Much is being made in New York this week of the pending 40-year retrospective of Richard Serra’s sculptural works, which opens at MoMA on June 3. It’s not so much the work itself as the installation that’s garnering all the attention. Granted, hoisting 30-ton slabs of gently-curled steel from a crane just off 5th Avenue isn’t something one can do surreptitiously. Witness a handful of images taken by Sah Surattanont for the Trolpolism site in New York:
Or even better, a video on YouTube of the monumental steel forms being hoisted up and over the wall of MoMA’s sculpture garden on 54th St. It is, to be fair, a spectacular circumstance that does in fact lay bare the scale at which some of Serra’s work exists. If you ever wondered what a performative work involving several hundred tons of steel might look like, then this would be it.
But it’s also an important part of the process. Serra, an affably crusty elder statesman of the late modern aesthetic, has only missed one installation of his increasingly popular torqued ellipses – that’s what they’re called – and only because he was recovering from knee surgery. This is no mean feat, given the fact the pieces exist in such opposite corners of the earth as Dubai, Seattle, and Spain. Toronto even has its own Serra, called Tilted Spheres, in the airport – which, alas, the rubes seem intent on defacing with juvenile scribblings.
Therein lies a real shame. All the hubbub of the heavy lifting is interesting, to me at least, in that it is the perfect counterpoint of what the ellipses beget, once put in place. I saw a large grouping of them at the Geffen annex of MoCA, in LA, several years ago. Massively imposing, they are at the same time serenely beautiful, the cool of their steel surface almost preternatural as you wander along the paths their curves form inside themselves. These pieces are meant to be experienced from within, not gawked at from behind ropes. Couple in your mind the wild, impossible-seeming – and actually quite dangerous – feat of putting 550 tons of steel in place via crane, and the soothing coolness of the pieces themselves, and you have a very interesting intellectual tension to reconcile amid a very real physical experience – which is what the torqued ellipses are all about, in my opinion.
In Toronto, they’ve talked of roping off Tilted Spheres, to protect it from scribbly fingers. They may as well remove the thing all together. I’m sure Serra would feel the same.
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