Richard Serra

Artists who create site-specific works of art have special limitations that they must consider, such as landscape features, buildings, traffic patterns, and orientation to the sun. A few, including the conceptual artist Christo, have environmental impact studies done, while others, like Richard Serra, have topographical surveys made. Among contemporary artists, Serra has consistently invented works for indoors and out that are the largest, heaviest, and the most challenging from an engineering perspective.

Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939; his father was a factory worker, and his mother was an amateur painter who took her son to museums. One of his most vivid childhood memories was watching the launch of a ship and its transformation from a massive inert hulk to something that floated gracefully on the waves. He studied first at the University of California at Berkeley, but transferred to the Santa Barbara campus where his major was literature. He admired most the writings of the Transcendentalists, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Shifting to art, he attended graduate school at Yale University, where Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Guston, and Frank Stella served as visiting critics. Using a Yale traveling fellowship, he went to Paris, where he regularly visited Brancusi’s studio, and then to Italy on a Fulbright grant. His most meaningful travel experience, however, was a 1970 visit to Kyoto, where he was inspired by the design of Zen gardens.

Experimenting with a variety of industrial materials including rubber and steel, Serra began a group of monumental environmental sculptures. Some consisted of slabs of steel artfully emerging from pastoral landscapes. Examples from this series can be found in Paris, New Zealand, Holland, and at Storm King Art Center on the Hudson River north of New York City. Another body of work, designed for urban spaces, consists of tall—up to sixty-four feet—plates of steel delicately balanced and leaning against each other in a simple but dynamic configuration. For these projects Serra did not work alone, but was assisted by a team of skilled laborers.

Serra’s career has been marred by two highly publicized events: the death of a steel worker while installing a piece at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the controversy over Tilted Arc, a 1979 commission for Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. The latter was a gargantuan leaning steel structure twelve feet high and 120 feet long that articulated a public space. Area workers and residents, however, objected to it on aesthetic as well as practical grounds: it interrupted the normal pathway of pedestrians across the space, just as Serra intended. “Sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the space and the places where it was created.” [1] Others claimed it created a security hazard. In 1989, Tilted Arc was ignominiously removed, dismantled, and stashed in a parking lot.

In the 1990s, Serra undertook his “torqued ellipses,” which typically consist of spiraling conical sections of weatherproof steel with leaning sides that resemble ship hulls. Usually arranged in tight groups, the shapes are often nested and invite the viewer—who is generally apprehensive—to explore within. Installations at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and at DIA:Beacon, north of New York City, energize interior space. In both instances, there is a keen relationship to architecture; the former is a Frank Gehry-designed masterpiece with curving titanium walls, while the latter is an old industrial space once used for the manufacture of Nabisco boxes. Serra’s work is architectonic in scale and material, and not surprisingly critics have often compared his creations to architecture. But Serra demurs, “Architecture has been a great encyclopedia of thought for me. Not that I want to make architecture, but it has enabled me to understand space in relation to movement. That cannot be learned from the histories of representational and object-making sculpture.” [2]

Because of the purity of his forms, Serra is often considered a minimalist, a designation that also applies to his drawings. They are typically large scale and intensely monochromatic, and they define space in unusual ways. Serra can be seen with notebook in hand constantly sketching as he supervises the installation of his big steel pieces. He has also been a conceptual filmmaker; one of his early efforts consists of a hand trying to catch a tube of lead, over and over again for three minutes. Continual activity and repetition are also reflected in his Verb List from the late 1960s, which simultaneously reflects what he does in his sculpture. It begins: “To roll/to crease/to fold/to store/to bend/to shorten” and ends with “Of mapping/of location/of context/of time … to continue.” [3]

Notes:

[1] Serra, “Rigging,” Richard Serra: Writings, Interviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 100, quoted in Aruna d’Souza and Tom McDonough “Sculpture in the Space of Architecture,” Art in America (February 2000), 86.

[2] Serra quoted in Kynaston McShine, “A Conversation about Work with Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 32.

[3] Serra Verb List, in Lynne Cooke, “Thinking on Your Feet: Richard Serra’s Sculpture in Landscape,” in Serra: Forty Years, 78.