The Histrionics
Douglas Crimp

back to useless steel in the mall

To artist page

I am an art critic and editor of the cultural journal October, but I want to speak here not as a professional but simply as a member of the public, and specifically as a member of the community who lives and works in the vicinity of Tilted Arc. When I look out the window of my appartment and am confronted by the stark ugliness of the Federal Building, I am somewhat consoled by the fact that one-half of one percent of the price of its ugliness paid for what I experience as the most interesting and beautiful public sculpture in my neighborhood.

But my experience evidently differs from that of many other people who live and work near Tilted Arc, and I cannot easily dismiss this difference of opinion. Nor can I easily change this difference of opinion. What I can do is say how I think this difference of opinion is being used. For I believe that this hearing is a calculated manipulation of the public of Tilted Arc in which we are asked to line up as enemies: on the one side those who love it, and on the other those who hate it and wish to destroy it. This hearing does not attempt to build a commonality of interest in art in the public realm. This is not a hearing about the social function that art might have in our lives; rather, it is a hearing convened by a government administrator who seems to believe that art and social function are antithetical, that art has no social function.

What makes me feel so manipulated is that I am forced to argue for art as against some other social function. I am asked to line up on the side of sculpture, against, say, those who are on the side of concerts, or perhaps picnic tables. It is a measure of the meager nature of our public social life that the public is asked to fight it out, in a travesty of democratic procedure, over the crumbs of social experience. I believe that we have been polarized here in order that we not notice the real issue: the fact that our social experience is deliberately and drastically limited by our public officials.

The view of us -the public- that is really held by those who have covened this hearing can be discerned from a passage in a letter from Chief Judge Edward Re, who has been leading the fight to remove Tilted Arc since the day it was erected. Judge Re writes, "Finally, but by no means of minor importance, is the loss of efficient security surveillance. The placement of this wall across the plaza obscures the view of security personnel who have no way of knowing what is taking place on the other side of the wall." Well, I would submit that it is we -the public- who are on the other side of the wall, and it is we whom the Judge so fears and despises that he wants that wall torn down in order that we may be properly subjected to surveillance. It is no small measure of the success of Tilted Arc that it has elicited this repugnant view of the public and brought it into the public realm. I urge that we keep this wall in place and that we construct our social experience in relation to it, that is, out of the sights of those who would conceive of social life as something to be feared, despised and surveyed.