tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146527096414447503.post7458891567581967761..comments2023-08-06T04:00:43.922-04:00Comments on Central Intelligence Art: Serra, Serra: last callUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146527096414447503.post-64350624861543904192007-07-16T16:23:00.000-04:002007-07-16T16:23:00.000-04:00Mr. Weil, my superiors are quite pleased with my r...Mr. Weil, my superiors are quite pleased with my report on your handling of the Serra problem. We commend you for the mystification inherent in the assertion that “the work functions on its own,” which not only negates the artist’s intentions but more importantly helps us in obscuring the fact that it is we and our corporate masters who determine how the work functions. <BR/><BR/>Your strategy also successfully disempowers the viewer and nullifies, to our delight, the experiences, not to mention the hopes, of poor viewers like Nathan and JCS, only to supplant those experiences with the assertedly more valid responses of critics in the industry. <BR/><BR/>Finally, having negated artistic intent and viewers’ own interpretations of art in favor, first, of mystification and, second, of the business of criticism, you pose questions by Benjamin and Marcuse that are both premised, in one way or another, on the supposed political “tendency” or “function” of the work. As posed, those questions reinforce the idea that the work “functions on its own” and is not subject to specific political-economic forces and strategies pursued by real people with real power, except perhaps professional critics, some of whom we employ or control.<BR/><BR/>Well done! You are at last beginning the earn that rather extravagant per diem they afford you.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146527096414447503.post-59453040059438218292007-07-08T15:25:00.000-04:002007-07-08T15:25:00.000-04:00Although the critical establishment has effectivel...Although the critical establishment has effectively canonized the dimension of performativity evidenced in Serra’s legal battles (see R. Krauss), it does not erase the presence of an object that ultimately exists as an instrument of a system of connoisseurship. Whether that object exists as a physical object or an object of discourse, its flirtation with ontological ambiguity does not directly translate into the work’s possession of a social function. <BR/><BR/>In the case of Hirst’s diamond skull, the supporting documents that assure the buyer of the ethical origin of the work’s materials imbue the works with a certain absurd self-consciousness. Does this self-consciousness in itself constitute a critical gesture? After reading your post, I would guess not.M Mitchellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04664602224188461889noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146527096414447503.post-62585579665624933422007-07-07T09:29:00.000-04:002007-07-07T09:29:00.000-04:00Serra, Serra, Serra. . . whatever will be will be....Serra, Serra, Serra. . . whatever will be will be.<BR/><BR/>In Juli Carson’s essay about Richard Serra’s <I>Tilted Arc</I> and its demise, <I>1989</I>, she states that with Serra’s publication of <I>The Destruction of “Tilted Arc,”</I> his obdurate, machismo, sculpture’s presence had become <I>“inextricably bound up with the rhetoric from which it was conceived (late modernist, phenomenological notions of site-specificity) and to which it contributed (postmodernist notions of the discursive site).”</I> She then continues with: <I>“For the ‘object’ destroyed was the very one borne within the modernist dialectic over a work’s physical site-specificity, bound up, as it were, in the logic of transcendence - a dialectic between a work seen to transcend any physical union with its site and a work seen to transcend any physical contradiction with its site.”</I><BR/><BR/>I believe this is a rather elegant consideration of both Serra (the sculptor) and <I>Tilted Arc</I>, (the sculpture), as physical, now mythological, “objects” hatched from those “late modernist” ideas of art and artists that transcend their location, whose ironic return now as “placeless” objects, freed of their earth-bound presence and encapsulated within postmodern discursivity.<BR/><BR/>Further still, Carson’s archaeological analysis of Serra (by way of Derrida) as <I>origin</I> (the Father) of <I>Tilted Arc</I> (the Son) is an especially useful and poetic analysis if we consider that his sculpture has transcended the physicality of Federal Plaza and has sustained new life within a discursive site further supported by Serra’s overtly virile machinations about his continued right to impose large-scale, territorial sculpture.Mark Cameron Boydhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04697922195376438088noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146527096414447503.post-47213913329393832007-07-06T11:53:00.000-04:002007-07-06T11:53:00.000-04:00You give yourself away, Mr. Weil, with the reprodu...You give yourself away, Mr. Weil, with the reproduced photo. Our intel leads us to believe it's not so much the cowboy as it is the cigarette. Having some trouble with abstinence? Making you a bit irascible?<BR/><BR/>Still, nice argument -- though I'm supposed to avoid matters of substance on this assignment.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com