Comment by Daub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daub | Hacker News Reader

No one here has talked about the number of lives that Serra's work has claimed/ruined. So far: one death and two serious injuries. Details here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2018/aug/...

From this link:

> Richard Serra’s steel sculptures feel the most dangerous of all. They tower over you, surround you, menace you. The danger is not illusory. Serra’s rolled steel is dangerous, especially for workers who have to install it. In 1971, a contractor called Raymond Johnson was killed during the installation of a Serra sculpture. In 1988, two workers were seriously injured while deinstalling one of his pieces.

We were taught to hate his work at school. Big, heavy, industrial... 'big willy' art I remember one lecturer calling it. However, I always liked his work, largely as a result of seeing it in person at the Tate Modern. I could feel the literal eight of his work as I walked through it: heavy sheets of metal balanced against each other. Peril was part of the price of admission.

The death/injuries victims were all art technicians: people tasked with installing the work. I used to work with such people, and their job is a fascinating one. I remember helping to scan a building with ground scanning radar in order to determine if it was strong enough to hold Anselm Kiefer's library of huge lead books: https://www.wikiart.org/en/anselm-kiefer/the-high-priestess-...

It took a team of four men and a forklift truck just to turn the pages of these books.

I’m guessing nobody else brought it up because the original article already mentioned this fact.

Woops. My bad. However, I believe the details I raise remain generally valid.

I’m not sure it’s fair to describe something as “dangerous” and as having “killed” people when you’re talking about technicians hired to safely move or install something.

By that definition pretty much any object is “dangerous.”

Right, in order to fairly describe this man's artworks as any more dangerous than average based on their entire functional lifecycle we'd need to evaluate, for example, how many people were killed while producing the marble blocks used by sculptors such as Michaelangelo, or how many people died as a side effect of exposure to toxic compounds (e.g. cinnabar (red), cobalt (blue), lead (white)) while producing pigments for painters such as Rembrandt.

There is a clear difference between the dangers incurred by an artist (e.g. an artist using toxic pigments) and an artist endangering their employees (models, assistants, etc).

Similarly, there is a difference between the dangers incurred by an artist and the dangers incurred by anyone deeper into the supply-line (e.g. in the mining of toxic compounds to be used in paint/pigment).

The artist who taught me sculpture died as a direct result of employing asbestos in his work. He was an art student when he did so, and the information that could have saved his life was not then public knowledge.

One of the hallmarks of Serra's work is precisely danger. Stand in person inside of his work and tell me otherwise. This was a knowing gamble on his behalf.

> By that definition pretty much any object is “dangerous.”

Fair point.

However, like any employer an artist has a responsibly towards their employees. I hate to say this, but there is an inevitable credibility attached to art artist's work that results in an employee's death.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506

The painting Ophelia by Millais required a model sit in a bath of water for extended periods of time. From the article:

> The model, Elizabeth Siddal, a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites who later married Rossetti, was required to pose over a four month period in a bath full of water kept warm by lamps underneath. The lamps went out on one occasion, causing her to catch a severe cold. Her father threatened the artist with legal action until he agreed to pay the doctor's bills.

At art school, this was presented to us as a romantic feature of the work, rather that the outrageous abandonment of an artist's responsibly towards their workforce.

> However, like any employer an artist has a responsibly towards their employees.

Were they his employees?

Hard to say, but the likelihood is that they were. Most 'blue chip' artists employ technicians that travel around the world to install and repair their work. This may be mediated through their dealer.

I mention repair as a lot of contemporary art requires ongoing maintain, Julian Schnabel's employs full-time a team who trot around the globe repairing his famous plate portraits.

Regardless, I would feel ethically responsible for anyone who installs my work. FYI: most exhibitions require that an artist define 'installation instructions'.

I'm more speaking concretely than theoretically: do we know he employed them? Even if an artist defines instructions, that doesn't mean that they'll be followed.

How many people die installing roofs above art galleries or felling trees for the paper upon which art is made?

It’s also weird that you were taught to hate something. Seems like a waste of time.

Exactly. It’s always so crazy to me how there’s such a double standard when it comes to art. Millions of people spend their entire lives in factories doing the same stitch over and over again, but if Kubrick makes Shelley Duvall do the same scene 100 times it’s abuse. How many people die in the shipping industry for example and no one calls them out

I'm not a huge fan of this kind of safetyism argument. Human beings have been injured or killed by most fields of human endeavor, it's certainly unfortunate but unless Richard Serra specifically was engaged in some kind of negligence I don't see how that's really a critique. In the last couple hundred years some person somewhere has variously been killed by swimming pools, kitchens, sidewalks, windows, bicycles, etc. How many people have fallen off say a roof in the last century? Imagine if you said 'no one is talking about the number of lives cut short by roofs'. A 0% injury/death rate is not really possible

The man just died and we're remembering what his art meant to us. Why would you expect a lengthy discussion on a handful of accidents his artworks caused? Read the room please.

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