building's budget to be spent on art. Here's how Serra characterized the experience he'd created for the office workers:
"The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes."The entire environment really changed when the sculpture was removed in 1989, after years of complaints. The sculpture's high art proponents ridiculed the complaints, including a fear of "terrorists who might use it as a blasting wall for bombs." Serra himself said that to move the "site-specific" sculpture would be to destroy it. He also said: "I don't think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people." Fine, but then, keep it out of the plaza! And don't take taxpayer money. The Grand Central carpeting on the other hand, can be walked on comfortably, is amusing for almost everybody, and is going to be removed after a short time, so any perception of ugliness will soon enough give way to the good feeling of relief when it is gone. "Tilted Arc" was there, in the way, permanently, with no feeling or sensitivity for the people who worked in the Plaza. I worked in the area at the time and know first-hand its effect on human beings, who had "site-specific" jobs and did not deserve to be challenged by art to take a 120-foot walk around a steel arc hundreds or thousands of times.
Second, I referred to "Tilted Arc" in a discussion of the awful teardrop WTC memorial, which I hope is never installed. Here, my point was that the high art experts will not defend the piece the way they defended "Tilted Arc." The memorial flouts high art sensibility. I don't want public art by democratic vote either. There do need to be taste leaders. And in any case, there's what lawprofs would call a dysfunction in democracy if the people of Jersey City vote for a big monument that they erect where the people of Manhattan have to look at it all the time. Here, I'm on the side of the high art people. It's not a contradiction: public art needs to satisfy both high art values and the needs of the people who use the space.
So what do I make of Richard Serra's newest creation, the Bush-bashing riff on the great Goya painting? It makes me suspect that Serra, like many artists, feels a raging hostility that motivates his art. I've always thought "Tilted Arc" showed the artist's hostility toward the workers who used Federal Plaza and his sense of superiority about the rightness of his own vision. Serra's Bush ad betrays the same qualities. Yet now he does not have the mantle of high art; lured into the political fray, he has added his hateful image to the pile of vicious anti-Bush propaganda that makes me want to ignore ugly politics and contemplate of high art in a beautiful plaza.
ADDED: Here's Serra's depiction of George Bush:
४८ टिप्पण्या:
Biden campaign hardest hit, as Serra won’t be around to share his artistic views of the monstrosity of Trump. Sad!
That’s the writing and thinking that brought me here and keeps me coming back. If it delights an artist to inflict their art on the people it does reflect a hostility that the general public need not encounter. Unfortunately many and perhaps most “taste makers” resent the rest of us, despise us. When Althouse wrote the above I had not yet experienced Serra’s work up close. But a few years back I found myself in Bilbao, Spain with a few free hours and went to the Guggenheim. There I encountered massive undulating sheets of rusting steel in one wing. I can’t imagine having to negotiate around one of those every day in a space that I had previously enjoyed as open and, well, spacious.
Then the artist’s own words betray his antipathy to the general public. Why is it the snobs and their benefactors have such contempt for their fellow citizens who have to work for a living?
In 1985 the GSA (Govt. Services Admin.) held a public hearing on the sculpture. You can read the testimony of many luminaries and locals here: https://www.artforum.com/features/tilted-arc-hearing-207391/
Tilted Arc was imposed upon this neighborhood without discussion, without prior consultation, without any of the customary dialogue that one expects between government and its people. . . .Since the Tilted Arc was erected the Art-in-Architecture procedures have been expanded to provide for consultation with local communities which are to be recipients of the art. If these procedures had existed when Tilted Arc was under consideration we would not be here today. . . .The rights of a large number of people who live and work here have been overlooked and ignored. I would like to see their rights restored.
—Representative Ted Weiss (N.Y)
When I started working on the project for Federal Plaza I made extensive studies of it. The plaza was essentially used only as a place of transit through which people pass from street to building, therefore Tilted Arc was built for the people who walk across the plaza, for the moving observer. Tilted Arc was constructed so as to engage the public in a dialogue that would enhance, both perceptually and conceptually, its relation to the entire plaza. The sculpture involves the viewer rationally and emotionally. A multitude of readings is possible. . . .
—Richard Serra
I hope that in the interest of American art for future generations that you will let this piece stand and permit time and history to judge it.
—Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice-President Walter Mondale
When I saw her being interviewed on 60 Minutes about this, it was the first time I began to suspect that our nation's elites had contempt for their fellow citizens.
Never liked Serra. None of his stuff looked good on my lawn…
I also think he Temple Grandin’s cattle chute…
I just noticed a huge irony in the pull-quote Althouse used for the headline. The artist said,
"I think if work is asked to be accommodating” and upon seeing it again at the top of the blog, I thought that this too reflected the unrealistic and anti-normie attitude of the artist. Because the vast majority of work done by normal people must be “accommodating” must conform to expectations whether the expectations are set by a superior, a co-worker, a teammate, a manager, a customer, a tradition, a legal standard. The normal life is spent in willing accommodation to spouses, parents, workmates and our fellow citizens. Good manners are an “accommodation,” as well as being the social lubricant that helps society function with less friction than if we all had Serra’s poisonous attitude.
Ironically the Left that inflicted such public monstrosities on the rest of us now insist on tearing down the art prior generations erected by public consensus.
Our host's original post is spot on. As usual the artist is an ego maniac with a crippling inferiority complex.
Create what you want, sell what you want, to who you want. That first penny of tax money means you are now an employee. Don't like the boss? The tax payer? Quit. Go on your way.
There has already been too much gnashing of teeth, over something so trivial.
This seems like a dose of the 'Emperors New Clothes'. Which is the term used, before we came up with gas lighting.
Kind of like Kathy Griffin's "Beheading" with a double shot of "Arbeit Macht Frei" chaser?
https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/129375/2013/02/raw/25be9384f1ebbd85a60324261976eeb8.jpg
In a similar vein, the city of Cambridge (in England) removed a statue they call the ugliest ever made that they say was erected without permission. No sculpter seems to want to take credit for it, either.
https://time.com/6961005/royal-family-prince-philip-statue-removal-notice-uk/
Wasn't there a commissioned statue of Lucy Ball, removed from a college campus? The photos did show a truly ugly depiction of some woman, but not Lucy.
Filed under "walls we don't like"
The deplorable leftists hate beauty. They will tear down wonderfully beautiful sculptures and force the citizens to "live" with crap. They are sick.
So...art "subservient" and "useful" to clap-trap leftist politics is sort of crappy, ham-fisted, and on the nose? He went way out of his way to prove his point, but point proven.
Years ago we visited Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. One of the installation rooms was filled with Serra's walls. First I'd heard of the guy. We wondered why those wavy walls were considered worth looking at and that opinion never changed.
This continual public funding of 'art' as a municipality does for public sanitation inevitable leads to confusion on trash pickup day.
Out of curiosity I googled to see if the NYT ever critiqued Hunter’s “art”. As best I can tell, the answer is no, but I did find this.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook/2021/07/27/we-asked-art-critics-about-hunters-paintings-493751
Each of the four critics responded that the initial appraisals were unrealistically high and the work was average at best. Note the comment by one critic about 2/3 into the article where he likened paying those prices to “making a campaign contribution”.
But of course we all knew that.
Waiting for the indictments ala Stormy Daniels.
Carted off to the scrap metal yard. Even though it was 35 years ago, Today I am celebrating another victory for Western Civilization!
His raging supporters remind me of FL Wright fans. I've been in half a dozen of Wright's buildings. They suck. They look 'artistic' but as habitats they suck.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself...
But Serra won't say it.
The "Turd in the Yard" school of public art is animated by the same impulse as hair-shirt environmentalism, confiscatory taxation, meritless "affirmative action", celebration of every sexual fetish and perversion, open borders, and the tidal wave of fat, ugly, bizarrely tattooed and pierced people in advertisements.
The Left loves the collective and hates the individual. Every institution of society has been hijacked in a 100 year long demoralization project meant to level all distinctions between individuals and undermine all considerations of merit, beauty, excellence, morality, national pride, and the rule of law.
I never understood WHY the people of Europe went for fascism in the 20's and 30's. That part of the story was NEVER explained. We were shown pictures of Nazi book-burning bonfires in school, but they never told us what was in the books. It's becoming more clear every year that their embrace of madness was an over-reaction to another form of madness.
It's obvious that we are going to have to summon the will to snuff out these corrosive leftist tendencies, or sink into an abyss. I just hope we can do it without becoming monsters ourselves.
"a wide swath of the public today continues to be baffled and occasionally galled by [Jackson] Pollock, just as it didn’t get Serra for years." I doubt that the failure to 'get' Serra should be in the past tense. I sense a pattern here. Our self-selected elites spend considerable, time, effort, and money (often the taxpayer's money) to convince us that something manifestly bad is actually good. Years ago I read Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography. He didn't spend a lot of time trying to explain his work to the deplorable's of the day, to let them know why and how they should view his work. It was enough that it was beautiful. Serra's description of tilted arc: "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes." is BS. The office workers who were the daily viewers of his artwork had no such feelings or experiences. They saw it as (correctly IMHO) just a big ugly imposition on the plaza.
That’s so sad.
Anyway…
I knew it. Serra was deliberately being a p***k.
The hostility is the point. Artists can no longer shock the bourgeoisie, but they can still inconvenience them. One sees it today with the protesters who block roads.
Rodin and Michelangelo. Their names will endure, and no amount of damnatio memoriae will change that.
Will anyone in fifty years know or care about Serra?
I'm astounded at how ugly most office scuplture where I work. Why do they even bother spending the money? The paintings they hang in the halls and lobby aren't ugly, but they're just nothing burger absract paintings. Never do I look at any of them and feel a sense of the good and the beautiful.
But i guess that's what people want. Or they don't care. My sense is that the vast majority of my co-workers are completely unaffected by Art or their surroundings. Its a postive attribute when you have ugly/sterile art and sculpture. Its akin to someone not caring about food, they are in a good position when you're forced to eat slop.
The ideas his art presents to the viewer work in large part because he made his art so big. Google "Richard Serra" and select Images. His work is presented on a computer screen in a scale that allows the idea to be seen: wavy surfaces, semicircles inside other semicircles, but off center, paths without vistas, corridors without corners. OK, got it. Abstract art in 3 dimensions, cool.
They remind me of the more humane slaughterhouse designed by Temple Grandin, who through her own autism better understood how to ease cattle from a pen or truck into the processing plant, without alarming the cattle with problems they instinctually disliked, such as slippery floors, open sided fencing, or sharp turns. https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/serpentine-ramp-temple-grandin/
So what do I make of Richard Serra's newest creation, the Bush-bashing riff on the great Goya painting? It makes me suspect that Serra, like many artists, feels a raging hostility that motivates his art.
One of the basest fears/motivations of humans is of things/people who are different from you. It is basic tribalism.
Richard Serra was just acting on that base motivation. This is the same motivation humans have used all through history to create violence and atrocity and cruelty. People keep trying to label it left wing or right wing but it is not political in nature. He was a hater and he hated people who were different from him.
The fact that most violence and atrocity, not all but most, results from people who are secular in training and thought I believe has to do with the paradigm that humans and animals are not that much different and that acting like an animal is OK. There are religions that adopt this vision as well. It is not coincidence that Secularlists and Islamists align often.
When I arrived in NYC in 1985 I pulled off the Westside highway at 1:00 am and my headlights scanned Richard Serra's "Rotary Arc" that had been installed nearby. It was a 50'-0" long slab of Cor-Ten steel rising 12'-0" from the field. Written across the piece in four foot letters someone had written "Kill This Artist." Such was the sudden and new hegemony known as post-Modernism responding to the eight-decades long modernist reduction that was at odds with the public everywhere. Serra became the whipping boy for this angry we-ain't-taking-it anymore backlash that grouped improbably everyone from excluded women and ethnic groups, to French hermeneutics pouring from the Sorbonne, none fancying this you-give-me-steel-I-make-you-art boy's culture. Indeed with the 500 acre Storm King sculpture park north of NYC, replete with Serra's steel sculpture colleagues, anyone not included, was well, not included. As Po-Mo set in Serra's frontal bare slabs became targets for removal across the west. Pointedly in NYC where "Tilted Arc" was removed from the Federal Plaza by petition. The bullying philosophy behind modernism had been reasoned away and these mammoth fabrication shop geometries were scrap. Serra somehow remained in view, barely, because he could still sell, for some reason. Fitzgerald wrote "There are no second an acts in American lives," but alas abstract modernism, returned the past five years in force, sans the rhetoric, and Serra is suddenly in vogue again, just in time for him to pass. I'm sure he smiled these last few years, with I knew it smugness. RIP iron man.
This goes back to the beginning of last century, when such "scandalous" art was a way for the scrappy independent artists to shock bourgeois sensibilities, "épater le bourgeois".
In their minds, they are ever the underdogs, sticking it to The Man, even when making millions of dollars and getting orders from the federal government.
What will they do when there is nothing left to subvert? Celebrate their victory, perhaps. Not much longer now.
Artist is liberal, egotistical asshole.
News at 11.
"I've suffered for my art. Now it's your turn."
Great piece.
And good to be reminded of how hateful Democrats have been since forever.
They like to pretend it's all about Trump, but that's nonsense.
Remember "Bushitler"?
I worked within one or two blocks of another Serra monstrosity that was plunked down in the middle of downtown St. Louis in the early 1980's. It was a triangular arrangement of big rusty steel panels that occupied most of a city block. Ugly as could be. We were subjected to a BS word salad from the "artist" describing his "sculpture" in terms nearly identical to the BS he threw at NYC. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn he used the exact same description for both of them. Those of us who had to walk or drive past those rusted pieces of scrap metal for years would have a different description, based on first-hand observation: A nice place for vagrants to relieve themselves in broad daylight. I left St. Louis over 25 years ago and haven't been back, so I don't know if the thing is still there. For the sake of what's left of downtown St. Louis, I hope not.
But the sculptor was also an eternal poet, reshaping our perception of space, says our critic" (NYT).
Why a "poet"? Why not a "novelist"? Why not a "short story writer"? Why not an "Essayist"? Why not a "reporter"? Or "polemecist"?
Of all the different kinds of writers why poet?
I like poetry. I probably own and read more poetry than 98% of Americans. But as I've discussed here before, I've never understood what make people put poets almost on a plane with God. They don't do that for any other type of writer.
It's a mystery to me.
John Henry
Howard has apparently never heard of Chesterton's fence.
And speaking of poetry, ever read any of Robert Frost's works, Howard?
Mending Wall
By Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Emphasis added. See also my anecdote from the other day about my neighbor, her dog and her fence.
John Henry
Who remembers the absolute fury when Mayor Giuliani dared to question the ethics of spending NYC tax dollars on displaying a painting of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung?
In the 60's my father worked for the CIA and we lived in McLean. Salona Village, on the other side of the tracks from the Kennedys, Mars and such but still pretty classy. My parents did not entertain lavishly but did entertain often.
My father had, as a joke, taken a painter's drop cloth and framed it. Just a piece of canvas with a lot of colors of paint drippings. He signed it "A. Wahl Paynter" and had it hanging in a prominent place in the living room. Everyone, except a few who were in on the joke, took it as a serious work of art. More fools they.
Or were they? Was that any different from Jackson Pollock's work where he literally dripped paint onto a canvas on the floor and sold it for hundreds of thousands?
Maybe it was "found art". Like the pile of rags or the table of empty and half empty wine bottles I saw in in hoity toity exhibition I attended at Rizzoli Palace in Turin 8-9 years ago. If he had called it found art, instead of a joke, would that have made it worth real money. Pollock style money?
What makes a Pollock, or the bottles or rags, art and my father's painting not art.
Most of it is phart. And if I could remember the commenter who said that years ago I would be happy to credit you.
John Henry
And thinking of art, at that same exhibition in Turin, the only piece that really caught my eye was a carpet, about 10' by 10' woven of extension cords in different colors. A plug at one end of each cord and a small light bulb at the other. It was not ugly but nothing to really catch the eye.
But it did catch mine. I stood and stared for several minutes. What got my attention was wondering about the effects of all those cords woven together like that. Wires generate a field when energized. When you get two fields together, they can amplify each other causeing heating. When you wind them in a coil, they become an electromagnet. There is capacitance and inductance to consider.
So I stood there staring wondering what the effect of all those wires woven together would be on each other electrically. There must have been some but I have no idea how it would all resolve. I could probably calculate it if I was really interested.
I wonder haw the artist would feel if I told them this. Some say that the purpose of art is to make one think. On this level the sculpture(?) really worked. 8 years later it still pops into my head from time to time. On the other hand, reading about art it always seems that if the art doesn't make me feel what the artist wants me to feel, I am a philistine.
So what am I? Art lover or philistine?
John Henry
Re: Serra repurposing Goya's "Kronos Devouring His Children," I wonder if Serra ever saw Saudi cartoonist M. Kahil's version, where Kronos is Israeli and the caption is something like "What's the matter? Haven't you ever seen a politician kissing babies before?"
I've been in half a dozen of Wright's buildings. They suck. They look 'artistic' but as habitats they suck.
My grandfather once owned a small ranch in Scottsdale, just down the road from Taliesin West. The main house was designed by one of Wright's senior acolytes, in collaboration with Wright himself. Not really a Wright house per se, but obviously a product of the FLW studio. Granddad bought the place for the land, not much caring for the house, and found it to be practically unlivable. The walls were not plumb and the ceilings were not level and as he walked down the halls it made him feel unsteady, even drunk. The heating and cooling was abysmal, the finishes were poorly applied and not durable, the site-specific matching furniture was uncomfortable, and the list goes on. He ended up living in the foreman's house and renting out the main ranch house to a hippy-dippy artist type, who loved it, and her henpecked husband, who felt the same way about it as my grandfather.
What makes a Pollock, or the bottles or rags, art and my father's painting not art.
In my opinion it’s context in which it was created/presented and also the context in which it was received.
Of course, your dad, having worked for the cia may have been involved in their clandestine fostering and promotion of american abstract-expressionism all over the world, which has been widely documented.
Wires generate a field when energized. When you get two fields together, they can amplify each other causeing heating. When you wind them in a coil, they become an electromagnet. There is capacitance and inductance to consider. . . So I stood there staring wondering what the effect of all those wires woven together would be on each other electrically. There must have been some but I have no idea how it would all resolve. I could probably calculate it if I was really interested. . .
I wonder how the artist would feel if I told them this.
Do you have to ask? He has no more understanding of resistance, inductance, or capacitance than a baboon, and would think you a bourgeois Philistine for even bringing up such mundane matters. Until his contraption burned down the art museum...
Hassyvamper,
You're right of course I don't really have to ask. It was more of a rhetorical question.
Unless,
The artist was actually an engineer or electrician with an artistic bent.
But then he would have given it a title like "The Effect of Capacitance on Woven Floor Coverings" and the exhibit would have included a sheaf of papers with calculations and diagrams all in pencil.
You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
John Henry
Of course, your dad, having worked for the cia may have been involved in their clandestine fostering and promotion of american abstract-expressionism all over the world, which has been widely documented.
OMG!!!
I never thought of that. He did travel some but the only specific trip I can remember was to Omaha when I was in third grade.
He said he went to SAC. But maybe he was sowing seeds of confusion in the heartland.
Perhaps he affected a young David Begley's psyche.
The other thing I remember from that trip was that he brought me back a big Bowie knife that loved so much I wore it to school every day for a month.
John.
I bet there was only one cord that was energized. Woven in such a way to conceal it's route.
I think state supported art is always horrible. At least in the days of patronage the artist had to please at least one person. If you cannot sell your art, it is not art.
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