Abstract
This essay looks to re-evaluate sculptor Richard Serra’s famous claim that “to remove the work is to destroy it.” Using OOO, and particularly Graham Harman’s interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis, in order to analyze the now famous moment when Tilted Arc was de-installed from Federal Plaza, Manhattan in 1989, this paper argues that the work was not in fact destroyed but rather that its ontological autonomy was even more absolutely revealed in that moment as such. Although it is the case that art objects and sites are prone to discursive co-construction and evaluation, it is this analysis’ claim that they both are possessive of a deep, substantive form also, a form resistant to appropriation. Tilted Arc therefore revealed something even more insidious and dangerous to those who opposed it than the power of art to speak back to its surroundings. Rather, it uncovered the substantive objecthood of the site itself.
References
Harman, Graham. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 183-203.10.1353/nlh.2012.0016Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. Dante’s Broken Hammer: The Ethics, Aesthetics, and Metaphysics of Love. A Repeater Books paperback original. ed. London: Repeater Books, 2016.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Penguin Books, 2018.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. The Third Table. Kassel: 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 085, 2012.Search in Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. “Materialism is Not the Solution.” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 47 (2016): 94-110.10.7146/nja.v24i47.23057Search in Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.Search in Google Scholar
Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.10.7551/mitpress/5138.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Serra, Richard. “Tilted Arc Destroyed.” In Richard Serra: Writing Interviews. London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 Emily Dickson, published by De Gruyter Open
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.