by What could be more ethereal or more timeless than the work of Richard Serra – with its vague metal blocks and curved steel walls that could be as menacing as the side of a ship looming above you as you crawl beneath? Serra’s sculptures are almost as impermanent as Stonehenge: they could last for centuries or even thousands of years – or collapse and crush you to death instantly. It is as if they are oblivious to the scale of man and the length of man’s life. But without us, they are just ruins, remnants of all-consuming ambition. Most of them would survive our end but no one would be there to see them. There is the paradox. Serra’s powerful works are nothing without us.
Le Corbusier’s architecture and Morandi’s early life, Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of empty city squares and Giacometti’s standing and walking figures; Georges Seurat’s conte crayon gradations and elegant atomic forms whose edges are about to dissolve – they are all somewhere in Serra’s composition, created in a career that lasted more than 60 years. In many ways, he was a very European American artist. Serra, who died on Tuesday at the age of 85, was a startling, fascinating artist. He made me think differently about space and sculpture – and about looking. Serra can make us vulnerable physically and psychologically, although fear was never part of the point. Beyond all the analysis and criticism, Serra’s sculpture is straight therelike a rock or a cathedral.
When a nearby rubber company closed down, he got rid of its scraps and used them as material
Talking to Serra, who was born in San Francisco, the silences that fell were like ticking time bombs. I was afraid to explode. When I first met him in 1992, at the time of his simultaneous exhibitions in London – one in the Duveen galleries at Tate Britain, the other at the Serpentine – I was extremely nervous. Like his art, Serra evoked seriousness. Both had gravity and gravitas. No matter how intense and physical it is, there is a great subtlety to his art and a complexity that only becomes apparent when you spend time with it. It has the ability to slow us down, engaging us physically but also psychologically. It is always here and now but it begs to think about timelessness. It is straight, but misreading is called for.
The two similar steel blocks held by the Duveen galleries in the Tate (now Tate Britain) in 1992 were unequal in size, one taller than the other, and appeared to expand and shrink. as you move around and between them. Is it me, I thought, or is it them? They seemed to do something to the limits of my own body. They refused clear recognition, even seeming to leave the space around them expanding and shrinking, depending on the ever-changing point of view. Speaking of his drawings, he said “all illusionistic strategies must be avoided”. We, the audience, discover illusions.
I cannot forget Serra’s kindness, in Paris, as he led me through a basement corridor and out into the blaring light falling through the Beaux Art glass roof of the Grand Palais to see his Promenade in 2008, with its five vertical slabs of Corr. -Ten stacks that went in and out of line along the longest axis of the building, like pedestrians anticipating each other’s movements on a busy street. They were also never vertical, leaning this way and that. The more time I spent there, as evening and total darkness wore on, the more I grappled with it, the more complex the experience became.
I liked the sudden surprise of Serra at first contact – a work that seemed immovable and had been there forever. That sudden glimpse of something impermanent and inevitable and permanent is a recurring comedy. I think Serra enjoyed seeing the impact his art had on others, the ways we interacted with his sculpture; he enjoyed the way we enlivened the space with our appearances and departures from the scene, our departures and departures. I also like to see the encounters of other people, who are a part of myself in their work and who are on an individual journey among them. I love how children run between its high walls, to find out what would happen around the next bend in the curve.
Sometimes these curves go back and forth and back twice. Sometimes we are not sure if we are inside or outside. Things arise and move away from us in different directions at the same time. I like to see people walking between its steel walls, their heads floating above its parapets, or visually cut back by a plane or a corner, as if edited and montageded in a silent film, sped -up. Serra’s own early films, made in the 1970s, had a structural simplicity. His hand, full frame, clenches and unclenches as he tries to catch fragments of lead falling in a blur from above. Both he and the camera try to capture their fall.
In Serra’s early sculpture there is tilting and balancing and rolling and proping, splashing and scattering and casting. Photographs show the artist in a protective apron and heavy gloves, hurling molten lead from a ladle at the angle between the wall and the floor. Living on almost no money in a loft in downtown New York in the late 1960s, Serra scavenged the contents of a nearby rubber company that had closed down, carting away all the sheets and scraps, using them as his material.
Cutting, tying, letting the rubber droop and flop, and taking thicker sheets of material and getting them to stand up, to find their own topological forms, thwunking, these pieces of rubber eventually led to the use of steel forms curving, whose production was only possible decades later by using computer mapping. But much of Serra’s work was often the result of pacing and eye placement, often in collaboration with his wife, Clara Weyergraf, to whom he was married for over 40 years. They were nothing but technical difficulties and achievements.
Serra’s sculptures are not monuments. They are not symbolic. Neither are they picturesque follies or desolate ruins in the park. They are not theatrical. Standing next to its steel-rolled plates, forged rhomboids and stubby cylinders, we understand their density – or we like to think we can. Maybe this is just a magical idea, and a little bit goes a long way. Serra had the ability to feel the weight of objects and the spaces between them. His art alerts you to your own presence as well as the forms you share the space with. It makes the work matter for us. His art makes me feel embodied and weightless. But Serra’s stuff isn’t the point. His was a double game, played with relevance and space, his intention and our audience. It continues.
