‘Memorial to St. Louis abandoned’

The “Twain” sculpture by Richard Serra, located in downtown St. Louis, garnered an excessive amount of media attention in the early 1980s. This was due, in part, to its expense and because it was promoted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch while simultaneously being criticized by the declining St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

In September 1985, novelist and professor William Gass took another look at Serra and his legacy in an essay for the St. Louis Journalism Review.*

Gass, taking note of the fact that much of St. Louis was in decline, wrote:

“I have been visiting buildings in St. Louis which St. Louis has abandoned. Victims of fear, greed, discrimination, and reckless neglect, maybe a third of the city, it seems, has been restored to a state of urban nature. Ransacked by thieves, ravaged by fire, befouled by birds, cats, and rates, occupied only by outcasts and the decaying bodies of small mammals, subjected to leakage, pillage, vandalism, and indifference, many of these buildings, thanks to the inherently harmonious processes of natural law, which include, among others, oxidation and mildew and scaling and rot, have become beautiful in their loneliness, majestic even, churchlike, as the empty Cupples Station near the Serra has become. My camera, I think, can now prove the beauty a callous public has unwittingly produced. Peeling paint, pigeon dropping, rusting eaves, shattered glass and rotting garbage sometimes combine to create real Still Lifes from all this still life, so I suggest we treat the Serra to the same neglect. Let it go its way. Perhaps the work of weeds and rust and earth-heave and erosion will help it realize its potentialities and it will finally come to stand for a deserted fortress, empty city. We need only put up a small plaque upon an indifferent corner, one which might say simply: This is a Memorial to St. Louis Abandoned. May it remain.”

Serra died on Tuesday (March 26, 2024); Gass died in 2017.

Here is a downloadable scan of Gass’s essay: