The accomplice and installation
In 1989, Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (conceived in 1979, installed in 1981), was removed from 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan by General Services Administration, the body that had originally commissioned it. Tilted Arc, a curved, vertically tilted plane of Cor-ten steel that bisected the plaza was designed as site-specific by Serra. The work's strengths, its references to numerous forms of apartheid, its commentaries upon architectural space and the possibilities for public sculpture were understood by many (outside of the art community) to be threatening. In the same year, the State of Illinois severed support for the School of The Art Institute of Chicago after it showed an installation work by African-American artist Dread Scott that forced visitors to walk over the American flag as they entered the work. Chris Burden's museum installation, Samson, was first installed in the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery in 1985. The work, which consisted of two massive beams of timber fixed horizontally to a system of gears and a one hundred ton jack, would literally push against the supporting walls of the institution as visitors passed through a turnstile. Theoretically, enough visitors passing through the turnstile could cause the work to demolish the museum.
These three installations, all site-specific and actively engaging the viewer, intervene into the field of politics in a way that appears obvious. My point here is to emphasise the strong link between installation and the political-the choice of work by male artists is arbitrary, other examples might be Jenny Holzer's electronic billboards in Times Square (1982), or work by Cady Noland in the 1991 Whitney Biennial. The works by Serra, Scott and Burden are confrontational and subversive in their