One day Rosalind Krauss the art critic woke up and heard an important American sculptor had died and “I remember sort of dancing all around my bedroom thinking, ‘Yes, I’m going to do my dissertation’” on this particular sculptor.1
That’s not my style. Hearing of the death of Richard Serra I felt more like a Hemingway hero: “How many more fascists are we going to have to fight before it’s good to go to the Prado again?”
Not so far-fetched a comparison: that famous art-world black they all wear, Ros and the others, originated after World War II, when rich bored children of war profiteers decided to emulate the Camicie Nere, the Blackshirts, the Italian fascist militias.2 From the fascists they picked up, along with shirts and dresses, that same Serra-like attitude of seen-it-all superiority; from their parents the black market dealers the assurance that insider knowledge was their most valuable capital. As the Artforum critic Sydney Tillim put it, “Our seriousness is hardly commensurate with the actual know-nothingness of the scene,” adding that just because something is significant in art-world terms doesn’t mean it’s profound.3
Because there’s nothing in a Serra sculpture that isn’t immediately obvious to the casual observer: the raw, brutal machismo, the brooding textures, the threat implied and the very real threat of being flattened. People have been killed trying to move this stuff; that is unacceptable. Fortunately, with the rise of unions among art handlers, it will never be possible again.
It was a blackshirt—who else?—that announced yesterday that it’s time to “bring back Tilted Arc,” meaning the humongous sculpture that in 1981 was installed to bisect a plaza in Downtown Manhattan, and was removed after almost a decade of protests. Even Arthur Danto, who was not much given to appreciating the political content of art until late in his life, got the gist of the issue, the resistance to bullying:
“The right of people to participate in the decisions that affect their lives extends to art when it impinges on their lives as lived… What remains to be explored is what recourse we have over art that is imposed on us without our consent….”
Almost:
“How could the art not be resented? It had been imposed on the basis of almost purely visual considerations… on people for whom visual considerations were only part of the story.”4
Because, as Robert Pincus-Witten pointed out, the most significant aspect of Serra’s minimalism was the form of its politics: not the representation of a political position, but it’s imposition as a brute, physical, reality: “for the first time […] that process could somehow reveal political content.”5 The medium was the message and the message wasn’t pretty. Beautiful to some, sublime, you’d say; pretty, not.—in other words, fascistic.
Of course, visual considerations were only part of the story; they were never the main part to begin with. Brooding, bullying, threatening aren’t the effect of Serra’s sculptures, they’re what an Aristotelian would call their final cause. And who needs Tilted Arc today, when we’ve got the Police? The man was ahead of his time.
WOID XXIII-46
March 27, 2023
Quoted in Amy Newman, Challenging Art. Artforum, 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), p. 78.
Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 158.
Tillim to Philip Leider, February 19, 1967’ quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, p. 496.
Arthur C. Danto, “Milestone 1989: The Removal of Tilted Arc,” Artforum, Vol 41, no. 8 (April, 2003): p. 106. https://www.artforum.com/columns/1989-the-removal-of-tilted-arc-166286/ Accessed March 27. 2024.
Robert Pincus-Witten, quoted, Challenging Art, p. 400.