Public Art

Q1) On page 63, Kwon quoted Moore saying that he “don’t like doing commissions in the sense that [he] go and look at a site and then think of something.” His idea of the “modernist public sculptures were conceived as autonomous works of art whose relationship to the site was at best incidental.” He argued further on that “to display the sculpture to its best advantage outdoors, it must be set so that it relates to the sky…only the sky miles away, allows us to contrast infinity with reality…” What I get from his argument is that the site is irrelevant to the artwork and that you can place it anywhere under the sky. As long as there is contrast with the sky, any surrounding elements don’t matter. However, doesn’t this totally deny the theories of site-specificity? If relationships of the sculptures and the surroundings are “incidental”, then wouldn’t the site be of utterly no significance?

Q2) Kwon talked about how Serra’s Tilted Arc “rejected the then widespread tendency of public sculpture to accommodate architectural design” on page 72. He claimed that sculptures must be “non-utilitarian, non-functional”, following “an interruptive and interventionist model…opposed to an integrationist or assimilative one”. Here, is Serra implicitly accusing architecture of being “tokens” of “governmental, corporate, educational, and religious institutions”? His argument is that in order to be critical of the surrounding institutions on the site, an artist must distance away from positive interactions with architecture. Is the two truly contradictory? Can you not follow an “integrationist or assimilative [model]” while “manifest[ing] a judgment about the larger social and political context of which they are a part” (74) ?