Mary Reid Brunstrom

Serra�s Twain: “Can’t this be replaced with something beautiful?”

This 1986 cartoon provides a point of departure for consideration of how Richard Serra’s Twain engages notions of beauty. Occupying an entire city block on the Gateway Mall in downtown St. Louis, Twain forms an irregular triangle made up of eight rectangular steel plates embedded in the ground with two-foot “doorways” between them. Since its dedication in 1982, the sculpture has attracted more detractors than devotees. Even Twain’s proponents view it as the very antithesis of beauty. They dismiss the innate desire for beauty as proposed by Kant, on the grounds that beauty was unfashionable when Serra created Twain. The need for beauty is displaced by a kind of intellectual gratification bolstered by Serra’s rhetoric, which claims that conventional pleasure (beauty) is not a goal of his creative process. Rather, says Serra, the work is about spatial relationships activated by physical engagement of the viewer’s body. Twain’s failure to satisfy even the most basic requirements of beauty guarantees that the sculpture remains divisive and unwelcome, an irritant embedded in the city’s psyche.

As the cartoon implies, Twain signals a violation of public taste, a transgression attributable chiefly to the “rusty” quality of the then unconventional material for art, Cor-ten steel. Terms like “junk” and “scrap metal” recur throughout the public discourse. Twain’s eyesore potential is exacerbated by a hubris of scale. Adding insult to injury, successive generations of graffiti writers have emblazoned messages on its billboard-like plates, ranging from the insipid--“Anna loves Billy” to the forceful--“GET RID OF THIS THING!” Such defacement precludes an appreciation of the abstract textural beauty in the patterns formed by oxidation runs and fabrication markings, the Japanese wabi-sabi notion of beauty in imperfection elaborated by Sartwell. Disfigurement of the sculpture guarantees that the work will be considered and dismissed over and over again in the realm of taste. The record shows that graffiti applications coincided with intensive media coverage of the rancorous public discourse on Twain. Graffiti express a need to vent opposition to Twain’s presence in the public sphere. But a debate that was ostensibly mobilized around outrage at the ugliness and inappropriateness of the material spilled over into a far-ranging and long-running discourse encompassing the major issues facing the city as it transitioned from a vital, well-populated center to a declining urban core. Hence, Twain’s polemical inversion of received notions of beauty leads to consequences in the domains of politics and morality.

Twain under construction, 1982.

Twain is evaluated consciously or unconsciously in relation to Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch (1965), the iconic expression of monumentality and aspiration that synthesizes a legendary contribution to westward expansion with an optimistic future. The Arch inaugurated gleaming stainless steel as the material of choice for public sculpture. Located ten blocks to the west and in full view of it, and made of a material that if anything was associated with urban decay, Twain from the outset found itself in an unwinnable beauty contest with the Arch. Twain engages the Arch directly through alignment, a juxtaposition that yields profound symbolism. By shape and material, the Arch is gendered feminine and Twain masculine, but the more productive realization is that geometrically, each can accommodate the form of the other. Moreover, Twain’s directional thrust through the apex towards the Arch, deliberately opposing westward progression (the theme of the Gateway Mall), creates a powerful metaphor for reciprocal longing. Following Sartwell and Scarry, we might ask what might be the object of such longing. Taking Scarry further, this metaphor moves us beyond issues of taste into the sphere of morality, since, as already shown, Twain’s beauty (or lack thereof) and the Arch’s definitive statement of it, can be clearly linked with political and moral issues.

The complementarity heightens the poignancy of both the Arch and Twain, but it especially dramatizes Twain as ugly, even threatening. Along with the decay of the urban core, Twain evokes homelessness (touched off by derelicts inhabiting the structure and using it as a urinal - La [sic] Grand Pissoir, in the words of one graffiti writer). In addition, its enclosure can engender feelings (fantasies) of entrapment, and the record shows that fear and danger are common associations, even though there is scant evidence of crime against individuals on the Twain block. Twain’s engagement of such issues provides a counterpoint to the one-sided and facile belief in the promise encoded in the Arch. Earthbound, horizontal, disfigured Twain relieves the unfettered optimism evinced by the soaring modernist statement of perfection (stainlessness) in form and materials. Furthermore, the reciprocity with the Arch can be understood in the way the interrogation of Twain spills over onto the Arch, bringing to light issues that cloud its history--the Arch came at a price which included the destruction of low-income neighborhoods on the riverfront, the displacement of their residents (perhaps to the ersatz shelter provided by Twain), and the partition of the riverfront from the rest of downtown. Twain’s perceived ugliness also produced a metaphor for the imposition of private taste in the public domain. Whereas sectors of the public wanted monumental art to be figural and uplifting as part of a city-wide beautification effort, Twain’s commissioners selected abstraction of a kind being touted nationally and internationally as the art of the moment. Abstraction per se was not objectionable as is clear from the embrace of Saarinen’s Arch. Had the sculpture on the Twain block achieved consensus on aesthetic merit, there would have been no outcry about the colonization of public spaces by the art elites of the city.

The Arch reminds us of the transformative power of beauty. Saarinen synthesized the aspirations of generations past and future in an exquisite form that arose from urban decay. As a counterweight, Twain’s radioactive potential functions as an impediment to forgetting. We could erase the graffiti, cut the grass, add comfort with benches placed strategically on the block, but Twain can never succumb to the cartoon’s demands for “something beautiful.” Its beauty lies rather in its capacity to precipitate discourse.

[For more pictures of Twain click here]