When I think of Richard Serra’s work as art, or of art as what Richard Serra does, a bracing bleakness descends, like that of a stern northern region, where people live gladly, while under no illusion that it’s the isle of Capri. Serra’s mostly magnificent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art proves that he is not only our greatest sculptor but an artist whose subject is greatness befitting our time. He works at the physical scale of architecture and at the intellectual scale of art history as a whole. The degree of his undoubted success is immeasurable, because nothing really relates to it. The enveloping austerities of Carl Andre and Dan Flavin—Serra’s minimalist forebears in the nineteen-sixties, when five years was a generation—come closest, but compared with his work theirs is parlor décor. His art affords no handle as easy, or as ingratiating, as “style.” Consciousness of Serra’s furious ambition—an arbitrary force, like weather—addles both analysis and aesthetic response. My comprehension of his tons of shaped steel always feels inadequate to their conceptual subtlety, engineering sophistication, and, oh my, size. Taking a childlike view may be the best way to relax with and, to the extent possible, enjoy Serra’s art. Don’t try to understand. Play.
I have in mind not the show’s early work, on the sixth floor, which is more congenial to grownup appreciation, but its climactic sections: two colossal pieces in the garden, “Intersection II” (1992-93) and “Torqued Ellipse IV” (1998), and especially a stupendous array of three that were made last year—“Torqued Torus Inversion,” “Band,” and “Sequence”—in the cavernous second-floor space for contemporary art. All consist of curved walls, twelve or so feet high, of at least two-inch-thick weatherproof steel, which seals itself with soft-textured rust. “Intersection II” is an open, upright sandwich of four almost identical conical sections, tilting this way and that along three routes of passage. The “Torqued Ellipse”s were Serra’s breakthrough to subsequent feats of geometric sorcery: oval enclosures, enterable through a slit, whose contour at the top is perpendicular to their contour on the ground. “Torqued Torus Inversion” is a pair of identical enclosures that describe the double curve on the inside edge of a doughnut; side by side, one flares upward and the other down. “Band” is a switchback ribbon that forms four chambers over a space seventy-two feet long. “Sequence,” Serra’s masterpiece so far, is a maze of two nested S shapes which, when you walk it, goes on just about forever. At each step around or within all the works, the walls curve or slant, or both, differently in relation to each other and to your body. The effect is like materialized music, actuated by your movement. Clap your hands for interesting echoes. You will like seeing and hearing other people share the experience. To explore these things alone, as I did, thrills but unnerves. I kept feeling like a trespasser at a top-secret industrial site.
Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939, the son of a shipyard pipe fitter and a remarkably supportive mother. In a chewy interview in the show’s catalogue with MOMA’s Kynaston McShine (who co-curated the show with Lynne Cooke, of the Dia Art Foundation), Serra tells of his mother’s first visit, in the sixties, to his loft on Greenwich Street. “It was barren, there was nothing in it but a mattress on the floor, I was living on maybe $75 a month. . . . She looked out the window at the Hudson River and said, Richard, this is marvelous.” He had majored in English literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara—he cites Emerson and Melville as persistent lodestars—and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art at Yale, where his classmates included Brice Marden and Chuck Close and the abundant role models included Philip Guston and the composer Morton Feldman. (Serra was ousted from a class after surprising a visitor, Robert Rauschenberg, with a work involving a live chicken.) He spent two years, 1964-66, in Europe, where he met up with the composer Philip Glass. In Paris, they haunted La Coupole at the hour when Giacometti arrived for his after-work drink, and almost every day for a month Serra visited Brancusi’s studio museum. In Florence, he immersed himself in Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Donatello, whom he rates higher as a delineator of sculptural volume than Michelangelo. The beautiful spaces of the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, and Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp made lasting impressions on him. For an artist of brute simplicities, Serra is a deeply cultivated student of tradition.
Back in New York, he befriended the rival eminences Donald Judd and Robert Smithson. Jasper Johns encouraged him. He was strongly affected by avant-garde choreographers, especially Yvonne Rainer. His first substantial work employed cast-off strips and sheets of rubber, manipulated to sculptural effect—his contribution to the big bang of post-minimalism, with an emphasis on “process” which was shared by such peers as Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse. Glass assisted him on the pioneering “Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure” (1969), a long irregular stack of lead, wood, stone, and steel elements, with two neat parallel cuts and severed extremities dragged aside at odd angles. It is a visceral demonstration of mind over matter. Serra had won art-world fame a year earlier, at a warehouse outpost of the Leo Castelli Gallery, by slinging molten lead into the angle of a wall and a floor. The adjective “macho” became attached to him like a tattoo.
Serra’s signal works of the late sixties are “props”: cumbrous rolls and slabs of lead held together only by gravity, either against walls or interbalanced on the floor. As alarming impingements on the viewer’s space, defining art as the peremptory assertion of the artist’s prerogative, they deliberately stirred dread, though they were quite secure. They aren’t frightening at MOMA, though, because they have been placed in wood-and-Plexiglas corrals—a precaution that reduces them to framed representations of themselves. The effect is bizarre. The zoo-like barriers generate as much sculptural presence—and meaning, as symbols of submission to institutional policy—as the saturnine pieces. Granted, Serra dropped scaring people from his repertoire in the seventies. Interim works like the terrific “Circuit II” (1972-86), four upright steel plates converging from the corners of a room, and “Delineator” (1974-75), a plate embedded in the ceiling at a right angle to another on the floor, achieve frissons of overawing materiality without appearing dangerous; and his subsequent walls, though they loom, are obviously self-supporting. But the props, deprived of their confrontational menace, become trivial. Serra’s acceptance of the barriers suggests that being museumified matters more to him than does fidelity to his original intentions or to a fundamental tenet of minimalism: the rejection of frames, pedestals, and other protocols for treating art works as precious objects.
The impact of Serra’s recent work is very twenty-first-century, in keeping with the physical and social immensities of globalized civilization. Its more recondite forms are made possible by CATIA, a computer program for designing in three dimensions, which is a mainstay, too, of Serra’s friend Frank Gehry, whose swooped and petalled architecture has striking affinities with the artist’s sculpture. (To experience Serras in the Bilbao Guggenheim is to know how wonderful our present age can be.) At the same time, the work is poignant with reminiscences of the two centuries past. As an affair of big, rusty things without practical use, it evokes derelict ships, locomotives, and heavy-industrial factories. It also recalls times when miracles of human invention were still spectacular, like the Brooklyn Bridge, rather than spectral, like the Internet. More generally, Serra conserves a battered modernist confidence in the collective genius of experts, a priestly class that confers meaning and direction on society. Hardheaded secular culture can make no greater claim to spiritual efficacy than it does in this show, appropriately housed in the high church of the twentieth century that is MOMA. The measure is the childlike feeling which the work rewards, a sense that the world’s order and progress are being seen to by sensationally competent adults. Ever fewer of us countenance that faith today, but it retains power even in decline. Among the echoes in Serra’s steel canyons is that of something Matthew Arnold perceived at Dover Beach, a “long, withdrawing roar.” ♦
