The Brooklyn Rail

Running Arcs (For John Cage) (1992) consists of three sections, each 2 inches thick; and 13 feet, 2 inches tall; with an overall width of 36 feet, 5 inches. It was shown only once before in Germany, more than thirty years ago. Richard Serra originally intended to name it “Curved Straights,” but then chose a title referencing John Cage, as the German curator Armin Zweite said, “evidently in order to underline the illusion of the transitory in the static,” and because both Serra and Cage believed “that works of art are forms of communicating the incommunicable.” I understand the first part of this statement, which alludes to the difficulty of getting the relationship of the three arcs in focus. The three segments are identical, but they are inverted in succession, and installed in staggered formation. You need to walk around for a while to understand that statement. But what in world is involved with “communicating the incommunicable?” “How,” I find myself asking, “is that way of thinking embodied in Running Arcs?”

Some of Serra’s early work traded in implied menace. In Delineator (1974–75), for example, which was displayed in his 1986 show at the Museum of Modern Art, you could stand directly underneath an enormous plate suspended on the ceiling. That was terrifying. And in the torqued ellipses on view at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, you could walk into the center, into a space effectively cut off from the gallery. The Running Arcs call for a quite difference experience. Unlike Delineator, this work doesn’t communicate any menace; unlike the torqued ellipses, it does not have an inside, but is all outside. Or, more exactly, when you walk between the arcs you are neither inside nor outside the work. That is a really odd experience. When you approach most sculptures, be they figurative works by Michelangelo or abstract Donald Judds, you are outside of the artwork. But long ago, at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, I had a premonition of the experience Serra provokes with Running Arcs. After asking me whether I had ever looked in the back door to hell, Albert Elsen took his key and opened the back of Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell: how strange, and how contrary to Rodin’s intentions it was to look at the inside of that vast bronze casting. But Serra means for you to walk between his arcs in Running Arcs. In a statement by Lynne Cook, a Senior Curator of the National Gallery of Art and co-curator of Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years she describes how to respond to this work: “How you make (the) impactful bodily-based encounter work on your behalf is up to you.” Let’s take that claim very literally.

Like the Tilted Arc (1981), which was a single arc, Running Arcs is a curved structure, but now expanded to three arcs. And of course, it’s in an enormous art gallery, not a public space. That said, as commentators have noted, the relation of Running Arcs to Serra’s ill-fated public work is unmistakable. It’s as if, by redoing the concerns of Tilted Arc with three arcs in a different setting, he’s shown how to make that sculptural conception come off most effectively. Often Serra’s works inspire a great deal of verbal commentating. Think of how many words were devoted to defending (or critiquing) Tilted Arc! Running Arcs has, in turn, inspired a German commentary, but at present that catalogue is not readily accessible; this show is accompanied just by a very laconic online commentary. And so, since Serra died a year ago, now his art has to speak for itself. But perhaps the dedication of Running Arcs gives us some clues. Cage’s most famous book was Silence, and his thesis was that we should open our ears and listen to the sounds which are all around us. Maybe, then, transposing that Cageian concern from hearing to seeing shows why Running Arcs is a perfect tribute to him. What does Running Arcs mean? You don’t need to read to answer that question. Just look for yourself!