Tilted Arc was created by Richard Serra and was a public art installation in Foley Square, Manhattan.

Result #1

It consists of steel and plastic wrapping tape that is stretched between two raised stainless steel poles, half-naked, and one suspended from a string along one corner, and a loose steel rod that projects outward from one pole toward a large round stain (Foley Square Sign) at the center. The range of colors, from the hard-edge to the frayed, looks like the natural spectrum; the liquid latex covering the lines would look like eggshells or gauze.Serra has called his work and installation documents of the pre-art world; a sense of place, a sense of time. He has also used film, video, and photography to evoke his work. Serra had not only to take his objects to the gallery, but he had to travel. This suggests that the artists motivations for making a sign, a sign, and even a live installation, which meant traveling, were distinct from his motivation for making a work. One of the signs has been repeatedly erased: It still seems to be scribbled on the wall and it still looks like a photograph—it is merely a symbol of the passing moment of the artist who has chosen to make an icon of himself. Serra has no time for time, for monumentality. He wants to bring to life what is coming, he has said. With this work, Serra shows himself to be as confused as the artist he is.

Result #2

Tilted Arc was created by Richard Serra and was a public art installation in Foley Square, Manhattan. The piece comprised a series of nine groups of twelve (respectively) slightly different stones and the slightly different color of the individual stones, a sign of the way nature is distorted by time. The groupings were of the same size, so that on average the groups of the same size occupied approximately the same piece of ground. A function of time was obvious: when the groups of the same size began to diverge into any group, they were numbered, whereas those of the other group were the same and never numbered. The groupings remained the same from one group to the other. The relationship was constant until it became almost totally impossible to tell whether the stones were in progress or in progress. The link to past performances was clearly present, as though a second hand had already appeared. The six stones found in the corners of the square were the endpoints of an earlier sequence of stones found there. They became the gesture of a repetition. The relationship between the stones was a strictly syntactical one, and the resulting clusters of anodyne rocks (each numbered one) in the corners occupied approximately one third of the allotted surface area of the piece. What Serra found when he looked at the stones was a determination to give the new stones a certain formal rigidity that they would not yield to the effort of going against their nature, and so they remained the clusters of clusters that Serra had experienced at the 4 P.M. show. The four clusters of stones in the same corner were the very first stones found by the artist, making it seem as if Serra had discovered his form.The structural consequences of the relationship between the clusters of stones in the corners and the six groupings of stones in the corners were apparent from the very outset. The clusters of stones were the crude, unsexy, unfashionable debris of nature, and Serra had to remove all of these bits of scrap material to complete the work.

Result #3

Tilted Arc was created by Richard Serra and was a public art installation in Foley Square, Manhattan. The piece consists of a circular steel rod that is tilted at a 45-degree angle from the floor into the gallery. A ring of big pegs is placed in front of the circle. The same pegs are now carefully held by two sticks, a rope and a tall pole. The pegs move in a wide arc. A rope is set over the pole and it is possible to see through the top of the pole to the floor. The floor and the ceiling and the ceiling all have a sense of permanence and impermanence.A similar installation was created for the 18th New York Biennial by the American Academy of Arts. The installation consists of a large round pool of water with sand between the sand and the wire fence. The pool has a sense of permanence and impermanence and a sense of permanent movement. The piece is about the embodiment of nature. The round pool becomes a permanent monument and signifies a permanent activity. It is a combination of discrete objects which can be looked at and felt as if they were within their own territory. It is a permanent monument which symbolically and conceptually defines the continuous flow of the individual. The rounded pool symbolizes the human activity of creating monuments and it symbolizes a native art form.The important distinctions Serra and De Maria emphasize in this installation are: 1) both use natural materials and are involved with an aggressive, expressionist notion of art; 2) the pieces are far more intimate than earlier installations; and 3) the elements are wholly calculated to create a sense of depth. Some of the pieces have a solid grounding and are solid; others are supported on thin metal poles. The pole is not a tool or a stand but a metaphor and stands for the metaphorical point of view of the spectator. Serra also uses a pole as a stand.

Result #4

Tilted Arc was created by Richard Serra and was a public art installation in Foley Square, Manhattan. This large horizontal slab was covered with black velvet (the material most commonly used in floor covering) and lined with slabs of two-by-fours and some hardboard, glued onto the gallery floor. This sculptural concoction was related to the deadpan Duchampian insouciant, to which this large structure seems to refer, but also read as a direct rebuke to Abstract Expressionism. Here Serra had cut into two of the three-dimensional wall slabs to produce a slat form—a working square—on one side and had mounted them flush with the gallery floor. But in these sheets, he had placed a few of the three-dimensional objects, all fashioned from these same materials, which are just as fragile as the real masonry slabs on which they were originally plastered. The works included were three arched limestone blocks (one bearing a simple pinewood veneer), a crude rectangle (two sizes), and an elliptical piece of synthetic clay (mixed media) and quartz (all mixed medium). Their approximate thickness and sturdiness could be inferred from the faux-biomorphic tracings on the blue Velvet Lounge piece, also in the show. Also in the exhibition were two of Serra's most recent, small-scale granite sculptures, thus the pair of lines of the arched slabs in Foley Square had been transformed into two of his Slate Piece, 2005.This recent self-reflexivity seems to have been a major component of the new sculptures—each piece took its title from a phenomenon or incident in Serra's life, from his discovery of the mineral kunolith (platinum-lead-silver) to his relationships with his late father, Allan Kaprow. The connection was an obvious one, and it was confirmed by the fact that the three new sculptures, a crude rectangle, a rough rectangle with a side cut out, and a thin round slab of gravel, are all titled Yes.

Result #5

Tilted Arc was created by Richard Serra and was a public art installation in Foley Square, Manhattan. After a small accounting of the sources for the pieces, however, the discursive arguments behind their creation seem entirely the result of their location. For one thing, the work does not seem connected to a larger ideological agenda, much less an ongoing debate. It doesnt make reference to a political event (i.e., they are not planned to be political) but, rather, seems to comment on the place in which their site has been determined by the monuments design. For another, the environmental concerns of the piece are not taken up—it seems likely that Serra would have found it appropriate to let it be. A third point is that the massiveness of the work is itself a comment on our day-to-day lives, and as such is critical, even amusing, and thus carries with it political baggage.What makes the project so difficult to cite is that the installation is set in a public space. Yet what makes it more problematic is that it looks like the drawing that it is. Only a handful of the 150 photographs contain any reference to the official site, and those that do seem to exist are associated with other, nonofficial documentation of events (e.g., the view from atop Mt. Wilson and other official sites). These photographs allude to the official space of the site, but in that context they are lost, and those that are still extant show us the sites original design. The work feels like a commentary on the separation of fact from fiction, a critique of the very premise of a public art installation.If there is a critique implicit in this installation, it is one of perspective. With this in mind, the pieces are effective only when seen from the vantage of the spectators own perspective, i.e., from the vantage that points to what is depicted. In this way they do not address their own site, but only that space as a mediation between us and the official site.