To Remove the Work Is to Destroy the Work

The General Services Administration, which manages federal buildings in the United States, commissioned Richard Serra to make a sculpture for Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, outside a government office tower. The money came from the agency's Art in Architecture programme, which sets aside half of one per cent of a new building's construction cost for art. Serra's fee was $175,000.

What he installed in 1981 was Tilted Arc: a single plate of Cor-Ten steel, 120 feet long, 12 feet high and two and a half inches thick, curving across the plaza and leaning slightly. Cor-Ten forms a rust-coloured skin on purpose. The wall cut the plaza in two, and anybody crossing from the building to the street had to walk round it.

That was the point. The sculpture was site-specific: made for that place and about it, about how bodies move through an open space, how a curve compresses and releases the view, how a public square is used. In Serra's account the plaza was part of the material.

Within a couple of months, around thirteen hundred people who worked in and around the plaza had signed a petition asking for it to go. The complaints were practical as well as aesthetic: it blocked the route, it attracted graffiti and rats, it spoiled the lunch hour, it looked like a rusting wall.

In March 1985 the agency held a public hearing, chaired by its regional administrator, William Diamond, who had set the process in motion. A hundred and twenty-two people testified for keeping the sculpture and fifty-eight for removing it. Many of those speaking for it were artists, critics and curators; many of those speaking against were people who used the plaza every day. The five-member panel voted four to one to relocate it.

Serra's answer was a sentence that has been quoted ever since: to remove the work is to destroy the work. It was a site-specific piece, and the same steel standing anywhere else would not be the same sculpture.

He sued, arguing breach of contract and his right to free expression, and lost. The appeals court held in 1988 that the sculpture belonged to the government and that removing it did not violate his freedom of speech. On the night of 15 March 1989 federal workers dismantled it and took it away. It has not been shown since, in keeping with the artist's view that it existed only in that place.

The case is usually told as a fable with an obvious moral, and the trouble is that there are two fables and people pick the one they already believe. In one, a philistine bureaucracy destroyed a major work because office workers did not like it. In the other, an arrogant artist and an expert panel imposed a wall on people who had to live with it, and the people won.

Both leave something out.

Serra was right about the object. If a work is about its site, moving it is not relocation. The suggestion that it could simply be put somewhere else misunderstood what kind of thing it was.

But being right about the object settles nothing about consent. The people who crossed the plaza every day had not chosen the work, had not been consulted, and were the ones whose daily route it was designed to change. A museum visitor who dislikes a sculpture can walk into the next room. An office worker cannot walk into the next plaza. Public art is a contract with an audience that never signed it, and the more ambitious the work, the more it asks of people who did not agree to anything.

Congress passed the Visual Artists Rights Act in 1990, giving American artists some protection against the destruction or mutilation of their work. Courts have since been reluctant to read it as protecting a work's location, so the precise question Tilted Arc raised has been left roughly where the hearing left it.

What the hearing could not know is what people would think in twenty years. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, chosen in 1981 from 1,421 entries to an open competition, was attacked as a black gash in the ground, and the opposition was strong enough that a conventional bronze of three soldiers was added nearby in 1984. It is now one of the most visited memorials in the country. Tilted Arc might have gone the same way, or it might not.

So the real decision in 1985 was not about whether the sculpture was good. It was about who should bear the cost of waiting to find out: the artist, whose work would be destroyed, or the people who would have to walk round it every day while history made up its mind.