the light/tunnel ratio continued

(The end of my last post probably felt a little abrupt--especially given the grandiose title and introductory image.  As has become the case with the reading that I'm doing for this class, I spent a little too much time "chewing" and neglected to leave myself enough time to adequately cull and transcribe the thoughts that formed in the process.  So, with this post, I'll attempt to continue the train of thought where I left it at the same time that I integrate the additional freight picked up from the interceding reading.  [How's that for metaphorical thought? And that last bit rhymes!])

When Serra made that comment about art not being democratic, he was in the midst of a very unpleasant episode in which his work had been rather violently rejected by his audience.  This was before his process of work-making had brought him to the point where curves came to figure heavily in his repertoire of techniques (PING Eisner, p 114).  Though he was perhaps already on his way to that point, because Tilted Arc (PING Dustin)--the much maligned piece in question--was, in fact, a slow, stately gradually described curve.  Unfortunately, it wasn't quite curvy enough and some very loud voices decried it an unsightly gash, spoiling their public ground and their vista.

This response was visceral.  In this respect, Tilted Arc was a success.  It engaged the audience as a sensual, "physical and, in a sense, erotic" (Freedman, p 96) experience.  And on this level, Tilted Arc met the criteria by which Kimmelman declared Serra's work successful.  It reduced the terms of viewing to the point where the audience and their roving, subjective viewfindership became the only point of entry by which to "locate themselves in the fictional realities of artistic forms" (Freedman, p 92).  This idea that narrative ("fictional realities") is the dominant interpretive lens for the average viewer is supported by VTS stage theory and also by Lowenfeld's stage theory in which haptic and descriptive approaches to art production give way to representational schemata (as tends to be the development in the dominant Western tradition anyway).  So, for this average viewer then, the troubling part of Serra's work is the aggressive way that it refuses to be fictionalized.  Its presence is obtrusive and demanding.  Stripped of all other context, the only narrative it offers is the attraction or repulsion of the viewer to its presence.  In Kimmelman's review of the Serra retrospective, this quality is lauded; in the case of Tilted Arc, it proved fatal.

I've already suggested that maybe Tilted Arc wasn't curvy enough to make that achieved effect pleasurable for the audience.  That evaluation is based partly on my familiarity with critical response to Serra's work over time and partly on my own responses to his works.  The early, uncurving, self-supporting slabs of lead and steel have an aggressive quality.  Serra could, theoretically, have made these works out of some other equally rigid but less hefty material (plastics? strong wood?), but the work required to make and sustain the pieces is ultimately part of their effect--they focus the viewer on material and process, at least in part out of a regard for personal safety.  In my kitchen, I keep a postcard of Serra densely suited in protective gear hurtling molten lead into the corner of his studio.  I consider his presence an icon of the visceral culinary approach to which I aspire, an approach that to my mind lines up with the early character of his work.  There's a sort of brutish, take-no-prisoners showmanship in this work and perhaps this is the reason that some people have characterized it as excessively masculine (PING, Kathy).

But this is not the sort of work that has, ultimately, made a popular artist of Serra.  Or, rather, it is--but modulated by finesse and the blessings of institutional savoir fair.  His works still offer the viewer the same stark narrative, but the curving forms no longer push or indicate the presence of an aggressive artist.  As Serra's relationship to his own work has shifted from lifting, pushing, and throwing heavy metals around to massive designs that are turned over for fabrication, the pieces have become more seductive. Great big museums like MoMA have bent over backwards to accomodate them and viewers have been provided with a "safe" space in which to fall under their influence.  No more ugly confrontations; no more unwanted democratic intrusions.

So, Freedman's correct.  No matter how pure the form, context and associations play a role in our experience of it.  It's one thing to be invited to approach and experience Serra's work as art in the traditional institutional settings and it's another to have his work invade your space and to have to live with it on a daily basis.  For me, the irony builds as I apply my own social activist lens to Tilted Arc.  I see the aggressiveness of Tilted Arc as equal to that of the urban landscape into which it was installed.  In that sense, it could have served as a critique or satire of the resignation with which individuals submit  their landscape, their worldview, their point-of-view--to urban developers and the felicities of capital.  Under this lens, Serra subverted the methods and language of the urban landscape to create a non-functional work of art--an object that exists by virtue of its desire to make its audience think and consider.  But that's what I bring to the work, and Serra deliberately avoids burdening his sculpture with politics.  Wisely, I think.  Such considerations would derail his oeuvre.