Serra at Saatchi

Irish Arts Review

Serra at SaatchiAuthor(s): Dorothy WalkerSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 28-30Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491984 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

SERRA AT SAATCHI

London is lucky to have the oppor tunity of seeing a large-scale exhibit

ion of the works of the American sculptor Richard Serra, at present in the Saatchi Collection at 98A Boundary Road, St. John's Wood. Because of their sheer size and weight, exhibitions of Serra's work are relatively rare.

So far as I am aware, there are no permanent public works by Serra in Great Britain. This is odd in a country that has produced two post-Moore

waves of sculpture. British sculpture, by and large, does still tend to remain in the 'object' class, even when using new

materials arising from new ideas. Serra's sculpture, on the other hand, is never

merely an object: it is a whole concept of space as challenging as any work of architecture, although he is careful to point out that sculpture must avoid the concerns properly belonging to architecture.

The extremely strong character and overwhelming size of Serra's work may explain why he has had so many brushes with architects. He refuses point-blank to see his work as "corporate baubles for Sixth Avenue office blocks".

Quite the contrary: rather than orna menting a given site, he wishes "to sub vert the context" in order to make the site work better for the sculpture. "Usually you are offered places which have specific ideological connotations, from parks to corporate and public buildings and their extensions such as lawns and plazas. It's difficult to subvert those contexts. That's why you have so

many corporate baubles on Sixth Ave nue, so much bad plaza art that smacks of IBM."

Piano and Rodgers turned down Serra's project for the Pompidou Centre in Paris. His sculpture competes with architecture on its own terms, and the

mother of the arts is not having any of that nonsense from her offspring. Light hearted, bright, witty fantasies from Nikki de Saint-Phalle will amuse the proud mama, but walls of solid steel causing static to the visual vibrations of architectural masterpieces, not likely. Venturi went so far as to re-design Serra's proposal for Washington DC which, understandably, Serra would not allow.

So, Serra's work stands better in a non-architectural context, either out of-doors or in a large neutral space like the London gallery of the Saatchis. The permanent piece in the Kroller-Muller Sculpture Park in Holland is perfectly

Art critic Dorothy Walker writes about the American sculptor

Richard Serra, and discusses the significance of the exhibition of his work in the Saatchi Collection.

J

Richard Serra, Olson, steel, two plates, each 120 x 432 x 2 inches, 1985/86,

Saatchi Collection, London.

sited in a large hollow, away from any other work. Three wall-sized plates of steel converge from the slopes of the hollow towards the centre, creating a space alive with the energy of the artist, and having the character of some ancient ritual site, an archaic outdoor temple. The energy that makes itself felt is not any egotistical statement of the artist; it is that ideal release of the creative force which all great art achieves, tapping into the spiritual presence inherent in the physical place, and activated by the mind of the artist through the powerful simplicity of the

work. The piece at the Louisiana Museum

in Denmark is somewhat similar but has two 'walls' instead of three; they are higher and in a different relationship, and the space is less bowl-shaped, more of a ravine.

Curiously, one of his most successful temporary installations was in the very formal context of the entrance to the Tuileries Gardens on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Two giant steel arcs

lined up directly with the Obelisk and the Arc de Triomphe, so they had the scale of the city. They were two sections of cones, exactly the same, but one was

inverted so the centre leaned a foot. The piece subverted the famous vista down the Champs-Elysees in so far as it made a composite work, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Arcs de Serra. (The title of the piece was 'Clara-Clara', and it has struck me that it had definite female connotations but I doubt if a serious American artist would have such frivolous Parisian ideas complete

with a suitably phallic obelisk on the axis.)

To return, however, to the Saatchi Collection, the Serra sculptures are shown together with a large group of paintings by the German artist Anselm Kiefer. At first sight, this seems an excellent idea, a brilliant visual con junction of two artists with a similar colour range but very different concerns. Even when they use the same material, such as lead, their intentions differ radically. Kiefer's heroic eagle wings,

made of lead and fixed to the surface of his paintings, are a superb paradoxical metaphor of the grounding of the German militaristic eagle. Serra, on the other hand, uses lead for a different paradox, a purely abstract sculptural paradox where the plane of lead, rolled, becomes a line, taking one character and form of being with it, impossibly, into the next, like certain experiments of quantum physics. The initial impact of seeing the two artists' work together is very exciting, but gradually, by sheer strength of presence and purpose, the Serras overcome the Kiefers, and the Kiefers begin to fade. The immensely strong physical being of the Serras, imbued with equally strong philosophi cal and scientific realities, makes the mythological, metaphorical, and narra tive reference of the Kiefers seem superfluous and even superficial.

Serra's large steel plates are clear, superb statements, in some ways an encapsulation of twentieth-century art and architecture, so uncompromising but so graceful in their vast solid steel curves.

I would have liked to see them team ed with the Sean Scully paintings in the Saatchi Collection. That would have been a real marriage of giants. Serra is an artist who is as strong in sculpture as

OPPOSITE

Richard Serra, Five Plates, Two Poles, hot rolled steel, 96 x 276 x 216 inches.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

SERRA AT SAATCHI

Beckett is in literature, one of the very great sculptors of the twentieth century. His concerns are as fundamental as those of the great scientists of the past, the basic discoverers like Copernicus and Kepler, in his exploration of the idea of universal balance. He treats of the Plane, the Line, the Incline, reduced to massive strength in two-inch thick steel plates held in balance like the gravitational forces of the universe. His concern with balance is a profound philosophical study of a matter that is as important to human life as the inner stability of the solar system. The two huge steel curves in Saatchi relive the mystery of balance, the mystery of the inner mathematics of the earth, and of physical and psychological life on it. Balance is the factor which holds the complications of life in stability; it is the crucial ingredient in human health, in human relationships, in living condi tions, in justice, in the material world, in climate, in nature, in agriculture, in science and mathematics, even in accountancy, and particularly in art. The strongest art has always been where the balance is most keenly struck, the least slack, that which is nearest the edge. Serra's work is the edge, is the incarnation of that philosophical and physiological liberation which is the perfect, taut synthesis of balanced forces. The power of that importance is concentrated into these pieces with extraordinary strength and will. They do not merely inhabit the space in which they stand, they take it on. Certain

walls, or corners, become adjuncts of the pieces, rather than the reverse.

Serra made a permanent work in Dublin as part of Rosc '84, a linear spiral triangle of steel embedded in the cobbled street surface outside the Guinness Hop Store. His work has always involved a working paradox between linear sculpture and planar drawing. Drawing has been fundamental in Serra's work since the late sixties, not drawing in the simple sense of making lines on paper but in a more far reaching sense of making lines with

material, with normally sculptural mate rial like the rolled sheets of lead, or the 'Cutting' series wherein his cutting through various materials, lead, wood, steel, marble, had affinities with Richard Long's later'Lines' in the landscape. His sculpture is still about drawing, in the gigantic arcs of steel, basically linear in their definition of volume. There is generally one point at which they appear as a single line.

Richard Serra, Installation, Saatchi Collection, London.

The actual drawings have a more planar existence, fantastic surfaces of black, supremely stating the quidditas of black. Serra maintains that the signi ficance of the drawings is in their special character, ". .. drawings which do not accept a static definition, which do not give over easily to analyses or categorizations, drawings which negate traditional definitions, exist outside of formalist values even though they remain self-referential." By the method in

which they are made, Serra sees his drawings as conventional; they can only be accomplished by using hand and eye in relation to a given material. He feels that drawing is a concentration on an essential activity: ". . . it's the most direct conscious space in which I work." Very curiously, his ideas about drawings are rather similar to those of Joseph Beuys: "To draw a line is to have an idea." Serra's drawing is not about descriptions or figurations but about the aesthetic experience of the work being concomitant with its form. "How the artist makes a drawing gives to the work its credibility, distinctness, uniqueness - its character." How his large drawings are made is that he takes boxes of black oil-sticks, melts them down, strains them, and lets them solidify into bricks

with which he draws with both hands. He has found that drawing, and its long hours of concentration, is a way of tuning his eye. "The more I draw, the better I see and the more I understand.."

He draws on different materials, on

Belgian linen, on paper, on canvas. One of the richest surfaces was the drawing in Documenta 7 in 1982. "I made that paper" he told me. "I went out to the desert, we poured a big slab, put up bamboo and towels over it, and made this tent structure. And then we just poured right onto the slab and used big rollers; it was a big experimentation and

we made one piece of paper 32ft x 30ft, we made another piece 14 x 12, another piece about 18 x 20, thick, fairly flat, maybe half an inch thick, it was a lot of fun. At one point I caught myself looking out of the corner of my eye, we had blowers on at 12 o'clock at night, we were in the desert on this flat piece of cement, with these people walking on boards on top, they had air-guns, like they use to melt the ice on planes'

wings with, walking on top of the paper. And I thought it was very curious,

the whole thing. If you didn't know what these people were up to, you'd really be taken aback. What are these people out in the desert in the middle of the night with these air-guns doing? The sun dried it too. We rolled it with these big steel rollers you use on asphalt to get it flat. It was a lot of fun."

This anecdote about the paper seems to me an epiphany of an American way of art: the commitment to a totality of will and effort that has a certain Roman imperial engineering flavour, inspired however by dynamic sensibilities alto gether more sensitive than those com petent road-builders.

Richard Serra's expertise in pushing massive steel plates to the limits of their powers of physical balance in order to incarnate a philosophical idea of cosmic balance is more than any Roman general or artist envisaged. His art belongs inescapably to the twentieth century in its material, in the scope of its scale, and in the vast simplicity of its intention.

Dorothy Walker

Note: All direct quotations are from Dorothy Walker's conversations with

Richard Serra.

All photographs by Jenny Okin.

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Serra at Saatchi