The Trials Of

By ROBERT HUGHES

Flanked by the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and the U.S. Court of International Trade, Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan is one of the ugliest public spaces in America. Everything, from its coarse buildings -- which look the way institutional disinfectant smells -- to its dry, littered fountain, begs for prolonged shiatsu with a wrecker's ball. But since no one is going to do that, would the next best thing be to put a Major Sculpture by a Major American Artist there?

In 1981 a sculpture was installed in Federal Plaza. It was 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: $175,000.

The sculpture promptly became an object of loathing to many of the people who worked in offices around it; they complained that it prevented their crossing or even using the space. In March the regional administrator of the GSA, William J. Diamond, convened a public hearing to gather opinions (both expert and lay) on Tilted Arc. Some 180 people spoke, two-thirds pro, one- third con. Last month a GSA-appointed panel recommended, based on the hearing, that the sculpture be removed, but the final decision will be made in Washington by GSA Acting Administrator Dwight Ink. The piece's public unpopularity is not shared, or at least not publicly echoed, in the art world, where Tilted Arc has become an inflammatory issue that may greatly affect the future of public sculpture in America. Or so the defense insists.

If 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 are the strangling weeds on the ruins of the idea of public art. No wonder most city dwellers today think of public sculpture as just one more semivisible addition to an already cluttered environment, and would rather have a nice tub of petunias.

The GSA 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, D.C., the most intensely moving war memorial in America, is basically a spin-off from Serra's land sculptures.

In 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 in 2001, bestowing consciousness on oblivious apes.

The 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 is.

Well, yes. It also happens that the world is full of formerly "site- specific" art, from the Elgin Marbles and the horses of San Marco to any number of detached 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.

This, surely, is the crux of the matter. The 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 its future commissions, if it can draft one that holds water. That way a perfect level of mediocrity can be upheld for all time. But Tilted Arc should stay, if not as a source of general pleasure, then as a didactic monument to the follies that can arise at the juncture of undemanding patronage and truculent aestheticism.