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.