Art since 1950 (ch 33)

Robert Rauschenberg: Canyon

1959 Assemblage -Different parts-stuffed bird (found object), bag of sand hanging off-posters, aluminum-a little bit of collage, sculpture, -In 1955, Rauschenberg began a series of assemblages that he called combines because they blended features of both painting and sculpture. CANYON (FIG. 33-3) incorporates old family photos, a picture of the Statue of Liberty, bits of newsprint, and political posters alongside ordinary objects like a flattened steel drum adhered to the work's surface. Other elements, including a stuffed eagle and a dirty pillow suspended by a piece of wood, project into the real space of the viewer. Rauschenberg added dripping splashes of paint to his composition as well, an ironic reference to Abstract Expressionist Action painting. Similar to Johns's more conceptual approach, Rauschenberg combined imagery from popular culture and avant-garde painting to undermine the idea of an autonomous art.

Yves Klein: Leap into the Void

1960 Performance in his carefully choreographed paintings in which he used nude female models dipped in blue paint as paintbrushes, Klein's photomontage paradoxically creates the impression of freedom and abandon through a highly contrived process. In October 1960, Klein hired the photographers Harry Shunk and Jean Kender to make a series of pictures re-creating a jump from a second-floor window that the artist claimed to have executed earlier in the year. This second leap was made from a rooftop in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses. On the street below, a group of the artist's friends from held a tarpaulin to catch him as he fell. Two negatives--one showing Klein leaping, the other the surrounding scene (without the tarp)--were then printed together to create a seamless "documentary" photograph. To complete the illusion that he was capable of flight, Klein distributed a fake broadsheet at Parisian newsstands commemorating the event. It was in this mass-produced form that the artist's seminal gesture was communicated to the public and also notably to the Vienna Actionists.

Warhol: Marilyn Diptych

1962 Pop Art Altar: our new saints are the famous and beautiful -1962 was Marilyn's death by suicide. is one of a series of silkscreens that he made immediately after the actress's death. Warhol memorializes the screen image of Monroe, using a famous publicity photograph transferred directly onto silkscreen, thus rendering it flat and bland so that Monroe's signature features—her bleach-blond hair, her ruby lips, and her sultry, blue-eyeshadowed eyes—stand out as a caricature of the actress. The face portrayed is not that of Norma Jeane (Monroe's real name) but of Marilyn, the celluloid sex symbol as made over by the movie industry. Warhol made multiple prints from this screen, aided—as he was in many of his works—by a host of assistants working with assemblyline efficiency. In 1965, Warhol ironically named his studio "The Factory," further highlighting the commercial aspect of his art. The Marilyn Diptych, however, has deeper undertones. The diptych format carries religious connotations (see "Altars and Altarpieces" in Chapter 19 on page 579), perhaps implying that Monroe was a martyred saint or goddess in the pantheon of departed movie stars. In another print, Warhol surrounded her head with the gold background used in Orthodox religious icons. Additionally, the flat and undifferentiated Monroes on the colored left side of the diptych contrast with those in black and white on the right side, which fade progressively as they are printed and reprinted without re-inking the screen until all that remains of the original portrait is the ghostly image of a disappearing person.

Warhol: Brillo

1964 Pop Art -Warhol was one of the first artists to exploit the realization that while the mass media—television in particular— seem to bring us closer to the world, they actually allow us to observe the world only as detached voyeurs, not real participants. We become desensitized to death and disaster by the constant repetition of images on television, which we are able literally to switch off at any time. While Warhol's Marilyn Diptych is similarly repetitive, superficial, and bland, it exploits these traits that, in the mass media, might desensitize us to the full impact of the actress's tragic life. Warhol, known for his quotable phrases, once said, "I am a deeply superficial person." But the apparent superficiality of his art seems shrewdly profound. In 1964, in his first sculptural project, BRILLO SOAP PADS BOXES, Warhol hired carpenters to create plywood boxes identical in size and shape to the cardboard cartons used to ship boxes of Brillo soap pads to supermarkets. By silkscreening onto these boxes the logos and texts that appeared on the actual cartons, the artist created what were essentially useless replicas of commercial packaging. Stacking the fabricated boxes in piles, Warhol transformed the interior space of the Stable Gallery in New York into what looked like a grocery stockroom, simultaneously pointing to the commercial foundation of the art gallery system and critiquing the nature of art.

Roy Lichtenstein: Oh Jeff...I Love you too...But...

1964 Pop Art -Taking the cheap style of cartoons in comics -Bring low art to these art galleries Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) also investigated the ways that popular imagery resonated with high art, imitating the format of comic books in his critique of massproduced visual culture. In 1961, while teaching at Rutgers University with Allan Kaprow, Lichtenstein began to make paintings based on panels from war and romance comic books. He cropped and simplified the source images to focus on dramatic emotions or actions, simultaneously representing and parodying the flat, superficial ways in which comic books of the time graphically communicated with their readers. His use of heavy black outlines, flat primary colors, and hand-painted Benday dots like those used in commercial printing ironically replicate the mechanical character of cartoons. OH, JEFF... I LOVE YOU TOO... BUT...compresses into a single frame a romantic storyline involving a crisis threatening a love relationship. Lichtenstein plays a witty game: We know that comic books are often unrealistically melodramatic, yet he presents this overblown episode vividly, almost reverently, enshrined in a work of high art.

Joseph Kosuth: One and Three Chairs

1965 Conceptual Art Conceptual Art found inspiration in both Fluxus and Minimalism, especially in art's relationship to systems of communication. Artists like Joseph Kosuth rejected traditional aesthetics and employed language itself as a medium for art. Drawing on the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the study of semiotics, Kosuth explored the role of visual signs to communicate meaning in ONE AND THREE CHAIRS . He illustrated this idea by juxtaposing a wooden chair, a photograph of a chair, and a printed definition of the word "chair" in the dictionary. The installation showed the visual equivalence of three distinct forms to represent a singular abstract concept. The title highlights the inherent ambiguity in systems of communication: We can read this work as one chair represented three different ways or as three different chairs. Kosuth's work may seem a philosophical exercise, but his questions about words and what they represent encourage more critical inquiry into the systems that endow art with value and meaning.

Robert Morris: Untitled (Mirror cube)

1965-71 Minimalism inviting you to interact-bend down to see your face, to walk around or through -While characteristic of Minimalism's repeated geometric forms, industrial materials, and machine-made surfaces that lack the artist's touch, Morris's UNTITLED (MIRRORED CUBES) is different because the mirrors deflect the viewer's attention away from the boxes. Morris argued that Minimalist sculpture heightens psychological perceptions of an object in its spatial surroundings, forcing viewers to consider the art's relationship to their own bodily experience moving around the gallery and observing the work from many sides. This idea derived in part from Morris's involvement in dance and experimental performance with artists involved in Happenings and Fluxus, and contributed to critic Michael Fried's characterization of Minimalism as "theatrical" because it relied on space, time, and physical interaction with the viewer.

Bruce Nauman: Self-Portrait as a Fountain

1966-67 Conceptual Art -Borrowing baroque aesthetics and referencing fountains built centuries ago -Baroque fountains: Quattro d Fontaine -Duchamp fountain -Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) uses performance, video, and other nontraditional media to explore the effects of physical, psychological, and intellectual experiences. Like Kosuth, Nauman considers the role of language and visual representation in demonstrating our individual identities. From 1966 to 1967, Nauman made a series of 11 color photographs based on his reenactment of common words and phrases. SELF-PORTRAIT AS A FOUNTAIN (FIG. 33-19) shows the bare-chested artist tipping his head back and spurting water into the air. Cleverly pulling together artistic identity, bodily experience, and visual communication, Nauman's photograph serves many functions. It documents his physical transformation into "a fountain," resembling the nude statues that often work to fill a traditional public fountain's basin. It acts as a self-portrait that represents the artist as his own work of art. And Nauman's title also recalls Duchamp's Fountain , suggesting the young artist's authority to recreate the famous readymade using his own body. Characteristically, Nauman uses humor and wit to engage the viewer and investigate challenging conceptual issues.

Donald Judd: Untitled

1969 Minimalism-one shape repeated over and over again -Untitled: prevents you from seeking meaning -qualities. This idea is evident in UNTITLED of 1969, consisting of ten rectangular units made of galvanized iron and tinted Plexiglas that are hung in a vertical row on the gallery wall. Although each unit remains discrete, the regular repetition of identical forms creates the impression of a single, large-scale structure. Judd's industrial production technique eliminates the expressionistic implications of brushwork to leave a smooth, even surface infused with subtle color. The arrangement avoids references to any imagined subject, allowing the objects to be seen only as themselves.

Claes Oldenburg: Lipstick Ascending on Caterpillar Tracks

1969 Pop Art -A monumental tube of lipstick sprouting from a military vehicle appeared, uninvited, on the campus of Yale University amidst the 1969 student protests against the Vietnam War. While the sculpture may have seemed like a playful, if elaborate artistic joke, Claes Oldenburg's Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks was also deeply critical. Oldenburg made the 24-foot-high sculpture in collaboration with architecture students at his alma mater and then surreptitiously delivered it to Yale's Beinecke Plaza. In Beinecke Plaza, the sculpture overlooked both the office of Yale's president and a prominent World War I memorial. Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks claimed a visible space for the anti-war movement while also poking fun at the solemnity of the plaza. The sculpture served as a stage and backdrop for several subsequent student protests. Oldenburg and the architecture students never intended for the original Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks sculpture to be permanent. They made the base of plywood, and the red vinyl tip of the lipstick could be comically inflated and deflated—although the balloon mechanism didn't always work. The original remained in Beinecke Plaza for ten months before Oldenburg removed it in order to remake the form in metal. The resulting sculpture was placed in a less-prominent spot on Yale's campus, where it remains to this day. Oldenburg had experimented with lipstick forms earlier in the 1960s, pasting catalog images of lipstick onto postcards of London's Picadilly Circus. The resulting collages showed lipstick tubes looming like massive pillars over Picadilly's plaza. In the Yale sculpture, the artist combined the highly "feminine" product with the "masculine" machinery of war. In doing so, he playfully critiqued both the hawkish, hyper-masculine rhetoric of the military and the blatant consumerism of the United States. In addition to its feminine associations, the large lipstick tube is phallic and bullet-like, making the benign beauty product seem masculine or even violent. The juxtaposition implied that the U.S. obsession with beauty and consumption both fueled and distracted from the ongoing violence in Vietnam. -Phallic-obelisks

Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty

1969-70 Earthworks Expects it to disappear over time but since it became popular, they keep on restoring it -Robert Smithson (1938-1973) sought to illustrate what he called the "ongoing dialectic" in nature between the constructive forces that build and shape form and the destructive forces that destroy it. SPIRAL JETTY (FIG. 33-25) of 1970, a 1,500-foot stone-and-earth platform spiraling into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, reflects these ideas. To Smithson, the salty water and algae of the lake suggested both the primordial ocean where life began and a dead sea that killed it; the abandoned oil rigs dotting the lake's shore reminded him of dinosaur skeletons and the remains of vanished civilizations. Smithson used the spiral because it is an archetypal shape—found throughout nature in galaxies, DNA molecules, seashells, as well as used for millennia in the art of different cultures. Although it recalls the geometry favored by Modernist artists, the spiral is a "dialectical" shape that endlessly curls and uncurls, suggesting growth and decay, creation and destruction, or, in Smithson's words, the perpetual "coming and going of things." He ordered that no maintenance be done on Spiral Jetty so that the work would be governed by the natural elements over time. Since its completion, the work has been changed by the varying environmental conditions of the lake, including years when it was completely submerged. Now covered with crystallized salt, it is visible to visitors at the site and as well as on Google Earth.

Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party

1974-79 Feminist Art -13 spaces-last supper -Triangle: vagina -Women produce textiles-ceramics-depictions of the vagina -Setting up dinner plates for women who have been ignored in the past -Smaller triangles on the floor that have names of other important women who have not been given a seat at the table of power in the past -Chicago's THE DINNER PARTY (FIG. 33-28) is a large, complex, mixed-media installation dedicated to hundreds of women and women artists rescued from anonymity by early feminist artists and historians. It took six years of collaborative effort to make and drew on the assistance of hundreds of female and several male volunteers. At the center is a large, triangular table, each side stretching 48 feet; Chicago conceived of the equilateral triangle as a symbol of both the feminine and the equalized world sought by feminism. The table rests on a triangular platform of 2,304 triangular porcelain tiles comprising the "Heritage Floor" that bears the names of 999 notable women from myth, legend, and history. Along each side of the table are 13 place settings representing famous women—13 being the number of men at the Last Supper as well as the number of witches in a coven. Among the 39 women honored with individual place settings are the Egyptian ruler Hatshepsut , the Italian noblewoman Isabella d'Este , the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, the American abolitionist Sojourner Truth, and the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe Each larger-than-life place setting includes a 14-inch-wide painted porcelain plate, ceramic flatware, a ceramic chalice with a gold interior, and an embroidered napkin, sitting upon an elaborately ornamented woven and stitched runner. Most of the plates feature abstract designs based on female genitalia because, as Chicago said, "that is all [these women] had in common.... They were from different periods, classes, ethnicities, geographies, experiences, but [that is] what kept them within the same confined historical space." The prominent place given to china painting and needlework in The Dinner Party celebrates traditional women's crafts and argues for their place in the pantheon of "high art," while at the same time informing the viewer about some of the unrecognized contributions that women have made to history.

Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still #21

1978 Postmodernism -Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) also turned to photography as a way to engage in Postmodern critique. In her series "Untitled Film Stills," Sherman creates fictional narratives with herself in the starring role. Each of the blackand-white photographs resembles a publicity still from popular cinema of the early 1960s, in which Sherman appears, costumed and made-up, in settings that seem to quote from the plots of old movies. Although each untitled image stands alone, we recognize these women's stories. In UNTITLED FILM STILL #21 , for instance, Sherman assumes the part of "small-town girl" recently arrived in the big city. Others show her as "the hardworking housewife," "the femme-fatale," "the teenage runaway," and other stereotypical personae. Part performance and part Conceptual Art, these works play on the documentary status we give the photograph and our familiarity with the cinematic narratives Sherman recreates. By forcing us to acknowledge the illusion of her own image, Sherman underscores the power of visual representation to construct female identity and alludes to the performances we enact every day in roles like "the best friend" or "the good student."

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face)

1981 postmodernism -Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) appropriates advertising and marketing techniques to subvert the messages in mainstream mass media. Her early career, working as a designer and art director at Mademoiselle, House and Garden, and other popular magazines, informs the signature look of her work. She relies on her provocative juxtapositions of words and image to challenge expected meanings that come from our experience of popular advertising. UNTITLED (YOUR GAZE HITS THE SIDE OF MY FACE) is typical in the slightly nostalgic quality of the female mannequin's appearance and the graphic contrast that recalls the three-color printing once common in newspapers. By addressing the viewer directly, Kruger forces us to acknowledge the relationship usually kept hidden between the viewer and the viewed. Framed within an advertising context, the viewer is likened to the consumer who looks at an object of desire for purchase. Although Kruger's pronouns are ambiguous in terms of gender, they seem an implicit reference to the "male gaze" in art described by critics like Laura Mulvey and John Berger and much discussed in the 1970s and 1980s. Kruger's work, however, raises broad Postmodernist issues of power and the need to expose underlying social structures that oppress and subjugate others.

Serano: Piss Christ

1989 Controversial Art -Created in 1987, two years before the NEA controversy, PISS CHRIST (FIG. 33-46) is one of many photographs Serrano (b. 1950) made that involve bodily fluids like blood, semen, and human milk. These function to highlight the tension between his images' aesthetic appeal and the abject undertones Serrano makes clear in the title. Piss Christ is an almost 2-foot-high, brilliantly colored Cibachrome photograph that shows a Christian crucifix bathed in a hazy, ethereal light. Serrano made the haunting image by submerging a small plastic crucifix in a Plexiglas container filled with his own urine. Serrano, who was raised a strict Catholic, has argued that the work addresses the physical death of Christ's body and critiques the commercialization of Christ's image. Around the same time that the exhibition of Piss Christ was being challenged, another traveling exhibition funded by the NEA—this one a retrospective of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe organized by Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art—came under similar attack for the inclusion of several homoerotic and sadomasochistic images, including self-portraits of the artist, who had recently died of AIDS. A flurry of debate developed in Congress questioning the authority of the NEA to distribute taxpayers' money to support art that some members of the public found distasteful or obscene.

Ofili: The Holy Virgin Mary

1996 Controversial Art -Another controversy erupted in 1999 when the Brooklyn Museum exhibited "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Catholic leaders took particular offense to THE HOLY VIRGIN MARY by Nigerian-British artist Chris Ofili (b. 1968). The large, glittering canvas features a stylized African Madonna augmented with mixedmedia elements of elephant dung and found pornographic photographs of women's buttocks. Ofili, who spent a year studying in Zimbabwe, explained that many African nations have a tradition of using found objects and materials in both popular and high art. He intended the painting as a contemporary, bicultural reinvention of the Western Madonna tradition, using elephant dung to reinforce this black Madonna's connection to the art and religion of Zimbabwe and to represent her fertility.

Gehry: Guggenheim Museum

Bilbao, Spain 1993-1997 The Toronto-born, California-based Frank O. Gehry (b. 1929) also creates dynamic Deconstructivist forms with curved, winglike shapes that extend far beyond the solid masses of his buildings. One of his most spectacular designs is the GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM in Bilbao, Spain . In the 1990s, the designing of art museums became more and more spectacular as they increasingly came to define the visual landscape of cities. Gehry developed his asymmetrical design using a CATIA CAD program that enabled him to create a powerfully organic, sculptural structure. The complex steel skeleton is covered by a thin skin of silvery titanium that shimmers gold or silver depending on the time of day and the weather conditions. From the north the building resembles a living organism, while from other angles it looks like a giant ship, a reference to the industry on which Bilbao has traditionally depended, thereby identifying the museum with the city. Despite the sculptural beauty of the museum, however, the interior is a notoriously difficult space in which to display art, a characteristic this building shares with Wright's spiraling design of the New York Guggenheim , a notable forebear of Gehry's explorations of the sculptural potential of architecture.

Zaha Hadid: Vitra Fire Station, Weil-am-Rein

Germany 1989-93 -Deconstructivist architecture, more theory-based than High Tech, emerged in the early 1990s. Deconstructivist architects deliberately disturb traditional architectural assumptions about harmony, unity, and stability to create "decentered," skewed, and distorted designs. The aesthetic of Russian Suprematists and Constructivists is an influence, as are the principles of Deconstruction as developed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Derridean Deconstruction claims that written texts possess no single, intrinsic meaning, that meaning is always "intertextual," a product of one text's relationship to other texts. As a result, meaning is always "decentered," "dispersed," or "diffused" through an infinite web of "signs," which themselves have unstable meanings. Deconstructivist architecture is likewise intertextual, in that it plays with meaning by mixing diverse architectural features, forms, and contexts; it is decentered by this diffusion as well as by its perceived instability of both meaning and form. A good example of Deconstructivist architecture is the VITRA FIRE STATION in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany , designed by Baghdad-born architect Zaha Hadid (b. 1950), who studied in London and established her practice there in 1979. Formally influenced by the paintings of Kazimir Malevich , the Vitra Fire Station features reinforced concrete walls that lean into one another, meet at unexpected angles, and jut out dramatically into space, denying a sense of visual unity or structural coherence but creating a feeling of immediacy, speed, and dynamism appropriate to the building's function.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

NYC 1943-1959 -Frank Lloyd Wright transformed museum architecture with the GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM in New York, designed as a sculptural work of art in its own right. The Guggenheim was created to house Solomon Guggenheim's personal collection of Modern art and, like the TWA Terminal, took on an organic shape, in this case a spiral. The museum's galleries spiral downward from a glass ceiling, wrapping themselves around a spectacular five-story atrium. Wright intended visitors to begin by taking the elevator to the top floor and then walk down the sloping and increasingly widening ramp, enjoying paintings along the way. Today, the interior maintains the intended intimacy of a "living room," despite alterations by the museum's first directors. Wright wanted the building to contrast with skyscrapers like the Seagram Building and become a Manhattan landmark—and it remains one of the twentieth century's most distinctive museum spaces.

Mies Van Der Rohe and Philip Johnson: Seagram Building

NYC 1954-58 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) created the most extreme examples of postwar International Style buildings. A former Bauhaus teacher and a refugee from Nazi Germany, Mies designed the rectilinear glass towers that came to personify postwar capitalism. The crisp, clean lines of the SEAGRAM BUILDING in New York City, designed with Philip Johnson, epitomize the standardization and impersonality that became synonymous with corporations in the postwar period. Such buildings, with their efficient construction methods and use of materials, allowed architects to pack an immense amount of office space into a building on a very small lot; they were also economical to construct. Although criticized for building relatively unadorned glass boxes, Mies advocated "Less is more." He did, however, use nonfunctional, decorative bronze beams on the outside of the Seagram Building to echo the functional beams inside and give the façade a sleek, rich, and dignified appearance.

Eero Saarinen: TWA Terminal, JFK Airport

NYC 1956-62 Although the pared-down, rectilinear forms of the International Style dominated the urban skyline, other architects departed from its impersonal principles so that even in commercial architecture, expressive designs using new structural techniques and more materials also appeared. For instance, the TRANS WORLD AIRLINES (TWA) TERMINAL at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, by the Finnish-born American architect Eero Saarinen (1910-1961), dramatically breaks out of the box. Saarinen sought to evoke the thrill and glamour of air travel by giving the TWA Terminal's roof two broad, winglike canopies of reinforced concrete that suggest a huge bird about to take flight. The interior consists of large, open, dramatically flowing spaces. Saarinen designed each detail of the interior—from ticket counters to telephone booths—to complement his gull-winged shell.

Maya Lin: Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Washington DC 1981-3 Postmodernism -Around the same time of Serra's commission, a jury of architects, landscape architects, and sculptors awarded Maya Lin (b. 1959) the commission for the VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL (FIG. 33-49), to be built near the National Mall in Washington, DC. A student at Yale University, Lin proposed a simple and dramatic memorial cut into the ground in a V shape like a scar, as a symbol of national healing over the divisive war. The sculpture is made of two highly polished black granite slabs that reach out from deep in the earth at the center. Each slab is 247 feet long, and they meet at a 130-degree angle where they are 10 feet tall. The names of 58,272 American soldiers killed or declared missing in action during the Vietnam War are listed chronologically in the order they died or were lost, beginning in 1956 at the shallowest point to the left and climaxing in 1968 at the tallest part of the sculpture, representing the year of highest casualties. The memorial serves both to commemorate the dead and missing and to provide a place where survivors can confront their own loss. It is one of the best-known works of public art in the United States and has transformed the way the nation mourns its war dead. Visitors often describe the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a powerful and profound experience, but Lin's design was contested at the time of her commission. Opponents described it as a "black gash in the Mall," its color contrasting with the pervasive white marble of the surrounding memorials. Others saw Lin's use of abstraction as a departure from the representational monuments often used to honor war heroes. In response to the criticism, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund commissioned Frederick Hart (1943-1999) in 1983 to create another, more naturalistic memorial depicting three soldiers, which was placed 120 feet from the wall; in 1993, a comparable sculpture of three nurses by Glenda Goodacre (b. 1939) was added 300 feet to the south to memorialize the contribution of women during the war. While Serra and Lin's monuments appear similar, their distinctive qualities may explain the differing public responses to each. In addition to the spare geometric forms of the sculptures, both rely on their physical scale to heighten the viewer's perceptual awareness and suggest additional meaning. In Tilted Arc, this translates to a vaguely threatening feeling as the imposing structure looms ominously over viewers and forces them to alter their path walking across the plaza. By contrast, Lin's sculpture seems to grow in height, impressing visitors physically with the sheer magnitude of inscribed names as they walk the lengthy path. Instead of Serra's industrial steel, Lin employs polished granite, commonly used for tombstones, that reflects the faces of visitors as they read names of the dead and missing. The effect is both to humanize the written words and to implicate the viewer who now bears witness to the national tragedy of the war. The examples of Tilted Arc and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial raise important questions about the rights and responsibilities of artists, as well as the obligations of those who commission public works of art. The case of Tilted Arc prompted changes in the commissioning of public sculpture. (In court, the artist had not attempted to defend his work on aesthetic grounds, but claimed the right to create the piece as planned and approved.) Today neighborhood groups and local officials meet with artists well in advance of public commissions, but rarely are all parties completely satisfied.