Public Things in the Modern City: Belated Notes on "Tilted Arc" and

Transcription

Public Things in the Modern City: Belated Notes on "Tilted Arc" and the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial
Author(s): D. S. Friedman
Source: Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 49, No. 2 (Nov., 1995), pp. 62-78
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools of
Architecture, Inc.
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PublicThingsin theModernCity:
Memorial
BelatedNoteson TiltedArc
andtheVietnamVeterans
D.S. FRIEDMAN,Universityof Cincinnati
Sitelessnessandloss of place suggestthe instabilityof boundariesthatotherwisesustainthe legSuchconditions
ibilityof publicinstitutions.
affinitiesbetweenarchitecnegateconventional
ture,ceremonialurbanspace, monuments,and
monumental
sculpture.Nowadays,the theoretical
betweenthese actorsis in
basisfor a relationship
flux.Thisarticletakes up severaldifferentcontemporaryconceptionsof publicspace andthe
publicthingandemploysthemin an interpretationof tworecentprojects:MayaLin'sVietnam
andRichardSerra'sill-fated
VeteransMemorial
TiltedArc.Theseprojectsembodychangingconditionsin the dialoguebetweenart,architecture,
andthe city.
dividual and independent self-expression
about public art than Rosalind Krauss's"ex- with "the community, the social order,
panded field."' In 1979, Krauss modified a [and] self-negation."' My aim here is to use
Klein Group diagram to extend binary cat- Krauss's "little motor of double negatives'"6
egories of art practice beyond canonic sculp- to further agitate this contradiction.
In respect of public art, this article
ture (Figure 1).2 The Klein Group is a
three schematic accounts of publicexercises
that
Krauss
describes
simple-looking square
as a kind of structuralistcartography, "away ity, roughly following Seyla Benhabib.7 The
of picturing the whole of a cultural universe first draws from Hannah Arendt's analysis
of "the social occlusion of the political,"
in the grip of two opposing choices."3
which
renders public space on the basis of
sets
Klein
Krauss's variation on the
Group
that
out discrete, artistic objects
transgress agonistic and associational distinctions;
conventional sculptural production: Out Arendt situates public experience in a "space
and away from sculpture,the starting point of appearance": being and acting in open
"
in
the
rooted
in
absence
Only
ofplace.
"Being
in her "logically expanded [quaternary] view of strangers and acting "together in
this way ... is itpossible "tograsp, like all the field," she
arrayslandscape,architecture,not- concert.8 The second account draws from
saints, what is length, breadth, height and
landscape, not-architecture,site-construction, Jiirgen Habermas's critical theory, which
is
what
absence
The
ofplace therefore
depth."
axiomatic structures, and marked sites.4To renders the public world as a discursive
all
in
us
to
allows
"space
'"grasp
paradoxically
the margins of Krauss's diagram this article "sphere," neither spatial nor agonistic, but
its extensions,to captureits specific "reality."It
brings two controversial public works: communicative and democratic, arising out
is necessary,then, to removefrom the '"lace"
of participation and practice: reasoned,
Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial
that which rendersit such....
and Richard Serra's Tilted Arc. These two open, plural discourse. The third account of
The "de-situated"-and
therefore projects demonstrate what attorney Barbara public experience is more tenuous; it follows
atopic-space is not boundless, however. It Hoffman calls the paradox of public art, the attempts to locate the frontier of the public
contains the limit in itself which no longer
way in which public art couples fiercely in- in the subjective interior. This account,
passes to its exterior,like a line ofdefense, but
to its interior.In this sense "atopic"is the truth
site-construction
theorized by Florenskijas the space that comprises everythingthat can erase it....
The modern city has no confines but is
...........
architecture
...........complex
traversedby a plurality of limits. The modern
landscape~
because
is
an
which,
precisely
atopic space
city
of its bewildering character, has always been
00
perceivedas a labyrinthine space. TheItalian
\
structures
axiomatic
Smarked
sites
because
cities
celebrated
structures
precisely
sculptureaxiomatic
poet Leopardi
markedsites
\
a thousand limits break up the habitual view,
thegaze ofreason which orderseverythinginto
hierarchiesand categories.One is thusforced
toproceed beyondtheselimits with the imagi0,
neuter
-4
not-architecture
not-landscape
nation.
Franco Rella
/
\
WHAT BETTER PLACE TO OPEN A QUESTION
.
.....................
sculpture
Journal ofArchitectural Education, pp. 62-78
? 1995 ACSA, Inc.
1. Rosalind Krauss's expanded field. (From Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic:Essays on
Postmodern Culture[Seattle: Bay Press, 19831, p. 38.)
November1995 JAE49/2
62
which proceeds from phenomenological inquiry, indicates the psychological magnitude of the "public" body and the
unconscious transactions between self and
Other that comprise contemporary metropolitan life. Each of these accounts implies
a different relation between figure and
ground, which determines the contours of
the public object and affects the valuation of
public art.
and authoritative attempt to pair the two
works occurs in W.J.T. Mitchell's Art and
the Public Sphere, an anthology of essays
culled from the journal Critical Inquiry,
which Mitchell edits.1"Many of the essays in
Mitchell's anthology were originally written
for curator John Hallmark Neff's symposium, "Art and Public Spaces: Daring to
Dream," which he convened to address in
part "issues raised by [ TiltedArc and] by the
very different response now accorded the
once-controversial Vietnam Veterans Me"We know very well what sculpture is," morial.""5 Mitchell and Neff twin these
Rosalind Krauss says. It is a "historically projects as equally demonstrative construcbounded category" no longer characterized tions, one successful in overcoming its deby the "commemorative representation" of tractors despite its "cunning violation and
the classical monument.9 Released from its inversion of monumental conventions,"''6
the other "failed-failed as art and as art for
pedestal and the duties of commemoration,
sculpture crosses "the threshold of the logic a civic site."" Mitchell and Neff would
of the monument" and enters modern
probably agree that what couples the Vietkind of nam Veterans Memorial and Tilted Arc is
space, its "negative condition-a
sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute not form, but controversy. Other critics,
loss of place."'o The nomadism and au- however, speak directly to the question of
tonomy that developed in modern sculpture Lin's "minimalism" and to the influence of
in the sixties and seventies give rise to Serra and others on her design.'"Such comKrauss's "expanded field." Sculpture ceases parisons warrant a closer look.
to be a "positivity" and becomes instead
As artifacts, these two works would
"the category that result[s] from the addi- occupy different positions in Krauss's extion of the not-landscapeto the not-architec- panded field. Tilted Arc is not architecture,
ture"; sculpture, no longer privileged, is not landscape, not site-construction, not an
"only one term on the periphery of a field in axiomatic structure. It defies sculptural conwhich there are other, differently structured vention, yet by Krauss's definition (and
possibilities [that] can no longer be de- Serra's), it is not "modern" in the sense that
scribed as modernist."" Krausscredits Rob- it is not siteless. "Sculptures by Noguchi
ert Morris, Robert Smithson, Michael
and Calder ... have nothing to do with the
Heizer, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, contexts in which they're placed," Serra
Saul LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, and Richard states, echoing Krauss. "At best, they are
Serra with a "historical rupture and struc- studio made and site adjusted. They are distural transformation of the cultural field," placed, homeless, overblown objects that say
which she names "postmodern."'2
'We represent modern art.""' TiltedArc,
It is tempting to see the Vietnam Vet- like most of Serra's later work, is specific,
erans Memorial as a product of this rupture, though not deferential, to its site: "In my
part of the same brisure that yields Serra's work, I analyze the site and determine to
Tilted Arc." Not a few critics take such a redefine it in terms of sculpture, not in
position, but perhaps the most conspicuous terms of the existing physiognomy. I have
63
no need to augment existing contextual languages. I'm not interested in affirmation....
Sculpture ... has the potential to create its
own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the places and spaces where it is
created. I am interested in work where the
artist is a maker of 'anti-environment'
which takes its own place or makes its own
situation, or divides or declares its own
area."20Serra's comment is concentric with
Robert Morris's earlier declaration, in
"Notes on Sculpture," that "minimalism realizes 'the autonomous and literal nature of
sculpture . .. that it have its own equally literal space.'"21For Morris, minimalism provisionally resolves the apparent contradiction
between autonomy and specificity. As Hal
Foster observes, the "paradoxicality of this
argument" leads to a simultaneous contraction and expansion of sculpture: "Here a
new space of 'object/subject terms' opens
up; . . . It is a 'death of the author' (as
Roland Barthes would call it two years later)
that is at the same time a birth of the reader:
'The object is but one of the terms of the
newer aesthetic [Morris writes] .... One is
more aware than before that he himself is
establishing relationships as he apprehends
the object from various positions under
varying conditions of light and spatial context.' Here we are at the edge of 'sculpture
in the expanded field."22
Tilted Arc strikes Federal Plaza like a
slash or deletion, "effacing it even as it presents its legibility."23Serra'ssculpture is not
concerned merely with intensification of
perception, but with the critical transformation of the physical and institutional context of the site. This critique and the
material and formal properties of the work
are indissoluble, part of a single thought, a
dialectical opposition of memory and anticipation that "prevents 'good form,' [or] a
Gestalt image, or a pattern of identity from
taking over."24Serra'swork sublates Gestalt,
Friedman
not through figural or allegorical devices-"no work by Serra seeks to create a picture"25--but through the motor reality of
the subject, through the interruption and
displacement of the body's perceptual trajectories. This encounter is always transitive,
never static. The "paradoxicality"of Tilted
Arc consists in the way it presupposes a passerby, as Yve-Alain Bois notes: It ceaselessly
jolts the pedestrian who crosses its site,
ceaselesslyinterrupting his or her perception
of the whole. TiltedArc "has no full-stop."326
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is
also obviously neither siteless, autonomous,
nor homeless, although it is almost universally acknowledgedas "modern."Where does
it belong on Krauss'sdiagram?It marks the
site (as a form it depends on manipulated
contours); it is a site-construction; its structure is axiomatic (it is a fairlysimple, graniteclad, concrete
retaining wall); it
commemorates. It is embedded in its landscape. Its form is figural, narrative: "a Vshaped gash or scar, a trace of violence
suffered," as Mitchell sees it: "Does Vstand
for Vietnam? For a Pyrrhic 'Victory'?For the
Veterans themselves? For the Violence they
suffered?... Is it possible to avoid seeing it as
a quite literal antitype to the 'public sphere'
signified in the traditional phallic monument, that is, as the Vagina of Mother Earth
opened to receiveher sons, as if the American
soil were opening its legs to show the scars
inscribed on her private parts?"27In figure
and fact, Lin's memorial is a wall (the Wall,
for many Vietnam Veterans). It holds back
earth, it holds up names, writing on the
wall.28Its structure and form belong both to
architectureand landscape, although it oscillates between the two, tempting us to attach
Krauss'snegative prefix to our categorization.
However, the black granite cladding
of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a positive element, polished to a mirror finish; it
reflects light. TiltedArc, on the other hand,
has a dull, nonreflective, absorptive surface.
Unlike Lin's memorial, it has no utilitarian
or functional value: "Any use is a misuse,"
says Serra, who rejects monumentality:
"When we look at [my work], are we asked
to give any credence to the notion of a
monument? [These pieces] do not relate to
the history of monuments. They do not
memorialize anything. They relate to sculpture and nothing more. They do not cry out
to be called monuments. A steel curve is not
a monument."29Contrariwise, the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial is immersedin historical
references: to the Mall; to the war; to the
individuals who died in the war; to the
other monuments and figures of visitors it
reflects in its mirror finish; not least to its
self-conscious appropriation of "minimalist
syntax."0' TiltedArc, on the other hand, resists any sort of narrativeor representational
figuration. Like Rotary Arc, "its form remains ambiguous, indeterminable, unknowable as an entity";31 "all [Serra's]
work," Bois tells us, "is based on the destruction of notions of identity and causality."32 For Serra, history weakens lived
experience: "The weight of history . . dissolves weight and erodes meaning to a calculated construction of palpable lightness.
... It is the distinction between the prefabricated weight of history and direct experience which evokes in me the need to make
things that have not been made before. I
continually attempt to confront the contradictions of memory and to wipe the slate
clean, to rely on my own experience and my
own materials even if faced with a situation
which is beyond hope of achievement. To
invent methods about which I know nothing, to utilize the content of experience so
that it becomes known to me, to then challenge the authority of that experience and
thereby challenge myself."33
Although both projects are long,
black, abstract, and planar, the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial and Tilted Arc suggest
binary differences: figure, not-figure; wall,
not-wall; historical, not-historical; monument, not-monument. Lin's memorial operates on the surface of the mirror; Tilted
Arc operates on the tain.34
Yale undergraduate Maya Ying Lin submitted her third required project from a senior
studio on funerary architecture to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial design competition
and won, first out of 1,421 entries (Figure
2).35 Lin's design is indebted to the eighteenth-century French theorist and "revolutionary" architect Etienne-Louis Boullke
(1728-1799): "An idea, as new as it was
daring, came to me. . ... I would create
buildings that gave the illusion of being buried. ... As I considered the problem, I realized that only low and sunken lines would
be appropriate. After pondering on the rule
that the first element of architectureis a wall
totally bare and unadorned, I decided that
my sunken architecture would be exemplified in a building that was satisfactory as a
whole yet gave the appearancethat part of it
was below ground."'36 This excerpt, a passage from Boullke's treatise, Architecture,
essai sur l'art, was published beneath a
haunting ink and wash drawing in the 1968
exhibition catalog, Visionary Architects:
Boullde,Ledoux, Lequeu (Figure 3). The image typifies Boullee's architecturedes ombres.
Its elevation depicts a huge, obtusely shaped
pyramid, "MONUMENT FUNERAIRE ...
CaractdrisantLe Genre D'Une Architecture
Ensevelie," one of three such images to be
included in the catalog. Note the similarity
between the profiles of these funerary
monuments and the V-shape of Lin's plan.37
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial occupies a clearing in Constitution Gardens,
in the northwest corner of the capital Mall
(Figure 4). Its well-known V is composed of
64
two identical walls, each 247 feet long, open
to an angle of 125 degrees. The walls begin
at grade; the ground in front slopes toward
the vertex, where the height of the wall
reaches ten feet. In plan, the composition's
two horizontal
axes intersect
the
of
the
Monument
centerpoints
Washington
and the Lincoln Memorial, so that visitors
walking east or west along the wall with
their backs to its vertex find themselves
trained on an obelisk and a classical temple
(Figures 5 and 6). The form of the memorial engages the surrounding perspective of
neoclassical Washington. Standing in front
of the wall, visitors are "surrounded by
America, by the Washington Monument
and the Lincoln Memorial. I don't design
pure objects like those [declaresLin]. I work
with the landscape."38The Vietnam Veterans Memorial works with Pierre Charles
L'Enfant's plan of 1791, to which the 1901
Senate Park Commission, in its restoration
of the Mall, remained assiduously loyal.39
Several critics have commented on
the memorial's relationship to the Lincoln
and Washington monuments. Philosopher
Charles Griswold notes that Lin's composition "points to, indeed cites, the two earlier
[monuments]."40 Griswold observes that
"one's eye is naturally drawn to the Washington Monument" and that "one's reading
of the VVM ... is interrupted halfway
through by the sight of the two other symbols," which "on a bright day one also sees
[in the surface of VVM] . . . along with
one's own reflection."4' He adds that Lin's
memorial "invites one to pause midway and
consider the names in light of our own
memories of Washington and Lincoln."42
He further observes that "the Washington
and Lincoln Memorials are continually
present as one enters [the] region [of the
VVM]" and that "they help give shape and
direction to our questions."43Not all critics
are as appreciative:
2. MayaLin,diagram,VietnamVeteransMemorial
with
competitionentrysite plan.(Reprinted
PentonPublishing.)
permissionof ProgressiveArchitecture,
3. Etienne-Louis
(Fromthe
Monument,
typicalof sunkenarchitecture."
Boullee,"Funerary
exhibition
Architects:Boullde,Ledoux,Lequeuby M.J.-C.Lemagny[Houston:
catalogVisionary
of St. Thomas,1968] plate 18, p. 38.)
University
4. Lin,VietnamVeteransMemorial,
aerialview.(Photograph
by RichardHofmeister,Smithsonian
Officeof Printing
andPhotographic
Services.FromReflectionson the Wall:The
Institution's
PA:.1987]).
VietnamVeteransMemorial
[Harrisburg,
85
Friedman
lookingwest towardthe
LincolnMemorial.
by StephenS. Griswold.
Courtesy
(Photograph
of CharlesL.Griswold.)
Despite the reflections of the Lincoln
Memorial and Washington Monument that play across the names,
Maya Lin's beautiful wall transcends
the possibility that the war is yet another element of our common lifelike those structures of gleaming
white marble with their affirmation
of hope and healing-precisely
by
deciding that thousands upon thousands of deaths of soldiers names
Willie J. Washington, Gary Lincoln,
and Jose Antonio Castro should remain 'a personal and private matter.'
Her scheme included no mention of
Vietnam, no hint that America had
sent the men and women listed on
the Wall to meet their fate, no clueexcept the odd reflection of official
someone, all of
Washington-that
us, might bear responsibility. Instead,
she proposed to list the names in the
order of death, to chart the dying that
made up the unnamed war, and, as
she told Art in America, "to return the
vets to the time frame of the war."
lookingeast towardthe
Monument.
(Photograph
by StephenS. Griswold.
Washington
L.
Courtesyof Charles Griswold.)
"The mode of listing the names
ality in which the chiasmic reflection of visimakes them individual deaths, not tors is "blurred into spectres of the dead
deaths in a cause," the National Re- standing behind their names"48-these deview rightly concluded; "they might vices dramatize the primary operation of the
as well have been traffic accidents."44 memorial, which is to symbolize the Vietnam War before the public so that the pubThe listing of the names, not its form, lic can decipher its message and move on.
is the essence of the memorial. Like all Lin explains that the point of using polished
monuments, the Vietnam Veterans Memogranite "is to see yourself reflected in the
rial derives from ancient species of architec- names."49Its mirror finish does not absorb
the reflection of the living, as death does; it
ture such as termini, flagpoles, obelisks,
hands it back: "Forever empty, the mirror
gravestones, and boundary stones-vertical
elements often distinguished by the pres- receives everything but retains nothing."5o
ence of writing on their surfaces.45MonuThrough inscription and reflection,
ments have no interior in the domestic or the inarticulability of death is deferred: Mepsychological sense; they are positive and morials are legible substitutes for the illegsolid. They appear "in the place of death, to ibility of the Void. Lin faces the wall with
point out its presence and to cover it up.'"46 names, not granite. Visitors come to face the
Monuments "point out," guide, guard the names, which delimit the immeasurability
way. They function not to aid memory, but of death and reestablish its boundaries. "Into restore mindfulness.47 People who visit scriptions on herms are the consequence
monuments are travelers, pilgrims, and and index of their exposure to movement
tourists: they live someplace else; they don't and exchange," Xavier Costa Guix writes.
"The resulting friction, however, does not
stay long; they read; they move on.
The memorial's V-shape, its funereal destroy the monument, but preserves it as
descent, its mirror finish, its ethereal virtu- an event rather than an object."" Reading
66
Serra's early projects, when he was rolling
and splashing lead. Like other minimalists,
Serra extended the limits of his art until it
appeared to many observers as "not art at
all."56In 1969, he began to arrange thick
steel plates and other heavy materials into
precisely, often precariously balanced constructions, such as One Ton Prop (House of
Cards)(1969) and SkullcrackerSeries(1969).
These constructions dilate "the boundary of
Serra'sart "is
[their] tendency to overturn.""57
not an art of punctuation [Bois writes], it is
an art of montage, an art that is not satisfied
to interrupt the continuity of temporality,
Richard Wollheim's early definition of but produces continuity by double negation,
minimalist objects is worth repeating here: by destroying the pictorial recoveryof conti"They have a minimal art content: in that nuity through discontinuity, dissociation,
either they are to an extreme degree undif- and the loss of identity within the fragferentiated in themselves and therefore pos- ment."58Serracarrieshis project further into
sess very low content of any kind, or else the this dilation of time in later works, which
Bois interprets on the basis of their paralax
differentiation that they do exhibit, which
effect, the "displacementof the apparent pomay in some cases be very considerable,
comes not from the artist but from a non- sition of a body, due to a change in position
artistic source, like nature or the factory.""53 of the observer."59 Bois deftly overturns
Minimalism rejects abstract expressionism Michael Fried's rejection of minimalism,
and the privilege of interior emotion over which Fried reduces to "theatricality."Bois
external fact; it rejects idealism, the a priori, directs us to Kant's "Analytique of the Suband illusion. The rhetoric of minimalism is lime," book II of Critique of udgment, "the
phenomenological. It repudiates classical only passagein the whole [work] where Kant
notions of prior space and ground and calls speaks in temporal terms ... of the mechafor practice that takes art back to things.54 nism of the aesthetic imagination." Art like
Minimalist materialism externalizes mean- Serra'sbelongs not to the province of beauty,
ing and declares that "there need be no con- but to sublimity: "'The sublime [Kant
nection between a final art object and the writes, cited by Bois] can be found in the
psychological matrix from which it is- formless object, so far as in it or by occasion
is representedin it, and yet
sued."" This expurgation of ideality and in- of it boundlessness
terior intention extinguishes the mythology
its totality is also present to thought."'60
of the "artist."The subjectivity of the artist
is displaced by the viewer-as-subject.
Minimalist ideology abjurescommodTiltedArc was a curved Cor-Ten steel plate,
ification, scandalizes art "capital,"and seeks 12 feet high, 2.5 inches thick, and 120 feet
to expose the institutional control of galler- long (Figure 7). The sculpture nearly biies and museums. Wollheim's definition of sected the small, undistinguished, semicirthe minimal object especially applies to cular, granite-paved Federal Plaza, which is
supersedes formal and stylistic considerations. "White marble may be very beautiful," Maya Lin said, "but you can't read
anything on it."52Reflection is secondary:
black granite is betterfor reading. One sees
oneself reflected in the (reading of the)
names. This concern for legibility-and its
participation in the "scopic regime" of the
Washington Mall-is precisely the thing
that sets the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
apart from minimalist sculpture. Lin's
project lists names. TiltedArc lists.
67
7. RichardSerra,TiltedArc.(Photograph
by KimSteele, New
York,NY.Courtesyof RichardSerra.)
located on Foley Square in lower Manhattan. The curved plane of Tilted Arc listed
one foot off perpendicular concave-wise, in
the direction of the Jacob Javits Federal Office Building and the U.S. Court of International Trade, which bound the north and
west sides of the plaza. TiltedArc stood for
seven years, four months, and fifteen days.
The dismantling of TiltedArc on the
ides of March in 1989 ended Serra's battle
to enjoin the General Services Administration Regional Administrator from removing
the sculpture. Edward D. Re, Chief Judge
of the U.S. International Court of Trade, issued the first official objections to the work.
Re soon found an ally in the Reagan
Administration's newly appointed Regional
Administrator, William Diamond, who
built a case against TiltedArc based on several facts and claims: There had been no
Friedman
public review of the proposed work prior to
its installation; the sculpture incommoded
the plaza; it obstructed concerts and other
public events; it rendered the plaza uninhabitable; it attracted graffiti, trash, and
homeless loiterers; it created a security hazard, made surveillance of the plaza impossible, and could have been used to direct the
force of a terrorist bomb toward the opposing federal office buildings.
In his defense, Serra argued that
Tilted Arc was permanent and site-specific:
To remove it is to destroy it. In the brief he
presented before the U.S. Court of Appeals,
Serrasought to reversethe unfavorable findings of the U.S. District Court, where he
had filed a complaint "for violation of [his
rights under] the First and Fifth Amendments, for breach of contract, and for violation of the trademark and copyright laws
and the Moral Rights Law of the State of
New York."'' He claimed that he was protected under the original contract and denied due process. The courts agreed with
the government: The GSA owned the work
and could move it if it wanted to. The debate and litigation surrounding Tilted Arc
and the coverage of the case in the press and
in journals62suggest that contemporary representations of the "public" component of
public art are protean. Like the favor of
God, "public good" always authorizes the
cause of both sides in a conflict.63
ways structured, always space between
things and between extrafamilial actors,
who by gathering in it constitute it. According to Arendt, this plurality enjoys a public
world only insofar as it endeavors to immortalize that world beyond its own transience,
as distinct from a world in which life and its
accumulations are elevated as the highest
good.65 Who is disinterested in the immortality of the world (the modern, principally)
privileges bodily happiness (a short-lived,
private matter) at the expense of political
excellence. Excellent works and courage are
characteristics of a kind of action undertaken in the space of appearance on behalf
of the durability of the public world, the
decline of which propels Arendt's political
and philosophical inquiry.
In her elaboration of the vita activa,
Arendt still finds life in Greek space.
Habermas shares this emphasis on civic, republican virtue. He aims toward "public
participation and the widest-reaching democratization of decision-making processes,"66but he shifts the question from the
space of appearance to the house of language. For Habermas, the durability of public life depends on communicative reason.
Richard Rorty notes, however, that
Habermas prefers its problem-solving to its
"world-disclosing" function.67 Habermas
argues for a democratic society that fulfills
"the universalism, and some form of the rationalism, of the Enlightenment," which he
wants to "update."'68Rorty's alternative is a
Hannah Arendt finds two meanings for the "poeticized culture" that accommodates
word public: the first concrete, the second "reasonand its other.""69
According to Rorty,
abstract. Publicness in its first sense is a the "contingency of language" renders
form of appearance that presupposes the Habermas's transcendent universality imwidest possible exposure, "the implacable, plausible. "Imagination [Dewey writes,
bright light of the constant presence of oth- cited by Rorty] is the chief instrument of
ers": "Appearance.. . constitutes reality."'64 the good .... Art is more moral than moIn its second sense, public means "the world ralities. . . . The moral prophets of humanitself," not the natural, but the artificial ity have always been poets."'70
world. Arendt's "space of appearance"is alFoucault, less optimistic, might argue
that the social and political transformations
of late capitalism preclude a democratic
public sphere. In his account, of course,
modern space incorporates a panoptical
"physics" that lightens and economizes the
administration of power through a technology of "generalized surveillance.'"71 Techaccelerates
and intensifies
nology
that
all
relations within a
such
supervision,
or
institutional
"body" can be depolitical
termined as disciplinary relations between
observer and observed.72Harvard art historian Anna C. Chave argues that this view
"admits no possibility of a radical dismantling of systems of power and undertakes no
theorizing or imagining of a society or
world without domination";73 Habermas
considers it to be a "blind alley."74
To the political and poetic we might
add a psychoanalytic interpretation of public experience. The potential for domination
suggested by Foucault's institutional archaeology is a well-researched conflict of the primal scene. Can we redraw the panoptical
schema as the diagram of the gaze?75In this
diagram, watcher and watched are central to
descriptions of visuality developed at the
level of the subject, whose self-enclosure and
spatial command are menaced and
decentered by the appearance of an/other in
the same visual field; in the gaze of this
other (this "irruption of alterity") the subject becomes a spectacle, becomes abject.76
Such a thing as "postmodern appearance"
necessarily involves an analysis of the dynamics between subject and other, within
which power relations correspond to plural
"visualities"inscribed by class, age, gender,
capital, race, and so on.
TiltedArc is more than a speck in the tissue
of Judge Re's eye. His complaint that Tilted
Arc is not art-that whatever art is is not
that "['awkward,bullying'], rusted steel bar-
68
rier"77--conceals a likelier possibility: Art is
precisely what he and Diamond want out of
sight: "Punctuality, calculability, exactness,"
writes Georg Simmel, "are forced upon life
by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with its money economy
and intellectualistic character. These traits
must also color the contents of life and favor
the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive,
sovereign traits and impulses which aim at
determining the mode of life from within,
instead of receiving the general and precisely
schematized form of life from without."78
Imagine Tilted Arc standing in front
of the Javits Building and the U.S. Court of
International Trade. "What do you see?
What is this strange suspended, oblique object in the foreground in front of these two
figures? ... What, then, before this display
of the domain of appearance in all its most
fascinating forms, is this object, which from
some angles appears to be flying through the
air, at others to be tilted?"79TiltedArc (Figures 8 and 9) crowds the camera; it cuts a
phallic, umbral swath across the orderly, articulate, mathematized surface of the site;
and in the same way it cuts a slash across the
surface of the eye.
8. Serra,TiltedArc.(Courtesyof RichardSerra.)
What does Judge Re see?80"My sculptures
are not meant for the viewer to stop, look,
and stare at," Serra says .... TiltedArc was
built for the people who walk and cross the
plaza, for the moving observer [Figure 10].
. . Space becomes the sum of successive
perceptions of the place. The viewer becomes the subject. One's identity as a person is closely connected with the experience
of space and place. When a known space
changes through the inclusion of a site-specific sculpture, one is called upon to relate
to the space differently.... This experience
may startle some people."81
9. Serra,TiltedArc.(Courtesyof RichardSerra.)
89
Friedman
10. Serra,TiltedArc.(Reprinted
withpermissionof the Museumof ModernArt.Photograph
by SusanSwider.
Courtesyof RichardSerra.)
The motor trajectory Serra wants
long enough and it will look back. "The gaze
TiltedArc to interrupt is driven by a more or in its formal structure," Dolar writes, "is
less indeterminate psychological interior. rather a device to open a 'non-place,' the
Serra's "startled" subject encounters some- pure oscillation between an emptiness and a
thing "uncanny" in the work. The blurred fullness.""' Neither the phenomenological
line dividing subject from object is the anchorage of minimalism nor Serra's determination to wipe the slate clean can elide the
threshold of an unwelcome uncanny
intercorporeity "neither interior nor exte- fact that "there is no direct apprehension of
rior."82Serra draws the viewer into the flesh the real, no possible liberation from imagoes,
of the work (what the work "is")at precisely no unmediated reading of a text."87"Vision
the same moment he or she is awash in the is socialized," Norman Bryson tells us.88"Viabsence of figuration (what the work sion ... is not just 'seeing,' but expresses a
"isn't"). Tilted Arc enlarges "the circum- prior relation to the object.""89"You never
scribed territory in which the Being and the look at mefrom theplacefrom which I see
No-longer-being of the thing are one and you," Lacan says. "Conversely, what I look at
Ellie Raglandthe same," to borrow Simmel's terms.83
is neverwhatI wishto see."90
Mladen Dolar argues that what distin- Sullivan elaborates:
guishes postmodern experience is "a new
In consciousness the intersubjective
consciousness about the uncanny as a fundaelement involved in "seeing oneself
mental dimension of modernity."84Essential
seen" has to do with knowing that the
to the question of the uncanny is the probother knows that one is being looked
lem of the eye itself, the primal organ in
at. The intersubjective element apwhich the image of TiltedArc lodges like an
pears mysteriously to consciousness
anamorphotic sliver:85Look into Tilted Arc
when a person experiences self as an
object of an-other's gaze-whether
present or absent-and the gaze catalyzes a phenomenology of judgment
in the form of shame, modesty, blushing, fear, prestige, rage, and so on....
The Other's gaze triumphs over the
eye, subjectivizing the relationship between gaze and eye, or seeing and
knowing. Such a radical subversion of
consciousness by the unconscious is
the antithesis of the transparencyand
continuity between self and world that
phenomenology assumes."9
Provisionally, at least, we might conclude
about TiltedArcwhat Lacanconcludes about
TheAmbassadors,that "[Holbein] makes visible . . . the subject as annihilated."92
Where would we draw the line between Lin's "minimalism" and Serra's?
Looking particularly at Serra's Shift, it is
possible to argue that Lin's project is a po-
70
etic misreading(whatHaroldBloomwould
of minimalistart
call "misprisionproper"93)
practice.Even CharlesGriswoldconcedes
that the "modern"form of Lin'sdesign "is
no more [controversial]than many other
monumentsin the same area."4Its plan is
so conspicuouslycontrivedfromthe centerpoints of the WashingtonMonument and
the Lincoln Memorial that its own space
and form become adjunctive,not disruptive. In this sense, it reciprocatesthe visual
dominionof the Mall. Its sleek,black,halfburiedV-gash, book, polyvalentinitial-inscribesan ichnographicalsymbolismon
the surfaceof the site, but this mark does
not transgressor subvert;rather,it is appropriatedecoration.Its phenomenologicaleffect reducesto severalbinary,compositional
devices, including its reflectivesurface.It
does not recodethe Mall; it schematizesit
and sustainsit.
Hereagainperhapswe shouldtakeup
the questionof the memorial'smirrorfinish.
SarahRogerswrites:"Thevisitor'sown reflection in the highly polishedgranite,and
the reflectionsof the adjacentLincoln and
WashingtonMemorials,alsopulleachviewer
dramatically into the experience. These
simple but powerfulconnections helped a
nationhealitself.""'
Againstthe chaosof absolute loss (the reality behind the list of
backto
names),Lin'smirrorfinish"[reflects]
of
and
order
.
..
the
the subject
organization
in
the good Gestalt alwaysthere potentia,
and, by meansof its reflection,alwaysassuring theviewingsubjecta concomitantlogical
and visual control."''96
Comparethis effect
with TiltedArc.In its faceand listingcurve,
Serraconfrontsthe viewingsubjectwith "a
kind of amorphousness,the threat that a
body 'that suffersin being organizedin no
Serraefwayat all'lies behindthe surface.""'
facesthe mirrorLinwantsto polish.
The VietnamVeteransMemorialis no
Shift, no Skullcracker.Of course, Chave
would not hold that againstit. She criticizes case can be made as well that what is most
the patternsof violence,domination,aggres- badly needed are, at least for a start, visions
siveness, and negation that characterize of something different, something else."102
minimalist "rhetoric," notwithstanding
Mitchell'sargumentthat"violencemaybe in
some sense 'encoded' in the concept and In the contemporary West, in Friedrich
practiceof public art."'"Chave notes that Nietzsche's
"evening land,"'103 even
"minimalism
dismaysviewersby its obdurate Habermas agrees that the chances for a
blankness,by the extremelimitationsof its democratically driven cultural modernism
means,by its harshor antisepticsurfacesand are "not very good."'04 All the Mall's inquotidianmaterials,and by its pretentions, scriptions glisten on the surface of Lin's sedecorous
in spite of all of this, to being fine art.""99pulchral
roster,
though
BlumtracesLin'scompositionbackto work unintelligible obsequies chiseled in the spirit
by CarlAndre,DonaldJudd,David Smith, of progress and overcoming. All its memoRichardSerra,and RobertMorris,the same rials are engulfed by "disproportion and ingroupChaveindicts.Certainly,the approval commensurability," by an "accidental,
of Washington's Fine Arts Commission heterogeneous space [in which] parts and
confirmsthat Lin'sdesignquietsthis rheto- fractions become essential."1"'
Detractors who argue that TiltedArc
ric of minimalism;Mitchell and Elizabeth
it. The sur- was disproportionate and incommensurable
Hess arguethat she "feminizes"
vival of her design againstsuch formidable are correct. The site-specificity of TiltedArc
opposition as Ross Perot and a phalanxof consists in its fractious occupation of a
congressmenwould suggestthat her project trivial urban space, which Serra intended to
of alter: "I'm not interested in augmenting the
ameliorateswhatChavecallsthe "dismay"
the public. As Hess notes (contrary to site or in decorating the site, I'm not interBlum), the Vietnam VeteransMemorialis ested in the work being subservient to the
In its own right,it site. I'm interested in declaring my own
"totallynonaggressive.""'0
has become "a place of pilgrimageand an place and space, which is specific to sculpture and nothing else. I'm interested in
icon of nationalhealing.""'
Lin's domestication of minimalist sculptural conditions, in sculptural spaces
rhetoricanticipatesChave'scriticism.Lin's and places, and in making those conditions
"minimalism"is didactic:It minimizesthe possible. I'm not interested in doing monudisturbanceof the landscape;it minimizes ments, because monuments usually memothe heroizingof war;it minimizesthe glori- rialize a person, a place or an event, and I
ficationof violence;it minimizesthe valori- don't attribute any descriptive symbolism to
zation of war's infernal commerce. These my works. People call my works monumenareperhapsthe memorial'sgreatestachieve- tal because they're large, but in no way do
ments.Lin'sprojectsatisfiesChave'scallfor they have anything to do with the history of
resistanceto "theunyieldingface of the fa- monuments."106 Serra declared, "After
ther":"Apersuasivecasecan be made,after [ TiltedArc] is created, the space will be unall, that the patriarchalovervaluation of derstood as a function of the sculpture."107
power-at the expenseof mutuality,tolera- Tilted Arc negates the sense of "belonging"
tion, or nurturance-can be held to account that persists in the notion of space and place
for almostall thatis politicallyreprehensible as sanctuary, home, or genius loci; it opens
and morallylamentablein the world. The "a hole in reality which is immediately also
71
Friedman
I
/?
P
'*
C?u ??I
ar
~~
:"
I~BE~n
F:
: ? ' ::
"''
?*:::.
.::.i~~i:f~?~~;18lil'iiiii~iiZl.ii;l.C:
";:
II'~?
i
i;.r
?????
11. "Thedestructionof TiltedArc,15 March1989."(Photograph
by JenniferKotter.)
No-places atomize traditional contours,enclosures,and boundaries,which in
turnacquirean increasinglyoneiricpresence
in contemporaryurbanculture.PaulVirilio
warns of an "unnoticed pollution of distancesthat [not only] organizeour relationship to others but equally to the world of
sensibleexperience."He calls this degradation of time anddistance"graypollution."112
Teletechnologyabolishesdirection within
both a geographicand psychologicalcompass:"I know that the centresof the polis,
those of power,religion,knowledge,for the
very reasonthat they becomeplural,are no
longer conceivable in the same terms,"
GianniVattimohasnoted."Transformation
into a metropoliscannot constitutea pure
and simple loss of the centre, but a
of the veryideaof a centre,in
requalification
a conditionof multi-centrality;not only of
the externalspaces,but firstandforemost,of
the interior space of the 'subject."'"ll3
that which comes to fill it with an unbearable presence, with a being more being than
being, vacuum and plenitudo all in one, the
plenitude as the direct consequence of emptiness."'108As art, it anticipates and even provokes the reformulation of public/private
distinctions (Figure 11).
Downtown, in the suburbs, along the
strip, in my house, spectral projections obviate "heavy" representation: monuments,
memorials, architecture. Material durability
is nowadays crossed off by "images whose
only duration is one of retinal persistence."'09The rise and fall of TiltedArc-the
prosecution of its case within the interconnected structures of law and publicityoffers an especially instructive episode in the
epochal shift from the modern to the "overmodern" city. Overmodernity (surmodernite)
is what anthropologist Marc Auge calls the
general overabundance of cultural phenom-
ena. One critical featureof this surplusis
"theacceleratedtransformation
of space,the
'excessof space' . . . [and] of topographies
and spatialrelations.""oXavierCosta,after
Aug,, notes that "partof such an 'excessof
"Unspace'is the emergenceof no-places":
like traditionalplaces which were inseparable from the social structures that
Durkheim and Mauss describe in their
ethno-topologies-foundation rites, festivals,liturgiesthatperiodicallyrenewand reenactthe veryexistenceand perceptionof a
place as public, common space-the
overmodernno-placeproposesan individual
relationshipwith the subjectandwith modern dynamicsof ownership,possession,the
resultingdialecticsof lack and satisfaction,
and the erringsearchfor an alwaysinsufficient reificationof desireembodied in the
well-known Baudelairean figure of the
flaneur,the urbanwanderer.""''
The VietnamVeteransMemorialis the first
telegenic monument commemoratingthe
first telegenic war. It is black, reflective,
ocularcentric,glossy, like the surfaceof a
picturetube. Its form embodies"theorigin
of coordinates,"yet positionsthe eye "atthe
privilegedviewing point of an optico-geometric masteryof space.""' TiltedArc, on
the other hand, haunts the lens. It dismantlesthe "projectivepoint of Renaissance
perspective,which suspendsa disembodied
single 'eye' before the visual array.""5Its
phenomenologyis not benign:At the same
time it "thickens the world for the perit turnsout the "phantasmagoria
ceiver,"''116
of commodities"and power relationsthat
animate Manhattan."'At the level of the
subject,it denudesits site, turnsplace into
not-place.
The VietnamVeteransMemorialand
TiltedArc reside in the breachof Krauss's
72
"historicalrupture,"a roily middle ground."8
Franco Rella (quoting Jean-Frangois
Lyotard) arguesthat "the postmodern 'decidedly forms part of the modern' and that 'a
work cannot become modern if in the first
place it is not postmodern.' Postmodernism
understood in this way is not... 'modernism
at its end,' but modernism in its nascent
state.""' Dolar antes in: "[Postmodernism]
doesn't imply a going beyond the modern,
but rather an awarenessof its internal limit,
its split, which was there from the outset."'20
Lin's memorial ends at, and TiltedArcopens
to, overmodern, plural, mongrel time.
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 13-27, where she
examines it in relation to Jacques Lacan's L schema;see
also pp. 104, 220, 320, and 189-92, where she plots the
oppositional structure of "value" using A.J. Greimas's
semiotic square, which is extrapolated from the Klein
Group. For a discussion of the Klein Group diagram,
see (at Krauss's recommendation) Marc Barbut, "On
the Meaning of the Word 'Structure' in Mathematics,"
in Michael Lane, ed., Introductionto Structuralism(New
York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 367-88.
3. Krauss, Optical Unconscious, p. 21.
4. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field,"
pp. 36-38.
5. Barbara Hoffman, "Law for Art's Sake in
the Public Realm," in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Art and
the Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), p. 113.
6. Krauss,OpticalUnconscious,
p. 104.
We live in a period [Rella writes] in
which what in the past was unthinkable, owing either to distance or to its
dimensions, is today rendered visible
on a mass level. After centuries of interrogating the value of the image in
relation to its referent,we are now confronted by images that have no objectreferent whatever. Traversing the
modern reallyleads us to go beyond its
limits, even if these limits are not external but rather an internal frontier.
More than ever, to think the modern is
to thinkthelimit:it is liminalthought.
... Liminal thought, precisely because
it is poised on the point at which the
visible and invisible touch each other,
where place and nonplace are tangents,
is atopic thought. Atopy is perhaps the
fundamental word of contemporary
modernity.121
Notes
1. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press,
1983), pp. 31-42.
2. Krauss returns to the Klein Group in
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cam-
7. My discussion of the first two of these is indebted to Seyla Benhabib, "Models of Public Space:
Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jiirgen
Habermas," in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the
Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp.
73-98.
8. Ibid., pp. 75, 78.
9. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field,"
p. 33.
10. Ibid., p. 35.
11. Ibid., p. 39.
12. Ibid.
13. Hal Foster,"TheCruxof Minimalism,"in
Howard Singerman, ed., Individuals: A Selected His-
tory of ContemporaryArt, 1945-986 (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 162: "Minimalism . . .
figure[s] not as a distant dead end but as a brisure of
(post)modern art, an in-between moment of a paradigm shift."
14. These two projects are discussed at length,
often jointly, in Art and the Public Sphere, which contains essays from past issues of Critical Inquiry, including material originally presented at the August 1989
symposium sponsored by Chicago Sculpture called
"Art and Public Spaces: Daring to Dream." In addition to numerous references to both the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Tilted Arc, Mitchell's anthology
contains an article by Richard Serra called "Art and
Censorship" (also published in Richard Serra: Writings, Interviews [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994]) and an often-cited essay by Charles L.
Griswold entitled "The Vietnam Veteran's Memorial
and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on
Political Iconography," which I discuss below.
15. John Hallmark Neff, "Daring to Dream,"
in Mitchell, ed., Art and the Public Sphere, pp. 6-7.
73
16. W.J.T. Mitchell, "The Violence of Public
Art," in Mitchell, ed., Art and the Public Sphere, pp.
36-37.
17. Neff, "Daring to Dream," p. 6.
18. Testifying against relocation at the March
1985 public hearings convened to debate the future
of TiltedArc, art critic Roberta Smith pointed to the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial as evidence of Richard
Serra's stature: "[ TiltedArc] is an excellent example of
Minimalism, which has already been watched by the
influential. The Vietnam Veterans' Monument [sic],
which has been such a hit in Washington, is a result
of someone working with Serra's ideas. So now we
have the real thing, the original, genuine article right
in our midst." (Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha
Buskirk, The Destructionof TiltedArc: Documents
[Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991] p. 103.) Art
critic Robert Storr seems to concur. In his essay on
the hearings, published several months later, he noted
that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial "not incidentally . . . owes its sculptural syntax to Serra." (Robert
Storr, "'Tilted Arc': Enemy of the People?" Art in
America [Sept. 1985] 93.) In the extensive commentary on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, art magazines especially resort to the adjective minimalist to
locate Lin's design. Elizabeth Hess calls Lin's design
"a combination Minimalist sculpture-earthwork."
Later in the same article, she notes that "Tom Wolfe,
who published a well-timed article in the Washington Post, . .. [called] Lin's memorial 'non-bourgeois
art,' or art 'that baffled the general public.' Wolfe
compared Lin's experience to that of Carl Andre in
Hartford and Richard Serra in downtown Manhattan. He concluded that her memorial, too, was abstract and elitist. Yet no one, including Wolfe, has
actually been baffled by the memorial." (Elizabeth
Hess, "A Tale of Two Memorials," Art in America
[Apr. 1983]: 122, 126.) Critic Shirley Neilsen Blum,
writing in Arts Magazine, goes further, putting Lin
squarely into the Minimalist school. She identifies
the influence of Carl Andre, Donald Judd, David
Smith, and Robert Morris (also, I must add, Camille
Corot, Claude Monet, Alfred Stieglitz, the Wailing
Wall, and most of funerary antiquity-see note 36):
"The highly charged message of the Vietnam War
Memorial [sic]," Blum writes, "is contained within
the cool spare language of minimal art. . . . As in
works by Richard Serra or Robert Smithson, the
viewer must actively participate within the space defined by the work." (Shirley Neilsen Blum, "The National Vietnam War Memorial," Arts Magazine [Dec.
1984]:125, 128.)
Storr and Smith are obviously not suggesting
that this construction derives its form from TiltedArc,
Friedman
a 12-by-120-foot curved steel plate. No doubt they are
thinking about a concrete sculpture by Serra called
Shift, constructed between 1970 and 1972 on a farming field in King City, Ontario. Shift consists of six 5foot-high, 8-inch-thick concrete sections that Serra
calls "stepped elevations," which span 815 feet end on
end. (Rosalind Krauss, "Richard Serra, a Translation,"
in TheOriginalityof theAvant-Gardeand OtherModernist Myths [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985], p.
264.) Serra's theme in Shift is transitivity, action that
is carried from the subject to the object." In the making of the piece, the locations of the walls are established through the bodies of Serra and an associate,
who by walking the field configure and then map the
boundaries of contact between their two lines of sight
within the existing topography. The walls register this
mapping and therefore delimit a set of transitive, internal horizons that change and "shift" in relation to
a lived engagement between viewer and artwork.
Thus inscribed, Shift operates to supplant the
"machinery of renaissance space," which depends on
fixed and immutable measurements. (Krauss, "Richard
Serra, a Translation," p. 267.) In Shift, this idea of measurement as something external to the body is negated.
The sculpture is not representational in any conventional sense, not an illusion, not a picture of anything
that exists prior to bodily engagement. It is rather an
armature for perception, purged of any figurative or
symbolic baggage. Its content is precisely the "beingnear-to" or "being-far-from" that knots body, wall, and
field into a sort of temporal suspense, a vivid presence
or "continuing" that Krauss calls an "erotics of process." (Rosalind E. Krauss, "Richard Serra Sculpture,"
in Laura Rosenstock, ed., Richard Serra/Sculpture[New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986], p. 21.) In this
process, the body's motor project displaces vision as the
singularly dominant mode of contact; no "conic vice"
holds the wall in an idealized, anterior space. (Amelia
Jones, "The Absence of Body/The Fantasy of Representation," M/E/A/N/I/N/G 9 [May 1991]: 12.) The wall
"appears" only in its internal, ever-changing aspect,
only in its proximity to the body, which activates the
dialectic between made and found horizons. Both
sculpture and field take place "as walked," permitting
the viewer/subject to measure herself or himself
"against the indeterminacy of the land." (Krauss, "Richard Serra, a Translation," p. 264.)
19. Richard Serra, "Richard Serra's Urban
Sculpture: An Interview by Douglas Crimp," in Richard Serra: Writings, Interviews, p. 126. This interview
was first published in Arts Magazine (Nov. 1980);
Krauss's "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" was first
published in October 8 (Spring 1979).
seum, 1980), p. 161, quotedin Krauss,"RichardSerra
Sculpture,"p. 7.
32. Bois, "PicturesqueStroll around ClaraClara,"pp. 344, 346.
33. Richard Serra, RichardSerra:Sculpture
Battcock,ed., MinimalArt:A CriticalAnthology
(New (New York:Pace Gallery, 1989), p. 67. The passage
York: Dutton, 1968), p. 224.
leadingup to this thoughtis importantto repeathere:
22. Foster, "Crux of Minimalism," pp. 172"It'shardto conveyideasof weightfromthe objectsof
73; Morris, "Notes on Sculpture," p. 232.
everydaylife, for the taskwould be infinite;thereis an
23. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translator's
imponderable vastness to weight. However, I can
Introduction," in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, recordthe historyof artas a historyof the particularization of weight.... I havemoreto sayaboutthe history
trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
of sculptureas a historyof weight, more to say about
Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xviii. With rethe monumentsof death,moreto sayaboutthe weight
spect to Serra's antipathy toward architecture, see, for
and density and concretenessof countlesssarcophagi,
example, "Interview: Peter Eisenman," pp. 132, 146,
moreto sayaboutburialtombs,.. . moreto say about
163, 188; and, in the same volume, also see "Richard
Serra and Alan Colquhoun," p. 235. Yve-Alain Bois
Mycenaeanand Incanarchitecture,moreto say about
the weight of the Olmec heads. . . . Everythingwe
writes that "the relationship between architecture and
choose in life for its lightnesssoon revealsits unbearSerra's work is one of conflict: he says of his Berlin
ableweight.We facethe fearof unbearableweight:the
Block for Charlie Chaplin, placed in Mies van der
Rohe's National Galerie in Berlin, that it was all done
weight of repression,the weight of constriction, the
so that it would contradict the architecture." (Yveweight of government, the weight of tolerance, the
Alain Bois, "A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara," weight of resolution,the weight of responsibility,the
trans. John Shepley, in Annette Michelson, et al., eds.,
weightof destruction,the weightof suicide,the weight
of historywhich dissolvesweight and erodesmeaning
October: The First Decade, 1976-1986 [Cambridge,
to a calculatedconstructionof palpablelightness."
MA: MIT Press, 1987], p. 349.)
24. Bois, "Picturesque Stroll around Clara34. RodolpheGasche, The Tainof theMirror:
Derridaand the Philosophyof Reflection(Cambridge,
Clara," p. 363.
MA: HarvardUniversityPress,1986), p. 238.
25. Ibid., p. 346.
26. "Elsewhere described by Walter Benjamin
35. Robert Campbell, "An Emotive Place
as the experience par excellence of modernism ..."
Apart," AIA Journal (May 1983): 151. Campbell
writes,"Thestoryof how this unlikelyand wonderful
Ibid., pp. 362-63.
27. Mitchell, "The Violence of Public Art," in
design cameinto existenceis one of the classiccompetition stories, too familiar to need much detailing.
Mitchell, ed., Art in the Public Sphere, p. 37. Elizabeth
Hess has also acknowledged the genital metaphor: "To
MayaYingLinwas 21 and a seniorat Yale,planninga
careeras an architect,when some students(she wasn't
add insult to injury, the eight male jurors had chosen
a memorial with a distinctly female character, placing
one) persuadedan instructor,AndrewBurr,to offer a
at the base of Washington's giant phallus a wide Vdesign studio on funeraryarchitecture.Lin enrolled.
"Tale
of
The Vietnamcompetitionwas ProblemNumber 3 in
a
mound."
surrounded
(Hess,
by grassy
shape
the Burr studio." Burr'sstudents visited the site in
Two Memorials," p. 126.)
28. It holds up 57,939 names, to be exact. For
Washington.Accordingto Campbell,Lin concluded
that "alandscapesolution seemedbetter"than "some
the seminal discussion on the distinction between writThe
see
on
and
walls,
Vidler,
Anthony
Writing big monument.... The notion of makingthe angle
ofthe
ing
Theoryin theLateEnlighten- and aimingthe wall at Washingtonand Lincolncame
of the Walls:Architectural
ment (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987).
later, backin the studio ... 'Andysaid, you have to
makethe angle mean something[Lin recalled].And I
My copy of this book was a gift from Nadir Lahiji, to
wanted the names in chronologicalorder becauseto
whom I also owe the suggestion of this note.
honor the living as well as the dead it had to be a se29. Serra, "Extended Notes from Sight Point
Road," in Richard Serra: Writings, Interviews, p. 171;
quence in time."' Campbell notes that "these were
also Serra, "Interview: Peter Eisenman," p. 135.
powerfulintuitions,and theyled directlyto a powerful
30. See note 18.
design.The briefesttalkwith its creatormakesit clear
that nothing about the memorial is either casual or
31. Richard Serra, Richard Serra: Interviews,
mentionof
Boull"e.
Etc., 1970-1989 (Yonkers, NY: Hudson River Mulucky."He makesno
20. Richard Serra, "Interview:
Peter
Eisenman," in Richard Serra:Writings, Interviews, pp.
147, 171.
21. Foster, "Crux of Minimalism," p. 172; see
also Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture," in Gregory
74
36. Helen Rosenau, ed., Boullie's Treatise on
Architecture: A Complete Presentation of the "Architecture, essai sur l'art, "which forms part of the Boullee
papers (MS 9153) in the Biblioteque Nationale, Paris
(London: A. Tiranti, 1953), pp. 80-81, quoted in M.
J.-C. Lemagny, Visionary Architects: Boullie, Ledoux,
Lequeu (Houston: University of St. Thomas, 1968),
plate 18, "Funerary Monument, typical of sunken architecture," p. 38. See also plates 15, "Entrance to a
Cemetery," and 17, "Chapel of the Dead." I have
double-checked: I am convinced that in my review of
nearly a dozen articles on Lin's memorial I have overlooked some reference to Boullke that is lying before
me plain as day. Blum, for instance, fails to mention
Boullke in "The National Vietnam War Memorial,"
which unrolls a long list of historical precedents for
Lin's design (see note 18). Blum is careful to mention
that "Lin [had] taken a course in funerary architecture
at Yale and surely was not unaware that the Wall
evokes a whole history of funerary monuments." She
proceeds to connect Lin's scheme to Mother Earth; to
ancient Egyptian and Greek antecedents (pyramid,
tholos, dromos, tumulus); to the graves of the Kings of
Lydia in Sardis; to the nine royal tombs at Mycenae
and specifically to the tombs ofAgamemnon, Alyattes,
and Cephren; and to modern architecture and sculpture; but not, strangely enough, to Boullke. The
writer's generosity and her great enthusiasm for Lin's
project may help account for these attributions and
oversights.
Not the source of this discussion but worth
mentioning is a parenthetical insert offered by Bois in
"Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara." At the beginning of his discussion about Serra and the sublime,
Bois writes, "(I might add that a whole parallel could
be traced between the idea formulated by Boullke of a
buried architecture and Serra's sculptures that are sunk
in the ground)" (p. 366). Bois does not support his
reference to "buried architecture" with a citation; it is
commonly enough known.
37. Notwithstanding its ingeniously simple
composition and elegant interpretation of historical
precedents, a widely publicized war of opinion quickly
exploded around Lin's proposal: Talk show hosts and
politicians took positions; the Commission of Fine
Arts held hearings. In a compromise engineered to placate powerful lobbyists (including H. Ross Perot, who
doubtless never heard of Boullke), a sculpture group
depicting three "battle weary GIs," rendered with a
sort of Saturday Evening Post realism, was added to the
memorial site, along with a flagpole, both placed seventy feet from Lin's composition, a distance satisfactory to both parties.
38. Hess, "Tale of Two Memorials," p. 123.
39. Few if any American architects could claim
greater authority in matters of classical composition
than two of the commission's members, Charles Follen
McKim (1847-1909) and Daniel Hudson Burnham
(1846-1912), still glowing from their triumph at the
Chicago World's Columbian Exposition; the third
member of the commission, of course, was Frederick
Law Olmsted, Jr., son of the Chicago Exposition's
landscape architect. Their proposal was "the first expression of the City Beautiful movement inspired by
the [Chicago] fair and. . . 'the country's first modern
city planning report."' (Leland Roth, McKim, Mead &
WhiteArchitects [New York: Harper & Row, 1983], p.
251.) They strengthened their loyalty to L'Enfant
through assiduous research and travel-to Virginia, to
inspect cities that had served as models for the capital;
and to Europe, where they immersed themselves in
monumental antecedents: "The group toured Paris,
turned to Rome where they studied the great Piazza of
St. Peter's, then, to Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, and from
there, to Venice, a plan of which had been among the
papers Jefferson lent L'Enfant. In Vienna they toured
the Schoenbrunn and the Ringstrasse. Some time was
spent in Budapest before the group returned to Paris,
where they measured the grounds at Fountainbleau and
Vaux-le-Vicomte. The gardens and grand allees and the
great basin at Versailles one of L'Enfant's primary
sources, were also carefully studied." (Roth, McKim,
Mead & WhiteArchitects,p. 253.) In 1900, the younger
Olmsted "pleaded for an understanding of L'Enfant's
original plan," although, according to McKim's biographer, Charles Moore, who accompanied the commissioners on their European junket, "the problem in
Washington [would have to] be worked out along Roman rather than Parisian lines." (Richard Guy Wilson,
"Architecture, Landscape, and City Planning," in The
American Renaissance, 1876-1917 [New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1979], pp. 84-85.) The commission
aimed to restore "visual reciprocity" between the major
monumental elements of the Mall. Visual reciprocity
accurately describes the manner in which Lin's memorial incorporates the diagonalization of L'Enfant's
scheme.
For a thorough discussion of the Senate Park
Commission's activities, see Roth, McKim, Mead 6&
White Architects, pp. 251, 251-59, especially his conclusion: "In surveying the gradual development of
Washington over half a century following [Theodore
Roosevelt's] establishment of the Fine Arts Commission, one discovers that, except for the clearing and
planting of the Mall, few of the Park Commission's
specific proposals have been carried out literally, yet
75
their basic scheme (and L'Enfant'soriginal design)
havebeen consistentlyreinforced.The essentialqualities of space, order, and harmony among the parts
have been maintained and 'reciprocityof sight' restored. Even the exigenciesof two majorworld wars
have not materiallyaltered the pursuit of this plan.
Fortunately,before the chance to reclaimthis legacy
had passed altogether, Burnham, Olmsted, and
McKim rekindledL'Enfant'svision"(p. 258).
40. CharlesL. Griswold,"TheVietnamVeterans Memorialand the WashingtonMall: Philosophical Thoughts on PoliticalIconography,"in Mitchell,
ed., Art and thePublicSphere,p. 92.
41. Ibid., pp. 102-3
42. Ibid., pp. 103, 108.
43. Ibid.
44. Marlingand Silberman,"TheStatueNear
the Wall: The Vietnam VeteransMemorial and the
Art of Remembering,"
SmithsonianStudiesin American
Art One(Spring 1987) p. 11.
45. XavierCosta Guix, "MercurialMarkers"
(Ph.D. diss., Universityof Pennsylvania,1990), pp.
1-7.
46. Denis Holier, AgainstArchitecture:The
Writingsof GeorgeBataille,trans. BetsyWing (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 6.
47. Costa Guix, "MercurialMarkers,"p. 4;
Griswoldnotes that monumentderivesfrom the Latin
monere,to remind-to admonish,warn,advise,and instruct.(Griswold,"VietnamVeteransMemorial,"
p. 83.)
48. Donald Kunze, "Architectureas Reading;
Virtuality,Secrecy,Monstrosity,"JAE41/4 (Summer
1988): 28.
49. Hess, "Taleof Two Memorials,"p. 123.
Lin adds, "Alsothe mirrorimage doubles and triples
the space."
50. MarkC. Taylor,Disfiguring:Art,Architecture, Religion(Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press,
1992), p. 281.
51. Costa Guix, "MercurialMarkers,"p. 4.
53. Richard Wollheim, "Minimal Art," in
Gregory Battcock, ed., MinimalArt (New York:
Dutton, 1968), p. 387, quoted in RosalindE. Krauss,
"Tanktotem:
Welded Images,"in RosalindE. Krauss,
Passagesin Modern Sculpture(New York: Viking,
1977), p. 198.
54. RosalindE. Krauss,"The Fountainhead,"
2 (Jan. 1974): 64.
Oppositions
55. Rosalind E. Krauss,"The Double Negative:A New Syntaxfor Sculpture,"in Passagesin ModernSculpture(New York:Viking, 1977), pp. 259, 266.
56. Francis Colpitt, MinimalArt: The Critical
Friedman
Perspective(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990), p.
101.
57. Serra, "Richard Serra's Urban Sculpture:
An Interview with Douglas Crimp," in Richard Serra:
Writings, Interviews, p. 129. On transitivity and the
temporal dimension of Serra's work, see Krauss, "Richard Serra Sculpture."
58. Bois, "Picturesque Stroll around ClaraClara," p. 350.
59. Ibid., p. 364.
60. Ibid., p. 370.
61. "Appeal Filed by Richard Serra in the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, December
15, 1987," in Weyergraf-Serra and, Buskirk, eds., Destruction of TiltedArc, p. 232. Serra's personal account
of the TiltedArc case serves as the introduction to the
Weyergraf-Serra and Buskirk documentation; it is also
published as Richard Serra, " TiltedArc Destroyed," in
Richard Serra: Writings, Interviews, pp. 192-214 (first
published in Art in America 77 [May 1989], pp. 3447); also see, following in the same volume, Richard
Serra, "Art and Censorship" (reprinted from Critical
Inquiry 17 [Spring 1991], also reprinted in Mitchell,
ed., Art and the Public Sphere, pp. 226-33).
62. Serra, "Introduction," in Weyergraf-Serra
and Buskirk, eds., Destruction of Tilted Arc, p. 9.
Weyergraf-Serra and Buskirk report that 3,791 people
signed petitions for relocation of the sculpture, 3,763
against. Over 350 articles in local and national publications took up the case.
63. The transcripts of selected testimonies before Diamond's panel published in Weyergraf-Serra
and Buskirk, eds., Destruction of Tilted Arc, suggest
multiple interpretations of public. Speaking in defense of TiltedArc, Richard Serra testified before the
hearing that Tilted Arc was "constructed so as to engage the public in a dialogue" (p. 65); Gustave Harrow, Serra's attorney, argued that the acts of the
hearings "disregard the responsibilities of public office and violate the terms of its trust" (p. 71); Douglas Crimp testified at the hearing "not as a
professional but simply as a member of the public"
director of the
(p. 73); Suzanne Delehanty,
Neuberger Museum of the State University of New
York at Purchase and a member of the original National Endowment for the Arts nominating panel,
testified that their decisions were informed by "a
principle that has guided public art since antiquity-the spirit of place" (p. 83); Benjamin Buchloch, professor of art history, testified that he did not "feel
confident to judge the public's taste [or] the public's
dislike of and discomfort with [ Tilted Arc]" (p. 91);
Annette Michelson, professor of Cinema Studies, ad-
dressed"the notion of public interest as it relatesto
the situationat hand,"arguingthat "Serra'swork has
alwaysbeen public"and that it was constructedin a
tradition that "redefinedsculpturalpracticeand its
theorization [through]large-scale,publicly oriented
and publiclychallengingworks"(p. 95); artistFrank
Stella addressed"theextension of visual culture into
public spaces," concerned that "no public dispute
should force the gratuitous destruction of any ...
civilizing effort"(p. 100); William Rubin, Director
of the Departmentof Painting and Sculptureat the
Museum of Modern Art, testified that Tilted Arc
"obligesus to questionreceivedvaluesin general,and
the nature of art and art's relation to the public in
particular"(p. 101); Roberta Smith declared that
TiltedArcwas "one of the two best public sculptures
in New YorkCity"(p. 103); Betty St. Clair,an attorney, noted that "in the public sphere the privacyissue doesn't exist. Once a piece of sculptureis erected
in the public spherethereis no longerany privacyinterest"(p. 106).
SpeakingagainstTiltedArc,JessieGray,an artist, complainedthat "ourpublicmoneyis beingsquandered"(p. 121); Peter Hirsch, an attorney,declared
that "thepublic has not been given [the choice to buy
artthat it likes] .... The publicis saying,we don't like
[TiltedArc]"(p. 123);MargoJacobs,a physicalanthropologist,spoketo the panel"asa memberof the public" and addressed"the sculpture'seffect . . . on the
public and the plaza, the public's space,"which was
"designed... as a placefor . . . publicassembly,"the
effectiveness of which, she argued, was reduced by
TiltedArc(p. 124);ShirleyParis,an areaemployeewho
decriedTiltedArcas "theBerlinWall of FoleySquare,"
demandedthat FederalPlazabe returnedto its "original state:that of a publicamenity"(p. 126). Afterthe
hearings,in his letterto the chief GeneralServicesAdministrationadministratoraccountingfor his decision
to remove TiltedArc,William Diamond invoked the
"public"nineteentimes (pp. 142-49).
64. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp.
50-51.
65. Ibid., p. 319.
66. Benhabib,"Modelsof PublicSpace,"p. 86.
67. Jiirgen Habermas, "Modernity-An Inp.
completeProject,"in Hal Foster,ed., Anti-Aesthetic,
113; and RichardRorty, Contingency,
Irony,and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), p. 67.
68. Rorty, Contingency,Irony,and Solidarity,
p. 67.
69. Ibid., p. 68. Reason's "other," Rorty
writes, includes "the passions, Nietzsche's will to
power, [and] Heidegger's Being."
70. Ibid., pp. 68-69.
71. See Michael J. Shapiro, "Language and
Power: The Spaces of Critical Interpretation" and
"Spatiality and Policy Discourse: Reading the Global
City," in Michael J. Shapiro, Reading the Postmodern
Polity: Political Theoryas Textual Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 1-17
and 86-103, respectively.
72. For the seminal discussion of panopticism,
see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 195-228.
73. Anna C. Chave, "Minimalism and the
Rhetoric of Power," Arts Magazine 64 (June 1990): 56.
74. J. Habermas, "Concluding Remarks," in
Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp.
477-78.
75. Take, for example, Alfred Hitchcock's film
Rear Window. Slavoj Zizek notes that "the fascinating
object that drives the interpretive movement"-Jeff's
(James Stewart's) obsessive voyeurism, his rejection of
Lisa (Grace Kelly), his determination to expose the
murder he believes has taken place in the apartment
across the courtyard-"is ultimately the gaze itself."
(Slavoj Zizek, LookingAwry: An Introduction toJacques
Lacan through Popular Culture [Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991], p. 91.) Stewart plays a middle-aged, action photographer confined to his New York apartment by a work-related accident that leaves him in a
cast up to his waist. "Rear Window," Zizek continues,
"is ultimately the story of a subject who eludes a sexual
relation by transforming his effective impotence into
power by means of the gaze, by means of secret observation. ... What we encounter here is . .. one of
Hitchcock's fundamental 'complexes,' the interconnection of the gaze and the couple power/impotence.
In this respect, Rear Window reads like an ironic reversal of Bentham's 'Panopticon' as exploited by Foucault.
For Bentham, the horrifying efficacy of the Panopticon
is due to the fact that the subjects (prisoners, patients,
schoolboys, factory workers) can never know for sure if
they are actually observed from the all-seeing control
tower-this very uncertainty intensifies the feeling of
menace, of the impossibility of escape from the gaze of
the Other. In Rear Window, the inhabitants of the
apartments across the yard are actually observed all the
time by Stewart's watchful eye, but far from being terrorized, they simply ignore it and go on with their daily
business. On the contrary, it is Stewart himself, the
center of the Panopticon, its all-pervasive eye, who is
terrorized, constantly looking out the window, anxious
76
not to miss some crucialdetail"(p. 92). Thereis more
to be said about this relationship,to be sure.Not unimportantis Stewart'suse of optical technology(first
binoculars,then a huge telephotolens) to furtherpenetratethe rearwindowsacrossfrom his. Referencesin
note 85 addressthe psychoanalyticdimensionsof optical instrumentswith respectto the uncanny.Also see
Krauss,OpticalUnconscious.
76. Norman Bryson, "The Gaze in the ExpandedField,"in Hal Foster,ed., Visionand Visuality
(Seattle:Bay Press, 1988), pp. 88-92, 95.
77. EdwardD. Re, ChiefJudge,U.S. Courtof
InternationalTrade) in a letter to GeraldP. Carmen,
Administrator,GeneralServicesAdministration,Aug.
and Buskirk,Destruction
18, 1981, in Weyergraf-Serra
of TiltedArc,p. 26.
78. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and
MentalLife,"in RichardSennett,ed., ClassicEssayson
the Cultureof Cities(EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1969), p. 51.
79. JacquesLacan,TheFourFundamentalConed. Jacques-AlainMiller,trans.
ceptsofPsycho-Analysis,
Alan Sheridan(New York:Norton, 1978), p. 88.
80. Do we count Judge Re-or any of the
nearlyfour thousandsignatureson the petition for its
relocation-among the passersbyTiltedArc presupposes? See Bois, "PicturesqueStroll around ClaraClara," p. 346.
81. RichardSerra,in "SelectedStatementArguing in Supportof Tilted Arc,"in Weyergraf-Serra
and Buskirk,eds., Destructionof TiltedArc,pp. 65-66.
82. Mladen Dolar, "'I Shall Be with You on
YourWedding-Night':Lacanand the Uncanny,"October58 (Fall 1991): 6.
83. G. Simmel, "Metaphysicaof Death," in
Essayson Interpretationand Social Science(Totowa,
1980), from an epigraph above Part 1 of David
Leatherbarrow,TheRootsofArchitecturalConvention:
Site, Enclosure,Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge
UniversityPress, 1993), p. 7.
84. Dolar, "Lacanand the Uncanny,"p. 10.
RichardSennett would not sufferthis readingof the
work:"I disagreewith the idea that thereis an unconscious to artand architecturewhich unleashesthe uncannyor the unexpectedin the city when it is analyzed
by people like myself. I think preciselythat the problem for artistswho aremakingpublicart,publicsculpture,public architectureis that the repressiveactivities
that are alwaysbound up in making form have now
been marshaled,mobilizedand become functionalin
society. The repressionsthat a sculptorwould engage
with-or more particularlythat an architectwould
engagewith-are things that areunderstoodby other
people as the way buildingsshould look, the way they
should function."(RichardSennett,"RichardSennett
with BruceFergusen,"interviewby BruceFergusen,in
JamesLingwood,ed., New Worksfor DifferentPlaces:
TWSAFour CitiesProject[Bristol,England:TWSA,
1990], pp. 143-45.)
85. See Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in
Works
TheStandard
EditionoftheComplete
Psychological
trans.anded. JamesStrachey,vol. 17
ofSigmundFreud,
(London:HogarthPress, 1955), pp. 219-56; E.T.A.
Hoffman,"TheSandman,"in TalesofHoffinann,trans.
R. J. Hollingdale(New York:PenguinBooks, 1982),
pp. 85-125; and,generally,AnthonyVidler, TheArchitecturalUncanny:Essaysin theModernUnhomely
(Cambridge,MA:MIT Press,1992).
The paragraphcontinues:"Frankenstein's
storyagain
reveals this simply and efficiently. The principal
source of the uncanninessof the monster, for Frankenstein, is preciselythe gaze. It is the being of the
gaze. The point that Frankenstein cannot endure,
during the creation of the monster, is the moment
when the creatureopens its eyes,when the Thing renders the gaze-it is this opening that makes it the
Thing. When seeing 'those wateryeyes, that seemed
almost the same color as the dun-white sockets in
which they were set,' Frankensteinruns awayin horror. But the gaze comes to pursue him in his bedroom; the monstercomes to his bedside-'his eyes, if
eyes they may be called, were set on me.' The emergence of this impossible subject is the emergenceof
the gaze-the opening of a hole in reality which is
immediatelyalso that which comes to fill it with an
unbearablepresence, with a being more being then
being, vacuumandplenitudoall in one, the plenitude
the directresultof the emptiness."
87. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca:
Cornell UniversityPress, 1985), p. 70.
88. Bryson,"Gazein the ExpandedField,"pp.
88-92, 95.
89. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan,
JacquesLacanand
thePhilosophyofPsychoanalysis
(Urbana:Universityof
Illinois Press, 1986), p. 158.
90. Lacan, "The Line and Light," in Lacan,
FourFundamentalConceptsof Psycho-Analysis,
p. 103.
91. Ragland-Sullivan,
JacquesLacan,p. 95.
92. Lacan,"The Line and Light,"p. 89.
93. Harold Bloom, "Six RevisionaryRatios,"
in Harold Bloom, Poeticsof Influence,ed. John Hollander (New Haven, CT: Henry R. Schwab, 1988),
pp. 101-3.
94. Griswold,"VietnamVeteransMemorial,"
p. 81.
77
The Poetry
95. SarahJ. Rogers,"Public/Private:
and Proseof Maya Lin,"in MayaLin:Public/Private,
catalogof the exhibition,Oct. 17, 1993-Jan.23, 1994
(Columbus:WexnerCenterfor the Arts, 1994), p. 12.
p. 319.
97. Ibid., p. 320.
98. Mitchell, "Violenceof PublicArt,"p. 37.
99. Chave, "Minimalismand the Rhetoricof
Power,"p. 54.
101. Mark Alden Branch, "MayaLin: After
Architecture
the Wall,"Progressive
(Aug. 1994): 63.
102. Chave,"Minimalismand the Rhetoricof
Power,"pp. 55-56.
103. Jon R. Snyder, "Translator'sIntroduction," in Gianni Vattimo, TheEnd ofModernity:Niin PostmodernCulture,trans.
hilismand Hermeneutics
J.R. Snyder (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), p. Iv.
104. The ability of the life-world"to become
able to developinstitutionsout of itselfwhich set limits to the internaldynamicsand imperativesof an almost autonomous economic system and its
administrativecomplements . . ." (Habermas,"Modernity-An IncompleteProject,"p. 13.)
105. Paul Virilio, "The OverexposedCity,"
trans. Astrid Hustved, from L'espacecritique(Paris:
Christian Bourgois, 1984), reprinted in Zone 1/2
(n.d.): 29.
106. Richard Serra, interview, in
"Conversazione con Richard Serra a Milano," in
Domus662 (June 1985): 77.
107. Storr, "'Tilted Arc': Enemy of the
People?"p. 92.
109. Virilio, "OverexposedCity,"p. 29.
110. XavierCosta,"Large-Scale
Barcelona:The
City and Its Architectureafterthe Olympics,"in Practices3/4 (Spring 1995): 56-63. See also MarcAuge,
Non-lieux: Introduction a une anthropologiede la
surmodernite
(Paris:Seuil, 1992), to which Costarefers
in this discussion.This assessmentcorroboratesGeorg
Simmel'sdescriptionof overabundancein his 1896 essay, "TheBerlinTradeExhibition":"'Theclose proximity within which the most heterogeneousindustrial
productsareconfinedproducesa paralysisin the capacity for perception,a truehypnosis.... In its fragmentation of weak impressions there remains in the
memorythe notion that one should be amusedhere.'
Any sensitiveperson'will be overpoweredand feel disorientedby the masseffectof what is offeredhere.'Yet
'preciselythis wealth and colourfulnessof over-hastenedimpressionsis appropriate
to over-excitedandex-
Friedman
hausted nerves' need for stimulation."' (Quoted in
DavidFrisby,"GeorgSimmel:FirstSociologistof Modernity,"in Theory,Culture,and Society2 [1985]: 61.)
111. Costa, "Large-Scale
Barcelona."
112. PaulVirilio, "GrayEcology,"in Cynthia
C. Davidson, ed., Anywhere(New York: Rizzoli,
1992), p. 189.
113. Gianni Vattimo, "Philosophy of the
City,"Epaulinos6 (1986): 4-5.
119. Franco Rella, "The Atopy of the Modp. 320.
115. Ibid.
ern,"in GiovannaBorradori,ed., RecodingMetaphys116. Krauss,"RichardSerraSculpture,"p. 28. ics: The New Italian Philosophy (Evanston, IL:
117. Frisby,"GeorgSimmel,"p. 61. See also NorthwesternUniversityPress,1988), pp. 141-142.
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York:A Retroactive
121. Rella,p. 142.
Manifestofor Manhattan(New York:Oxford University Press,1978).
118. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded
Field,"p. 39.
78

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