Fine 319: Richard Serra/Before the Post-

Richard Serra's One Ton Prop thrills me. I've always liked the concept of the sublime, and I think that this piece really captures it in a very simple way. No illusion of gazing off a cliff: simply four pieces of sheet metal (of course, it's Serra) that are barely balancing off of one another. This thing could fall on you if you got too close. J'adore.

But then we have the debacle regarding his 1981 piece Tilted Arc. Reading up on this, it got me thinking: a lot of Serra's public works are ugly. Not even sublime... just flat-out ugly. Of course that's besides the point --not even the point-- but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of people weren't on his side when the courts were debating the piece's removal. We're supposed to contemplate the 'thingness of the thing'. But what happens when the thing itself is ugly?

Compare this to Cloud Gate in Chicago. People love Anish Kapoor's 2004 sculpture; always taking pictures of it, surrounding it, laughing at it, hugging it. The difference between these pieces is the difference between Minimal Art and Post-Minimalism.

Minimal Art revelled in the ready-made, the factory-shipped, the found, the boring, and the sublime. Post-Minimalism takes stripped-down, clean aesthetics and transforms it into something else: rather than dogmatically avoiding any references or any notion of beauty, many of these Post-Minimalists have no fear of fixing something up to make it look better, or even alluding to the outside world. Cloud Gate was painstakingly polished to remove any trace of its construction, creating this otherworldly magical bean that seems to have fallen out of the sky. Its surface distorts images and creates a void, recalling metaphysical or spiritual ideas. People come up with all sorts of theories about what it "means" -- something that I'm sure many Minimal artists would be horrified at.

I've just started to read Lyotard's Post-modern Condition, and this evolution from the minimal to the post-minimal strangely recalls some of his theories of post-modernity. Minimal Art seemed to have a dogma, something that the Post-minimalists have shunned. Does this represent part of the post-modern rejection of absolutism and the embracing of pluralism? Hmm!