I started with the idea to compare multiple flickr photos of the Richard Serra’s sculptures at MOMA in NYC this summer. If you are interested, visit the 436 pictures on The MOMA Project. Favorite shots by the amateurs and professionals: Sky/buildings cut by curving steel line, walkers in a tight linear space, full body portraits against the rusting steel and kids when available.
The real advantage of the blockbuster show in the New York (the center of traditional media) is the vast quantity of writing, not pictures. All the major New York critics have spoken and the bloggers’ thoughts pour onto page after page.
Both bloggers and critics think the show is fantastic, No reservations are expressed except by a few young artists that think it’s just old stuff without contemporary merit.
Universal praise from critics comes from two things: 1. the determination of Serra over many years to really figure out the power of these steel plates and the spaces they make. And get better and better at it. 2. the assumed fact that the works are unique – a rare commodity in art, architecture and design. With the huge cost and technical knowledge required, no one else can shape INDEPENDENT massive steel plates like this. As Michael Kimmelman notes in the NY Times, what is a better American compliment than “You have never seen anything like this before”? (my sentence)
No one is stepping back from the applause to ask “Why now” and “Who else”. For why now, Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker implies the work has contemporary value as a passionate tactile counter-revolution against the virtual world and electronic art. For who else, in New York Magazine Jerry Saltz makes the connection to Frank Gehry’s shapes and credits Serra with influencing him (Doubt he verified the truth of it.)
To me the “why now” is forty years of artworks in museums and public spaces that has produced an audience that knows that art can be anything. “Is it art?” is assumed and the audience just attempts to get out it whatever it can. For the critics and bloggers alike, the amusement park bodily experience dominates in the endless tunnels and optical confusion caused by slightly tilting walls at multiple angles. Many report dizziness. Both Kapoor in Chicago and Eliasson in London have achieved popularity with full body involvement.
Despite the removal of “Tilted Arc,” Richard Serra may be the first artist to gain popular acceptance due to public art. I cannot imagine anyone but a child interpreting Serra without the experience of thousands of sculptures in city plazas, parks and sculpture gardens across the USA.
In my early 20s, traveled from Pakistan through the Indian Punjab visiting the palaces and mosques of the 15th and 16th centuries. When I got to the Taj Mahal in Agra, I cried tears. As a future architect, I knew that one person could never design such perfection. Only a culture committed to beauty could imagine the Taj. I was cursed as I came from a culture that prizes the individual and that ignores beauty. No Taj Mahal in my future.
Perhaps Serra lifts the black mark. But not by praising his notoriously arrogant individuality as is so prevelant among critics that know Serra or feel sorry for his trials. Rather ignore Serra as the person and see him as the start of a wave of artists. Artists now have a substantial cultural history in the USA that matches the consistency of 16th century India. Like the architecture he admires, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and Borromini in Rome, his work is possible because he is the second or third generation. Others have been working before him and with him.
Therefore the “who else” is not individuals, but the consistent artworld that was developed after WWII. They are all in Serra’s work – Judd, Andre, Morris, Turrell, Holt, Berg, Lewitt, Aconci, Eisenman, Gehry, Kiesler, Graham ,,,,, on and on and on. As the boomers age, we may have this final baroque modern of joyous maturity. I think in fifty years some other artist will cry when experiencing Serra and lamenting the impossibility of the artistic collaboration in the decentralized world.
The Writing
From a writing perspective, the most interesting phemenoem is descriptions of critics and bloggers. Everyone is seeking the right way to describe the work through comparison to other memories from common human experience. Clement Greenburg must be suffering AGAIN to see all the scientific art jargon gone. Art criticism is merely good description, not the exploration and development of a precise artists language. Coming with Serra, whose original work grew from the intense art language, it ironically demonstrates the final demise of art criticism as an field of study. But art criticism is now fun the write and read.
Go to the CONTINUED entry for comparitive quotes and link to several articles. Be sure to the read the Artopia review on Artsjournal.com.
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Quotes from Critics and Bloggers
I love the kineasthetic and aural experiences of his sculptures. There was another women going around singing “boop boop” to hear the acoustic resonance of the structures. What I love was the sense of dizziness I get from walking around the concave sculptures. There is something hardwired about straight lines that makes you dizzy when there are not any.
I was reminded of several peak experiences: easing through Granite cliffs at a famous rock climbing haunt called the ‘lemon squeeze’ in upstate New York or swimming in between coral cliffs of the outer reefs in
. Al Doyle
These photos don’t really do the new Richard Serra exhibit at MoMA much justice. You can’t see how large the steel sculptures are, how they lean or open up over you, and how grand each piece is.
I got very disorientated when walking around these pieces. The way the “walls” are constantly changing and the fact that you are not quite sure how much ground you have covered or if you have been to a same place before or not starts to mess with your head. I walked though “Band” twice but each time I felt as if I had gone to a different piece or experience when I got to the other side. It is a weird feeling to know that you are in front of the exact same steel plate you just walked by yet you are totally unfamiliar with it, it is a brand new thing again and you don’t understand how it got that way.
It’s all about feeling the space, and how the sculpture is interacting with the room it is installed in. You have to experience these pieces the same way you would experience a cathedral in Italy.
Walking around these undulating sidewinders is like being around a herd of otherworldly elephants, or seeing steel skirts blowing in the breeze.
……you can delight in sculptures that are a combination of cave walls, the circus’s coming to town, fortresses, flowers, and a force of nature.
Serra’s ruddy, overlapping plica and pleats of swelling steel collapse gender and describe a kind of labial interface with space. His shapes and configurations are vulvalike, surfaces are silky and puckered, outside and inside merge, folds envelop folds, and the sculptures become embarrassingly erotic.
Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine
Reconsider your understanding of late 60’s art and embrace the phenomenological!
I mean, just try not to feel while walking through his Torqued Ellipses or the newer work on show in the MoMA’s contemporary galleries on the 2nd floor. I double dog dare you.
It seems to turn from architecture to sculpture and back again, to turn inside out and outside in again several times as you trace its perimeter. All the while its sloping walls — here looming like an encroaching ship’s hull, there opening like a volcano’s crater, elsewhere appearing to sweep open like parting stage curtains — seem to wring changes in mood from your body.
“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.
……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.
Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker
These shapes and experiences are new. That’s about the best, and the rarest, compliment you can give to any artist…..
…..call it democratic art because it sticks to pure form that requires no previous expertise to grasp. There’s no coy narrative, no insider joke or historical allusion or meta-art theme.
evoke canyons, dunes, crevasses and ravines. The industrial steel walls, in uncalculated rusty orange and velvety brown, evoke natural terrains;
Michael Kimmelman, NY Times
Mental and Physical
If you got this far, I call your attention to two other quotes
It is a visceral demonstration of mind over matter.
Peter Schjeldahl
Torqued Ellipses” and their descendants can’t be pictured mentally, except in broad strokes, because from no place, not even above, can you get a good sense of their shapes. They’re too complicated; from outside you don’t know what the inside is like, and vice versa.
Michael Kimmelman
Human want to grasp things mentally. To Schjeldahl, the grasping is the action of Serra to mentally picture something and then work and work until the steel bends to the mind. But to Kimmelman, we cannot find the mental image that generated the physical. Despite the multiple “from above” photographs on the MOMA website and the multiple installation clips, Serra defies our mental powers and we give up and languish against the rust.
Good piece on Serra. And I like Schjeldahl’s ” . . .a passionate tactile counter-revolution against the virtual world and electronic art.”
That is what I try to do with my own sculpture in a completely different way.
An encounter with art is like meeting another person. And when meeting a sculpture, this feeling is more vivid, because of the physical aspects of most sculpture. We are three-dimensional beings navigating three-dimensional reality, employing all our senses in relation to the presence of a three-dimensional sculpture. This encounter engages mind and body, and can elicit polite indifference, dislike, mild interest growing into deeper understanding, temporary infatuation, anxiety, and flat-out falling in love. The excitement of these meetings is why I want to keep experiencing new art. The desire to keep making new art is my way of perpetually encountering the greater world around me.
Thanks for the work of putting the responses together. They bring out the works action as shared spaces.
From Helen Lessick
Interesting perspective on a master sculptor. But public art antecedents- you forget Mark di Suvero who, as part of his 1975 solo show at the Whitney had a monumental sculpture placed in each of the city’s 5 boroughs. Steel i-beam next to bridges, towers, the construction of New York.
Serra wouldn’t be possible also without David Smith, Tony Caro, and.. You get the idea we all need to study more modern art history.
Weiss Responds
Yes we all need more historic knowledge, but my thoughts were about the kind of critical appreciation of Serra’s work and the ability of the general public to enjoy it. The writing and citizen photography shows full of acceptance and inventive personal rationales. This kind of embrace comes, at least in part, from 30 years of public art in the city, which di Suvero was an important contributor. Rather than follow the critics as in 1975, the critics follow the public, or rather, write like a member of the public.