ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the visitor experience to Promenade as one involving an exhaustion of looking. Through unfolding in a time and space marked by the exhaustion of looking, Promenade thus challenged longstanding beliefs about the prominence of vision and seeing as the primary access to understanding the world in modernity. And within this phenomenological experience of sculpture, if the body becomes alienated from the social world in the discourse on modernity, then Serra's work recuperates the body. Behind Michael Fried' condemnatory claim in 1967 that sculpture had become invaded by theatricality was the temporal extension of sculpture, a temporality that can be identified in the visitor's experience of Serra's sculpture. Serra thus restores the physical senses to the post-modern environment and through this experience of that environment, confuses the limits of modernity, modernist sculpture and the expectation that an artwork necessarily give dominance to vision and ocularity in its perception.
