Serra’s Indiscipline: Neutralization and the Site of Tilted Arc

When sculpture affects flows in space as a function of its siting, viewers are potentially dis-placed in the experience of the sculptural object inasmuch as the typically invisible framing of space emerges into vision. Lefebvre’s theorization of abstract space, which underpins this idea, is applicable to public arts as a critical tool, enabling us to demonstrate how art may be either neutralized within disciplinary enclosures or brought into active service of state-sponsored ideological agendas. The specific applications in this study concern Richard Serra’s large-scale public sculpture, with particular emphasis on the Tilted Arc controversy of the 1980s. The discourse surrounding Serra’s sculpture was especially complex, demonstrating both the techniques of disciplinary control and the left’s willingness to operate within the very space of neutralization bounded by that discipline. Beginning with a theoretical discussion of how space is produced, consumed, and neutralized in the context of public art, this study investigates first of all the pathways by which minimalism brought institutional frames into vision, and subsequently how this framing process was further developed into the notion of site. From this point, site is explored vis-à-vis disciplinary enclosures in order to explain the failure and success of Tilted Arc in pointing up the ideological manipulation of space, specifically the space circumscribed by the Federal Plaza where the sculpture once stood. The disappearance of Tilted Arc, then, is understood to be coincident with its incompatibility with disciplinary formations, which though ambiguous in the context of the overall process by which it became immaterial, nonetheless contested the surveillance-based disciplinary formation it once fronted by bringing into view, into vision its very objectification and disintegration by the disciplinary gaze.