Hope och Tilted Arc – en komparation av två publika verk i New York

Sammanfattning: The essay points out some important features regarding hermeneutics of the concept ‘sculpture’. The aim is to make a comparative analysis of two sculptures sited in New York City, Manhattan. One is a monument, entitled Hope, dedicated to the former Swedish Ambassador Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of lives in Budapest during the Second World War. The artists are the Swedish couple Ulla and Gustav Kraitz. The other one is the much discussed Tilted Arc, manufactured and installed by the American artist Richard Serra. The methods used in the essay are both compositional and semiotic. Both sculptures are (were) in a way destined. Tilted Arc was dismantled and destroyed in 1989 and for Hope there is a fixed sum funded for its final destruction. The issues to be addressed in the essay are: what are the connotations embedded in the sculptures, and is it reasonable to believe that these connotations did have any significance for the public reception? The essay also draws a schematic matrix of the sites and modalities concerning works of art. Following an analysis of formal, iconographic and semiotic nature, is a discussion mainly based upon the semiotic concept of commutation, where the idea is to isolate certain parts of the artwork in focus, trying to study when and how the mental concepts of meaning are established and changed. The conclusion turns out in a ‘most likely’. The conditions of the public reception were probably highly dependent on the connotive meanings of the sculptures discussed, and with a slight twist or change, most parts of the structure of meanings would have been different.