Tilted Arc was a controversial public art installation by Richard Serra, displayed in Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan from 1981 to 1989. It consisted of a 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high solid, unfinished plate of rust-covered COR-TEN steel. Advocates characterized it as an important work by a well-known artist that transformed the space and advanced the concept of sculpture, whereas critics focused on its perceived ugliness and saw it as ruining the site. Following an acrimonious public debate, the sculpture was removed in 1989 as the result of a federal lawsuit and has never been publicly displayed since, in accordance with the artist's wishes.
Commissioning and design
In 1979, the United States General Services Administration's Art-in-Architecture program decided to commission a work of public art to grace the open space in front of a planned addition to the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Manhattan, New York City.
Taking the recommendation of a National Endowment for the Arts panel of art experts, the U.S. General Services Administration administrator gave the commission to sculptor Richard Serra, a fine-arts graduate of Yale University who at age 40 was one of the leading minimalist sculptors. The contract for the commission required Serra to give the work to GSA, making it property of the United States.
The post-minimalist artwork was designed and constructed in 1981. Exemplifying Serra's minimalist, conceptual style, Tilted Arc was a solid, unfinished plate of COR-TEN steel, long, tall, and thick. As its name suggests, it was slightly tilted.
Placed in the Federal Plaza, the work bisected the space, blocking views and paths of those who frequented the plaza. Serra said of the design, "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 steel is self-oxidizing and is designed to develop a natural rusted appearance over time.
For Serra, an important part of the work's meaning was that it would interact with the commuter passing through the plaza, a location usually passed through quickly on the way to somewhere else. This would subsequently become important as the basis for Serra's designation of the work as site-specific.
Reactions
Commissioned in 1979, Tilted Arc immediately attracted intense negative feedback, prominently from Chief Judge Edward D. Re, as well as fierce defenders. Those who worked in the area found the sculpture extremely disruptive to their daily routines, and within months the work had driven over 1300 government employees in the greater metro area to sign a petition for its removal. Serra, however, wrote, "It is a site-specific work and as such is not to be relocated. To remove the work is to destroy the work."
Serra's side argued that Tilted Arc was designed to be counterintuitive, to "redefine" the space in which it existed, and that due to this intimate relationship between the location and the meaning of the work, it could not exist as a piece of humane art unless it remained in that exact location within the Foley Plaza. Therefore, it was said that by removing the physical steel sculpture, the government would destroy the broader work, regardless of its physical existence.
Opponents countered that, because the sculpture forced the site to function as an extension of the sculpture, it was in effect "holding the site hostage." Calvin Tomkins, an art critic for The New Yorker magazine, was quoted saying, "I think it is perfectly legitimate to question whether public spaces and public funds are the right context for work that appeals to so few people – no matter how far it advances the concept of sculpture." Sociologist Nathan Glazer, writing in The Public Interest, declared that Serra was “attacking the awful by increasing the awfulness. To the misery of working in an ugly and poorly designed building, it was Serra’s thought to add additional misery in the form of a sculpture that was ugly to most people… that obstructed the plaza, that offered no space to sit on, that blocked sun and view, and made the plaza unusable even for those moments of freedom when the weather permitted office workers to eat their lunch outside.” The Storefront for Art and Architecture invited prominent NYC artists and architects to envision the future plaza as a protest in "After Tilted Arc".