Valentina Ravaglia

The politics of Tilted Arc

The battle behind the destruction of Serra's commission for New York's Federal Plaza and its critical legacy

I agree with the judge that the court is overrun with rats, but they were not attracted by Tilted Arc. They are of the two-legged variety. - Richard Serra, Art in America 77, n 5, May 1989i

In 1989, after years of heated arguments and public hearings, Richard Serras sitespecific sculpture Tilted Arc was dismantled from New Yorks Federal Plaza on request of the United States General Services Administration (GSA). This 120-foot long hot-rolled steel sculpture had been commissioned by the GSA in 1979, in the frame of the Art-inArchitecture Program, enforcement of a federal policy destining the 0.5% of the cost of a federal building to commissioning art for its embellishment. Even though the quality and the relevance of the works produced under so-called percent-for-art legislationsii tended to be subordinated to functional considerations, the National Endowment for the Arts had managed to administer the Art-in-Architecture Program in a relatively enlightened way, commissioning works through panels of art professionals whose guidelines were to favour American artists of recognized historical relevance, allowing them to work in a close dialogue with the sites' architects. The Program had previously commissioned artists such as Oldenburg, Segal, Stella and Calder to create works on federal sites throughout the States, which all managed to earn the approval both of art critics and of an initially reticent public. But the importance of Tilted Arc, the one work in this series to leave the most indelible mark in art history, is ironically rather due to the controversial events that led to its destruction - a paradigmatic example of the problematic relationship between so-called 'public art' and spatial politics. The troubles started when one of the workers located on the Plaza, Chief Judge Edward D. Re of the Court of International Trade, sent the GSA a letter of complaint while the scuplture, referred to as the rusted steel barrier in front of our courthouseiii, was still 1

officially under construction. Boosted by an article published on the New York Times, in which art critic Grace Glueck had defined Serras piece an awkward, bullying piece that may conceivably be the ugliest outdoor work of art in the cityiv, Judge Re wrote:
[...] I will not comment on the declared purposes of the artist, except to state that the barrier indeed alters and dislocates the decorative functions of the plaza.v The 120-foot wall effectively destroys not only the beauty and spaciousness, but also the utility of the plaza, which has been used for ceremonies. All the comments I have heard unanimously condemn this architectural barrier, not only for its stark ugliness, but also because of the taxpayers dollars that were spent we have heard estimates up to $200,000. This waste of funds seems particularly improper during a national movement toward reduced government spending. [...]vi

After this letter was sent, not much happened in the debate around Tilted Arc for the following three years. Then, in 1984, Judge Re stroke again with an even more indignant letter, this time armed with the support of petitions signed by allegedly over thirteen hundred federal employees [...] demanding its removalvii. New evidence is presented to prove his initial points, and after quoting a series of dismissive newspaper articles, he goes on to accuse Titled Arc of being a threat not only to the structural integrity of the plaza itself but, more importantly, to the health and safety of its dwellers. Res arguments reach here paranoid levels when blaming Tilted Arc of being solely responsible for rats infestations in the courthouse:
[...] one cannot overlook the damaging effects on the masonry in the plaza, the cost of removing graffiti, and the litter and waste which accumulate in the well dug to support this structure. We have never experienced a rodent problem of the present enormity in this area. Exterminators are called regularly, at considerable expense, to rid our courthouse of this hazard. [...]viii

One could have easily countered Judge Res arguments by stressing their triviality, as they could generically apply to a considerable number of permanent public sculptures (for example, the remarks on the maintenance expenses and the structural consequences on the installation siteix). Judge Re found instead a sympathetic ally in William Diamond, the new regional administrator for the GSA, appointed as a result of the recent Republican turnover following Reagans electoral victory. Diamond decided to embrace Judge Res 2

crusade in what can be interpreted as a political manoeuvre in the form of a smear campaign, addressing Tilted Arc as the the arrogant product of a bad administration, the embodiment of the Democratic Partys cultural policies, to counter with typically conservative populist and anti-intellectual argumentsx. At this purpose, Diamond called for a public hearing, in which anyone was invited to testify in favour or against the relocation of Tilted Arc. Due to the site-specific nature of the sculpture, this would have inevitably meant its destruction, as Serra repeatedly argued in defence of the integrity of his work. Serra had considered the viewers motion around the structure as an integral part of Tilted Arc, designed in relation to the austere International Style architecture of the office building, to the circular fountain nearby and to the curved pattern animating the stone pavement; more importantly, his interest in site-specificity was accompanied by a critique of art as commodity, as a form of resistance to consumer culture and to the most cynical aspects of the art market. In any case, the issue of the sculpture's fate was beside the point in Diamonds campaign. Diamond insisted on using the term relocation to dismiss the artists claims on the ontology of the work, as his idea was to instrumentalise the perceived elitism and inaccessibility of the commissioned work by raising questions on its value as a piece of public art. In the text of the petition he circulated in the Federal Building before the hearing, Diamond applied this tactic in a rather disingenuous way: We the undersigned feel the artwork called Tilted Arc is an obstruction to the plaza and should be removed to a more suitable location. (The individuals whose names are listed with an asterisk find no artistic merit in the Serra artwork.)xi According to Serra,
[...] in order to avoid the accusations of censoring a work of art, [Diamond] personally refrained from commenting on the aesthetic value of Tilted Arc, both in his statements to the press and in his letters of appeal for participation in the hearing. Instead, he concentrated on the destructive effects he claimed the sculpture was having on social functions in the plaza. But his second tactic, the campaign he waged within the Federal Building, was quite different in content. [...] Diamond was successful in inciting what amounted to a hate campaign against Tilted Arc and in urging federal employees to condemn the aesthetics of the sculpture.xii

Moreover, Diamond had started contacting institutions that could be suitable to receive the displaced sculpture way before the hearings took placexiii. All this appears even more significant considering that Diamond had appointed himself chairman of the hearing. 3

Even Donald Thalacker, the head of the Art-in-Architecture Program, noticed and repeatedly reported Diamonds manipulative and heavily biased handling of the case, before, during and after the hearingsxiv. The public hearings were scheduled for the 6th of March 1986, but had to be extended for two more days due to a tremendous response. Many figures from the New York art world participated to actively defend Serras case, including Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Claes Oldenburg, Coosje Van Bruggen, Louise Bourgeois, Keith Haring, Joan Jonas, Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, George Segal, Leo Castelli, Philip Glass and Annette Michelsonxv. The opponents, on the other hand, were mainly local residents and workers from the Federal Plaza. The result was unexpectedly in favour of keeping Tilted Arc in its place, and by a vast majority: of the 180 people who intervened, only 58 spoke in favour of its relocation. But Diamond was adamant on representing the interest of a silent majority that had failed to show up and speak out when it was given the opportunity to do so. Diamond spoke as the representative of an implied, abstract mass of opinions, modelled on and justified by Judge Res complaint letters; the only proof that the GSA could put forward to support his case were the signatures collected during the hearings: 3791 for relocation and 3763 against relocation. Diamond, aware that such numerical evidence could eventually be used to prove the weakness of his argument, never mentioned these figures in his following interventions other than as an undifferentiated sum of contrasting opinions.xvi What he rather did was call for a further vote, by personally appointing a panel of five containing himself and two of his staff membersxvii. The predictable verdict was that the sculpture be relocated, by a majority of four to one votesxviii. Following the vast media response to this dispute, which had in the meantime become an instant case clbre, in 1987 the American Council for the Arts published a collection of related documents, newspaper articles and testimonials from the hearings, together with a juridical analysis of the arguments presented by the GSA and by Serra. Despite the effort to present a neutral viewpoint, Public Art, Public Controversy: The Tilted Arc on Trial ambiguously stands in defence of a generic democratic right, motivated by the idea of publicness supposedly behind a work of art commissioned by a Federal body for a communal space. Nevertheless, the supporting essays underline the paradoxes at play in the American cultural context, where concepts of democracy and res publica are traditionally subordinated to individualist rhetorics and to the absolute sovereignty of private property. 4

[...] While in the most basic sense, public art is created for the public, that public does not necessarily commission it or own it. Like the collections of museums and public galleries, public art is chosen or commissioned by a trust acting for the public. Indeed, such trusts share a common history with the corporations such as Standard Oil, that were instituted about the time of the Civil War to take action for the good of the public.xix

Significantly equating representative democracy with corporate trusts (inasmuch the United States Congress can be defined as a trust acting for the public), the author - art critic Dale McConathy - goes on to explain how an artist's moral right to have their say on the ultimate fate of their work, a conquest of liberal legislations originated by the French Revolution, have no value in English common law as it came to be applied in the United Statesxx:
Common law says if you own it, your possession is absolute. Civil law says that you own it, but with certain understandings. Protection for an artist under Common law is weak, if existing at all.xxi Thus, for reasons stemming from this common law, Richard Serra chose not to pursue the question of freedom of expression since his work fell into the not yet legally defined area of public art: commissioned by a governmental quasi-trust, acting for the public good. Rather, Serra sought redress for the violation of his contract, since under current American law, he had no right to appeal the removal or destruction of his piece.xxii

Thus, while stressing its will to respect the interest of the people by restoring the public use of the plazaxxiii, the GSA appealed to its rights as owner of a private property over the moral rights of the artist and over his freedom of expression as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Public Art, Public Controversy eventually denounces Diamonds mishandling of the case, as well as the lack of clarity and the unconstitutional potential of moral rights regulations in the United States, although its main thesis is fundamentally dictated by a demagogic approach to public art commissions. After the publication of Public Art, Public Controversy, Serra took the GSA to court claiming breach of the contract and violations of the First and Fifth Amendments, and had to appeal after all his claims were dismissed by the US District Court. Ironically, the arguments presented in Public Art, Public Controversy were mirrored by those of the Court of Appeals. 5

In a remarkable (and unabashedly authoritarian) rebuttal, the government summarized its opinion as follows: As a threshold matter, Serra sold his speech to the government. [...] As such, his speech became goverment property in 1981, when he received full payment for his work. [...] An owners [p]roperty rights in a physical thing have been described as as the rights to possess, use and dispose of it.xxiv This [...] means that if the government owns the book, it can burn it; if the government has bought your speech, it can mutilate, modify, censor, or even destroy it. [...] If I had known that the government would claim Tilted Arc as its own speech and destroy it, I would never have accepted the deal. Tilted Arc was never intended to nor did it speak for the United States Government.xxv

Eventually Serra had to surrender. On the night between the 14th and the 15th of March 1989, Tilted Arc was finally dismantled. Diamonds comment after the event, reported by the New York Post on the 17th of March, was halfway between the biblical and the Peronian: This is a day for the people to rejoice, because now the plaza returns rightfully to the people. Probably as a reaction to the publication of Public Art, Public Controversy, in 1991 Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk edited a new collection of materials related to the Tilted Arc case, this time shifting the point of view resolutely on Serras side. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents includes a comprehensive selection of correspondence, transcripts of hearings, reports and legal documentation, as well as a series of laconic black and white images of the plaza before, during and after the destruction of Tilted Arc. In the final set of photos a large round planter with benches sits in its place, almost as a symbol of the neutralization of all sensorial experiences of the plaza: an artificial bit of nature confined in a vase and an invitation to stasis and quiet. People dont want to engage with confrontational artworks. People would rather sit down and eat their packed lunch. The book opens with a passionate introduction/invective by Serra, expressing his motivations, his aesthetic and political standpoint on the destroyed piece and his condemnation of the methods employed to deal with the case by the institutional bodies involved, the justice system and especially Will Diamond and Dwight Ink. His main points relate to the site-specific nature of his work and to the critical position represented by it:

[...] The governmental decree to remove and thereby destroy Tilted Arc is the direct outcome of a cynical Republican cultural policy that supports art only as a commodity. Relocation would, in fact, transform Tilted Arc into an exchange commodity in that it would annihilate the site-specific aspect of the work. Tilted Arc would become exactly what it was intended not to be: a mobile, marketable product.xxvi

And further down:

[...] Site-specific works invariably manifest a judgment about the larger social and political context of which they are a part. [...] Unlike modernist works that give the illusion of being autonomous from their surroundings, and which function critically only in relation to the language of their own medium, site specific works emphasize the comparison between two separate languages and can therefore use the language of one to criticize the language of the other. [...] Works that are built within the contextual frame of governmental, corporate, educational and religious institutions run the risk of being read as tokens of those institutions. [...] there is no neutral site. Every context has its frame and its ideological overtones. It is a matter of degree. But there are sites where it is obvious that an artwork is being subordinated to / accomodated to / adapted to / subservient to / useful to... In such cases it is necessary to work in opposition to the constraints of the context, so that the work cannot be read as an affirmation of questionable ideologies and political power. I am not interested in art as affirmation or complicity.xxvii

Serras idea of the social function of art could be problematised, to an extent, by rereading it through Jacques Rancires formulation of the 'aesthetic regime of the arts'. For the French philosopher, the role of art in the public sphere in the widest possible sense rather than as outdoor artworks in public spaces - is that of merging with daily life and creating its own ethos by reconfiguring the 'distribution of the sensible' (partage du sensible), or the way life itself can be experienced. Rancire proposes to call this property of the aesthetic regime its metapolitics, that is, its way of producing its own politics, proposing to politics rearrangement of its space, reconfiguring art as a political issue, or asserting itself as true politics.xxviii His theory should not be read as a praise of explicitly political content in art; on the contrary, it allows for a complete integration of aesthetics and politics/ethics by transcending the categories of autonomy and engagement, and is in many ways closer to Schiller's aesthetic theories than it is to Marx's. Rancire's terminology won't be used in this text to invest Serra's work of any unintended political aim

or content; rather, it is one way of thinking through the mechanisms of perception that his public sculptures can generate. Serras intention, as he himself wrote, was to work in opposition to the constraints of the context, so that the work cannot be read as an affirmation of questionable ideologies and political powerxxix; that is, to make sculptures that function as an implicit critique of their context - in this case, an active disturbance of the Plaza's spatial politics and of its symbolic authority by its very ontology and material presence. The use of an industrial material such as hot-rolled steel, for example, is a first, basic way of crossing the traditional boundaries set by the 'representational regime of art' brought about by modernism, a characteristic that Rancire interprets as a sign of a historical movement towards the affirmation of the aesthetic regime of art. The (re)convergence of visual art per se with design, architecture, crafts and so on is also a symptom of this change, where Tilted Arc transcends established norms defining a specific, autonomous field of plastic techn. Placing of a massive curved sheet of rusty-looking steel in a space like that of the Federal Plaza introduces an element of disruption in the aseptic aspect of this governmental hub, the impenetrable embodiment of the bureaucratic structures it contains. In fact, the piece was created to establish a dialogue with its surroundings and turn the whole experience of ones presence and motion in space into an ever-changing, enveloping aesthetic experience, actually affecting ones perception sensorial and intellectual - of the surrounding environment. The fact that a number of federal employees (allegedly) perceived their daily encounters with the sculpture as a disturbance in their daily routine only proves the work successful in the artists original intentions. Aside from the direct effect Tilted Arc could have had on federal workers, local residents and passers by, its role in the constitution of this new collective ethos can be considered to still resonate as of now, as the case behind its destruction is still topical today. The debates on the relevance and the possibilities of art in the public realm are kept alive by curatorial projects such as the Skulpture Projekte Mnster, as well as by the hype surrounding the Fourth Plinth commissions in Trafalgar Square (or, more in general, any new commission for contemporary artworks in publicly accessible spaces). In the last twenty years, a rich literature on new types of public art and their relationships with spatial politics has been produced, which clearly bears the scars of the eradicated Tilted Arc; one example above all is Evictions. Art and Spatial Politics by Rosalyn Deutsche (1996), a true 8

benchmark text on the subject which contains an intelligent analysis of the Tilted Arc case and a critique of The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents. On the other hand, Serras relationship with the public of his public commission is problematic to say the least, and partly negates his own claims about his work's potential as a form of dissent. As he declared in his statement for the 1985 public hearings:
It has also been suggested that the public did not choose to install the work in the first place. In fact, the choice of artist, approval of the sculpture, and decision to install it permanently in the plaza were made by a public entity, the GSA. Its determination proceeded on the basis of national standards, carefully formulated procedures, and a jury system to ensure impartiality and the selection of art of lasting value. The selection was therefore made by, and on behalf of, the public. The question, then, is whether this public decision can be reversed by this hearing after the fact.xxx

The fact that the results of the hearings were manipulated and instrumentalised for political purposes would be enough to prove Serras syllogism wrong. It is actually rather incongruent that Serra, while expressing disappointment and lack of trust in the institutions, should mention the principle of representative democracy to dismiss the public hearings a priori. Drawing once again from Rancire's philosophical lexicon, this kind of intellectual elitism and paternalistic approach towards the so-called general public falls into the 'explicative order', that particular aspect of the distribution of the sensible aimed at constantly reiterating the distance between the 'master' and the 'ignorant', or between the institutional figure of the 'qualified expert' and the layman. Rancire also calls this the 'principle of enforced stultification', a constant reinstatement of the need for interpretation the vulgus allegedly cant generate on its own: The child who is explained to will devote his intelligence to the work of grieving: to understanding, that is to say, to understanding that he doesnt understand unless he is explained to.xxxi Moreover, representative democracy is the same principle that allowed the GSA to ignore Serras appeals and impose the destruction of Tilted Arc by alternatively appealing to public and private interests and exploiting or ignoring the voice of the people at its convenience. As Rancire explains in Hatred of Democracy,
[...] In the first place, [...] domination works through the distinction of the public, which belongs to everyone, and the private, where the liberties of all prevail. These liberties

each person has are the liberties, that is the domination, of those who possess the immanent powers of society. It is the empire of the law of the accumulation of wealth. In the second place, the public sphere allegedly purified of all private interests is also a privatized, limited public sphere, one reserved for the institutions and the monopoly of those who work them to their advantage. These two spheres are only separated in principle the better to be united under oligarchic law.xxxii

In a way, both Serra and Judge Re were fighting for emancipation their own way, and both were fundamentally betrayed, although in different manners, by the bodies that were supposed to represent their interests, both as private and as public citizens. The Tilted Arc case remains to this day an exemplum of the paradoxes inevitably embedded in permanent commissions for public spaces. Meanwhile, in the last thirty years, the very nature of public sculpture has undergone a radical, long overdue shift to embrace dematerialisation, entropy and impermanence trends which had already been at play for decades in western post-war art in what Rosalind Krauss had defined sculpture in the expanded fieldxxxiii. Site-specific art is hardly immune to this descent of monumental sculpture into obsolescence, especially when its presence in space feels no less authoritarian than a stolid equestrian statues. The best of these interventions, though, manage to affect the viewers spatial awareness and trigger more or less subtle experiential side effects, which in the contemporary cityscape can easily translate into issues of social identity. It is another aspect they share with urban furnishing and crowd control barriers, enforcing a form of authority that is a psychological as much as a physical stumbling block.

Bibliography
Balfe, Judith H., McConathy, Dale et al. (eds.), Public Art, Public Controversy: The Tilted Arc on Trial, New York: ACA Books, 1987 Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987 [orig. La distinction: critique sociale du jugement, 1979] Bourdieu, Pierre, Political Interventions. Social Science and Political Action, London / New York: Verso, 2008 [orig. Interventions, 1961-2001. Science Sociale & Action Politique, 2002]

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Deutsche, Rosalyn, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Chicago, IL: Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996 Franzen, Brigitte, Knig, Kaspar and Plath, Carina (eds.), Sculpture Projects Muenster 07, Kln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Knig, 2007 [orig. Skulptur Projekte Mnster 07, 2007] Rancire, Jacques, Disagreement, Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999 [orig. La Msentente : Politique et Philosophie, 1995] Rancire, Jacques, Hatred of Democracy, London-New York: Verso, 2006 [orig. La Haine de la Dmocratie, 2005] Rancire, Jacques, The Aesthetic Revolution, New Left Review, no. 14, Mar.-Apr. 2002, pp. 133151. Rancire, Jacques, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991 [orig. Le matre ignorant : Cinq leons sur l'mancipation intellectuelle, 1987] Rancire, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, New York -London: Continuum, 2004 [orig. Le Partage du sensible: Esthetique et politique, 2000] Weyergraf-Serra, Clara and Buskirk, Martha (eds.), The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, Cambridge, MA / London: The MIT Press, 1991

11

P. 36. Republished as the introduction to C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, 1991. ii The original Percent for Art Program (Kunst am Bau) was conceived in Weimar Republic Germany in the 1920s and first enforced in 1934, then revived by the West Germany government in the 1950s and later spread to other western countries. For a short history of Percent For Art Programs, see B. Franzen, K. Knig, C. Plath (eds.), Sculpture Projects Muenster 07, 2007, pp. 412-413. iii Letter from Edward D. Re to Gerald P. Carmen, August 18, 1981, in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 26. iv Grace Glueck, An Outdoor-Sculpture Safari Around New York, New York Times, August 7, 1981, p. C20. v Presumably words that Serra or a spokesperson for the GSA had used, although the source is not referenced in the letter as published in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 26. vi Letter from Edward D. Re to Gerald P. Carmen, August 18, 1981, in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 26. vii Letter from Edward D. Re to Ray Kline, November 5, 1984, in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 27. These initial petitions are never nominated again or considered as evidence by the GSA. viii Ibid. ix Serra also argued against the accusations of preventing the use of the plaza to hold public cultural events that in the plazas seventeen years of existence prior to the installation of Tilted Arc, there were fewer than twenty such events. R. Serra, Introduction to C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit, p.8. In his statement given during the 1985 public hearings he declared: It is bogus and false to say that the social function of the plaza is destroyed [...]. Also, the experience of art is in itself a social function. It is curious to me that people who are so concerned with function cant even put water in their fountain. In C. WeyergrafSerra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit, p.66. x See Serras Introduction to C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., pp. 5-6 and R. Deutsche, Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy in Evictions. Art and Spatial Politics, 1996, pp. 257-268, especially 264ff. xi Text of Petition (Labeled For Relocation) Distributed in the Federal Building Before the Hearing, in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 48. xii R. Serra, Introduction to C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 7. xiii A statement by Diamond published on the Times on 3 February 1985, therefore reflecting his ideas at the moment of the pre-hearing campaign, says: Mistakes can be made in the placement of art. At the time the impact on the site wasnt really understood. Quoted in Serras Introduction to C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 6. xiv See Memo from Donald W. Thalacker to Dwight Ink, May 9, 1985, in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 154: [...] there is a widespread perception that the official GSA-sanctioned actions affecting the prehearing activities, the hearings themselves, and the posthearing activities have been manipulated. Italics in the original text. xv A complete list is in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., pp. 59-62. xvi Cfr. Serras Introduction to C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 9, against the documents included in Part III Correspondence and Documents Subsequent to the Public Hearing, in ibid., pp. 131190, and especially against the Letter from William Diamond to Dwight Ink, May 1, 1985, p. 143. xvii R. Serra, Introduction to C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 7 and n15, pp. 273-274. xviii Letter from William Diamond to Dwight Ink, April 10, 1985, in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 136. xix D. McConathy in J. Balfe, D. McConathy et al. (eds.), Public Art, Public Controversy: The Tilted Arc on Trial, 1987, p. 13. xx Ibid. xxi E. Yassky, A Comparison of the definition of Property as Legal Precedents for Legislation Protecting Works of Art in France and in the United States, 1986 (unpublished dissertation), quoted by D. McConathy in J. Balfe, D. McConathy et al. (eds.), op. cit., p. 14. xxii D. McConathy in J. Balfe, D. McConathy et al. (eds.), op. cit., p. 14. xxiii For example, see Letter from William J. Diamond to Announce the Public Hearings Concerning Tilted Arc, in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 45. xxiv Brief Filed by the Defendants, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, January 26, 1988, in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p. 240 and quoted by Serra in the Introduction, p. 14. xxv R. Serra, Introduction to C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., pp. 14-15. xxvi Ibid., p. 5. xxvii Ibid., pp. 12-13. xxviii Ibid., p. 137. xxix See our p. 12 and n30. xxx R. Serras statement in C. Weyergraf-Serra and M. Buskirk (eds.), op. cit., p.68. xxxi J. Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 1991 (orig. 1987), p.8.
i

xxxii xxxiii

J. Rancire, Hatred of Democracy, 2006 (orig. 2005), p. 57. R. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field, first published in October, spring 1979.