Interpretive Conventions in Site-Specific and Experimental Art: An analysis of Richard Serra’s Sculptures and Joseph McElroy’s Fictions

In his essay “9/11 emerging,” Joseph McElroy brings into his comments on the destruction of the World Trade Center reflections on a quite different New York destruction, that of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc in 1989. This gigantic work becomes a locus of questions about the role of art in the twenty-first century, especially after the terrorist attack of September eleventh. Likewise, it may suggest parallels between Serra’s sculpture and McElroy’s fiction, as both artists derange our perceptual...