"Time and movement became really crucial to how I deal with what I deal with, not only sight and boundary but how one walks through a piece and what one feels and registers in terms of one's own body in relation to another body." - Richard Serra
"My work is really very hard to hurt. I mean people sit on it, write on it, piss on it, you really can't hurt it, I mean you can graffiti the f*** out of it, there's not much you can do to it hurt it." - Richard
Serra
"If you build it they will come." That was the preeminent phrase that vibrated through my mind as I first stood in the corner of the 2nd floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, as I gazed upon the flurry of visitors entranced by and meandering within the set of sculptures done by Richard Serra.
I went to the exhibit blindly. I didn’t do any background research on the exhibit because I wanted my feeling to be organic – largely because this was my first time exposed to his work in the flesh. Serra's "Torqued Ellipses" and "Torqued Torus Inversion" and other recent works like "Band" and "Sequence" have their origins in work he did 40 years ago in rubber and lead, as this retrospective handsomely affirms, but these are nonetheless unprecedented variations on the theme of dumbfounding spirals and loops.
Band, Torqued Torus Inversion and Sequence are new pieces residing on the 2nd floor. They are completely mammoth in scope and size. The medium is steel, but the appearance of the structure is wooden. Walking amongst the sculptures you have the juxtaposed feeling of simultaneously walking within a maze and a magical forest. This work is spellbinding, and food for dreams.
I would be lying if I were to write that I could easily identify which piece was Torqued Torus Inversion and which was Sequence - or Band, except to say that each produced a unique feeling when you were within its walls and walking close to the space. The lines between the two and curvature were unique. There were “flat” versus “curved” openings, at times I felt like I had entered the hallow of a forest, although very artificial, there existed a serene feeling within each open space – it was very difficult to comprehend the weight of these objects, and I had to consistently remind myself that the sculptures were steel and not wood. Walking amongst the more curved structure gave the feeling of going through a cave, where the open area felt like a dry river bed.
On one page of my notes, I had simply scribbled, that in passing around one of the curves I simply had the feeling of being a little knome passing by the curved back of a high banquet. Another section, when looked at from the right angle, had a very complex, tiered opening, reminiscent of an unfolding fan. Another shape from the right vantage, brought to mind the Fibonacci spiral. When I stood at the end of the room and gazed at the giant form, en masse – I made out 3 simple shapes, a cone, a triangle, and a square. They all revealed themselves to be much more elaborate by simply walking a few steps.
The pieces that did look like steel were to be found in the courtyard. Intersection II mimics the side of an abandoned ship, however its insides betray that its form is not this simple, because a miniature maze lies within and one can observe curious onlookers greedily and hastily exiting and entering from the four separate points that exist from either side. Very few pause or take hesitation to observe the structure before they enter, it all seems very mindless – very much like an intersection.
The 6th floor exhibition was a marvel. My first thought was simply Jasper Johns in metal with balance. It is always an amazing experience for me to visit artwork that I have only experienced through pictures. I am either bitterly disappointed or transcendentally enchanted and moved to another realm. Despite the crowd existing around me, it was not difficult to get lost within the serenity of Serra's collection. If Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollack were to have taken up large scale sculpture, I imagine it would have felt like this. At first glance, there is a bit of chaos or feeling of randomness, but then one simply gets lost in the serenity of it all. Like nature, randomness does not exist so much as functionality, but their is a primal beauty and balance in that - and a certain bit of tension, as though any piece could fall at any moment, just like a leaf from a branch. I suppose this is where I make my connection to Pollack. In Jasper Johns, in some ways it felt like the "meaning" of the work could be found in the process itself. And as Johns once so eloquently put it, "There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the {work} exists."
Richard Serra Sculpture: 40 Years” has been extended through Sept. 24 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400 and moma.org (although the 6th floor portion of the exhibit closed on the 10th). The works in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden are on display through the 22nd. I advise anyone to read the article and view clips available here from the New York Times. They did a fabulous write up on the exhibition, installation and Richard Serra here as well.
Visit the MOMA exhibition site by clicking here.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939. After studying at the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara, he graduated in 1961 with a BA in English literature. During this time, he began working in steel mills in order to support himself. In 1964, he graduated from Yale University with both a BFA and an MFA. Receiving a Yale Traveling Fellowship, he spent a year in Paris, followed by a year in Florence funded by a Fulbright grant. Serra’s early work in the 1960s focused on the industrial materials that he had worked with as a youth in West Coast steel mills and shipyards: steel and lead. A famous work from this time involved throwing lead against the walls of his studio. Though his casts were created from the impact of the lead hitting the walls, the emphasis of the piece was really on the process of creating it: raw aggression and physicality, combined with a self-conscious awareness of material and a real engagement with the space in which it was worked. Since those Minimalist beginnings, Serra’s work has become famous for that same physicality, but one that is now compounded by the breathtaking size and weight that the pieces have acquired. His series of "Torqued Ellipses" (1996–99), which comprise gigantic plates of towering steel, bent and curved, leaning in and out, carve very private spaces from the necessarily large public sites in which they have been erected. Serra’s most recent public work includes the 60-foot-tall "Charlie Brown" (1999; named for the Peanuts comic-strip character in honor of its author, Charles Schultz, who had died that year), which has been erected in the courtyard of an office building in San Francisco. He lives in New York and Nova Scotia.
