This book makes available a series of documents concerning the attempt by a United States Government Agency (the General Services Administration) to remove and thereby destroy Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, a sculpture at Federal Plaza, New York City. A public hearing was held on the subject of the sculpture in March 1985, with 122 people testifying in favour of keeping the piece and 58 in favour of removing it. A jury of five voted 4–1 to remove the sculpture. The decision was appealed by Serra, leading to several years of litigation in the courts, but the sculpture was dismantled and placed in storage by federal workers on the night of March 15, 1989. More information here and here.

Tomio Miki (1937–1978), who exhibited among a group of avant-garde, politically active artists in Tokyo in the late 1950s and early 1960s, settled in 1963 on the human ear as his primary sculptural subject for the next several years. He often depicted them individually, on a giant scale. Sometimes he combined ears with other elements, such as spoons or colored lights, or made series of them set in rows or in boxes. Miki spoke quixotically about his choice of the ear, saying that it originated in an “experience in a train, when, for no reason, I suddenly felt myself surrounded by hundreds of ears trying to assault me. This personal episode, however, wouldn’t be any precise answer to why I make ears. I can hardly say I chose the ear. More precisely, isn’t it that the ear chose me?”

As a representative of concrete-minimal art Charlotte Posenenske was among Germany’s leading artists in the 1960s. She aspired to a clear, hard realism of form, production, distribution and reception—all conditions that in the context of the 1968 movement meant changing society. In 1968, having come to the conclusion that art ultimately cannot have sufficient political impact Posenenske took the radical step of giving up art altogether.

She went on to study sociology and worked as a social scientist. Even though she could not envision political issues being pursued within a conceptual approach, it later became clear that she had formulated important aspects in her art that only came to bear in Concept Art in the 1970s. These aspects included the variability of objects, participation in production, the inclusion of a specific situation, a social context and institutional critique.—Between Bridges, 2007

From a collection of catalogues documenting presentations of Posenenske’s work installed at various locations including Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Lufthansa, Grossmarkthalle Frankfurt and Hauptbahnhof Frankfurt 1989, organised by Burkhard Brunn.