Richard Serra was one of the giants
By Herbert Rothschild
Among the luminaries who died this year was the sculptor Richard Serra, who was born in 1938. If you haven’t experienced his work, put that treat on your bucket list. The three works closest to us are “Wake” in Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park (2004), “Charlie Brown” at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (2000), and “Sequence” at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University (2006).
I said “experienced,” not “seen.” We can see paintings without experiencing them. Not that we should, but their geometry — two dimensions fixed on a wall — lend themselves to a look. Our appreciation of a painting can be measured by how long we sustain that look. The longer we remain in a museum, the shorter our attention. Two hours at a stretch is my limit now. With a lunch break I can go for another two hours. After that, I’m just looking, so it’s best to leave.
With small sculptures it’s possible to get away with a look. Statues, though, tend toward the monumental. That’s probably because the human form, which was its primary subject matter for most of human history, is both three dimensional and large. It demands to be displayed free-standing. One simply can’t apprehend it with a look. One has to spend at least as much time as it takes to view it from its several angles.
The different physicality of paintings and sculptures explains why, in Western culture, there have been far fewer great sculptors than great painters. You can probably rattle off the names of 10 great French painters of the 19th century, but can you name a French sculptor of that century besides Rodin? Far more time and materials are required to create a statue than a painting, and most households have difficulty accommodating them spatially. Both these realities narrow the market for sculpture.
Which helps explain why, historically, pieces of sculpture weren’t executed and then sold but were commissioned, commissioned more by rulers, municipalities and churches than by private individuals. Then they were displayed in settings accessible to the public. More than paintings, statues are out in the world. Most of them are civic propaganda of modest artistic merit. But in that same vein there are transcendent works, such as Michaelangelo’s “David,” Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” and Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty.
The great sculptors of the 20th century moved away from historical and civic iconography. Serra’s work is completely nonrepresentational. He didn’t think in terms of depiction, which makes it even less pertinent to talk of “seeing” a Serra sculpture. He thought in terms of material presence — the work itself, its physical setting — and we viewers as we engage with the work in its setting.
When Serra was growing up, his father worked as a pipefitter in a shipyard. At various times, Serra himself worked in steel mills. “I started as a kid in the steel mills,” the artist told an NPR interviewer in 1986, ”and in some sense I’ve never left.”
Early in his career he employed other materials that were cheaper and easier to handle, such as rubber and lead. When he became successful enough to afford it, though, steel was his preferred material.
More precisely, for his monumental outdoor commissions Serra worked in corten steel, also known as weathering steel. It’s an alloy designed to develop a stable rust-like appearance when exposed to the elements, which protects it from further corrosion and eliminates the need for painting. It hardly needs saying that his sculptures are enormously heavy. His first forged steel sculpture, “Berlin Block (for Charlie Chaplin),” made for the plaza outside the New National Gallery in Berlin in 1977, weighs 70 tons. That was dwarfed by “Sequence,” which weighs 235 tons.
Massive as these sculptures are, they are crafted with great refinement. Often, each piece is curved, or torqued, in complex ways, and in the multipiece works the placements relative to one another are calculated with wonderful artistry. So, too are the placements of each piece and the whole in their sites. Each sculpture organizes the experience of the space it occupies and the time it takes to move through it.
In a 2001 issue of the magazine Art 21, Serra spoke of how he worked. “When I first started, what was very, very important to me was dealing with the nature of process. So, what I had done is, I’d written a verb list: to roll, to fold, to cut, to dangle, to twist. And I really just worked out pieces in relation to the verb list, physically, in a space. Now, what happens when you do that is, you don’t become involved with the psychology of what you’re making, nor do you become involved with the afterimage of what it’s going to look like. So, basically it gives you a way of proceeding with material in relation to body movement, in relation to making, that divorces from any notion of metaphor, any notion of easy imagery.
“As the work becomes more extensive, and I had a need to walk into and through and around it, then you get involved with what effect the work has physically, on your body, as you walk. So, 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. So, in that sense, as the pieces became bigger, and you walked into and through and around them, they took on other concerns, which were more psychological.”
We’re fortunate that Serra’s talent was recognized by people and institutions commanding the resources his artistic vision required. To a greater extent than even Henry Moore, the only other sculptor working during my lifetime whom I would rank with him, Serra actualized a potential in sculpture that hadn’t been explicitly manifested before. Which means that the sculptures may do the same for those of us who experience them.
Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].
