In the 1980s, Serra found himself in the center of a public controversy over his piece titled Tilted Arc. While it was the government that approached him to create the work for downtown Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, the unveiling of the piece in 1981 was met with sharp criticism. The monumental sculpture was said to disrupt rush hour and the pedestrians who had to cut through the plaza daily. To the dismay of art lovers, the 120-foot-long, 12-foot-tall Tilted Arc was ultimately disassembled in 1989.
I have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, and have described my blog as a kind of garden. But lately I’ve been revisiting the architecture/gardening distinction and I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advanced and built to specifications. Rather, writing a blog over a period of years is something like building the Watts Towers.
Simon Rodi didn’t have a plan, didn’t even have a purpose: he just started building. His work was sustained and extended by bricolage, the acquisition and deployment of found objects – and not just any objects, but objects that the world had discarded as useless, as filth. You put something in here, then something else, you discover, fits there … over time you get something big and with a discernible shape. Not the regular shape envisioned in architectural drawings, but nevertheless something that can be pleasing or at least interesting to look at – an organic and irregular shape. A geometry of irregular forms.