A Picturesque Stroll around "Clara-Clara"

Abstract

Smithson went to see Shift, Serra tells us, spoke of its picturesque quality, and I wasn't sure what he was talking about (p. 181).' This incomprehension is quite comprehensible, at least if one sticks to early definitions of the picturesque, all of which go back to the etymological origin of this word, that is to say, the sphere of painting. For the pictorial is one of the qualities that Serra would like to banish completely from his sculpture. In speaking of his first Prop Pieces, he criticizes them for retaining pictorial concerns (the use of the wall as background), since such a reminder detracts from their meaning (which is prescribed by the way they are made) (p. 142). In speaking of the numerous works created by laying out materials on the floor, works that appeared in the late 1960s as a criticism of minimalism, in which he himself had participated, Serra severely judges their debt to painting in this respect: Lateral extension in this case allows sculpture to be viewed pictorially that is, as if the floor were the canvas plane. It is no coincidence that most earth works are photographed from the air (p. 16). Which takes us back to Smithson: What most people know of Smithson's Spiral Jetty, for example, is an image shot from a helicopter. When you actually see the work, it has none of that purely graphic character. ... But if you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph ... [y]ou're denying the temporal experience of the work. You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the (p. 170). Far be it from Serra, of course, to suggest that Smithson had approved such a reduction of his work to the plani-

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