All articles by this author
On Frederick Wiseman
As much as we may want their subjects to be actors in the historical sense, there are no individuals; there is only society, plainly laid out for us to see. There are always “characters,” but their significance lies in the way they intersect with and illuminate social structure. They never motivate action — what they do instead is perform (and sometimes declaim) the logics under which they operate.
April 11, 2025
Richard Serra and his sites
Perceptive critics noted early on that Serra’s sculpture only made sense in relation to its time and place and gave meaning only to those specific conditions against which it unfolded. Serra insisted on as much himself. We might apply such a phenomenological approach, or better yet, a deambulatory one (as the very eminent art historian Yve-Alain Bois proposed when both of their careers were still in their youth, in 1983), to the work as a whole: a “picturesque stroll” through the landscapes, predominantly urban, that Serra punctuated, demarcated, and ultimately produced or dominated as his work found a privileged place in our late-modern world. Revisiting the public sculpture, as emplaced in the contexts or sites it has specifically confronted, and as these have unfurled around the work, we can see how it frames our cultural and social investments in urban space: what is hostile and what is safe, what is art and what is industry, what moves and what stays put.
